Ben Jonson asked:


As a known fact oil painting is the most preferred mode of painting by most of the artists as well as the painting fans. The probable reason why it is enjoyed and loved by most of the people is because of the deep and beautiful colors present and the attractiveness which the picture brings to the room when it is hung. Oil paintings have greater scope of being framed beautifully, unlike other forms that do not lent themselves to be framed with metaphorical frames that enhance and add an additional point of attraction to the paintings.

Paintings as such from the ancient times are considered to be a mode by which artists express the beauty which they feel around themselves and thus they present it according to their interpretations. Oil paintings have proven to create a tremendous leap in the creation of the art that looks much realistic and people just groove into the beauty of the oil paintings which have an extremely realistic appearance.

An imaginative and a good artist uses oil paintings as a medium to enhance his piece of work which is created based on his imagination or out of the interpretations which he might have drawn from the objects viewed.  A good artist along with his set of oil paintings can add a life to the objects he paints, especially painting on a canvas gives the paintings a three dimensional look. A good and an imaginative artist can make any paintings renowned by adding a pinch of emotion with just a stroke of a brush to the paintings which might be depicting victorious events or the scenic beauty of nature. Artists have this admirable ability to add life to the objects, thus the different interpretations which the artist draw makes us visualize the inanimate objects in a new way. Now for instance let’s consider a ship which is fighting a terrible storm, an artist possesses the ability to portray the intensity of the nature and thus making us to imagine the fury of nature by viewing the painting. Oil paintings have provided extremely realistic appearances that have added a color to the imaginations of the artist. In 1500A.D the artists made the discovering of making colorful paints by mixing ground natural pigments by using vegetable oil took place. The drying oils which were utilized in the early days were walnut oil, poppy oil, hempseed oil, castor oil and linseed oil. These oils acted as varnishes for protecting the images and thus it helped in the protection of the paintings from damage caused by water.   Thus oil paintings are considered as one of the best medium to put into light the frozen thoughts and provide a realistic view to the paintings.

Remi Engels, Ph.D. asked:


Because oil paints have been used for many centuries, their properties are very well known.

Oil is, even today, still one of the easiest and most forgiving mediums you can work in. Creating an oil painting is in fact relatively easy compared to other mediums such as watercolor or even pastels.

The advantages of oil are many and various. Here are some of the most important ones:

* Oil paints are easily put onto a canvas or panel. You just put some paint on your brush and rub it on the canvas or panel. The paint will generally not run or move.

* Creating a painting becomes a matter of putting the right color paint in the right place. Of course, some artists are better at this than others.

* One great property of oil paints is that they do not change color when they dry as opposed, for example, to acrylics. Oils pretty much stay the same for a long period of time.

* It is very easy to correct a mistake when you paint with oils. Just scrape the paint off with a paint knife and repaint whatever it was you scraped off.

* Oil paint dries very slowly because they consist of small pigment particles suspended in oil.

In fact, each color has its own drying time. But all paints dry slow enough so that you can remove them days and even weeks after they were applied.  This is also the reason why it is so easy to correct mistakes.

Of course, the disadvantage is that they dry … slowly. That means they stay wet longer although there exist mediums that, when mixed in with the paint, can significantly speed up the drying process if that is what you want.

* It is easy to mix tube colors on a palette and is usually done with a brush of paint knife.  There are mediums to thicken the paint into a pasta-like consistency and mediums to thin the paint into a water-like consistency.

* Once a color mixture formula is memorized it is easy to consistently reproduce the mixture. This is less the case with most other mediums.

* The fact that oil paint dries so slowly also gives you more time to work and rework a painting. You have enough time to sleep on certain decisions you need to make. Acrylics, for example, dry much faster and give you less time to ponder your masterpiece before action is required.

* Oil paints are also easily blended. So, it becomes relatively easy to render smooth transitional areas between different colors or values.

* Oils are also amenable to a whole series of techniques each of which yields a different look and feel. One example of such a technique is glazing. In de glazing technique several thin layers of transparent paint are put on top of each other. Each layer must be thoroughly dry before the next one is applied. Once done light is reflected off each layer resulting into an unusual luminosity and brightness.

* Oil can be used on any number of grounds: canvas, panel canvas, glass, wood, paper, etc. each, when done correctly, with excellent and durable results.

These are some of the more important and interesting properties of oil paints that have given this medium the enduring popularity that it has.