Artists
Related: About this forumoils vs acrylics - differences; similarities
I have painted with both in the past. I am using acrylics now, but I always think about using oils.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)Now that there are water based oils Im thinking of trying them out.
I loved oils but the solvents really made me sick so I switched to acrylics. There are quite a few things I think are drawbacks about acrylics.
They dry so quickly that you have to paint very fast sometimes, especially if your smearing separate colors without blending them completely like when you want your brushstrokes to be visible. With oils theres a window of time before the paint dries, so you can come back to it and work with it.
Some colors dry darker than they look when theyre wet. Yellows. They tend to dry darker and look flatter than you intended. When you paint with blended colors this means they dry a different shade which makes it very difficult to match the color again.
I do like the way acrylics can be made to look like watercolors though, which you cant do with oils.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(120,150 posts)too matte, and it's hard to do glazes with it. It does have the advantage of drying quickly.
The Blue Flower
(5,625 posts)I've been painting in oil since the 70s. I think there's a richness of color that acrylics can't match.
BigmanPigman
(52,157 posts)Oils allow for more working time but you can speed things up with glazes if you want.