6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use Olive Oil For Oil Painting!
The number of people reaching out each month and asking if they should use olive oil for oil painting has been steadily increasing over the last year or so. Due to seeing so much missinformation on social media and painting forums about the use of olive oil with your oil paints, we have decided to publish this article to try and help ensure that our readers know what to expect.
Although we have seen people report that they are using olive oil as their medium of choice, this does tend to be a poor option in the long run. We have also noticed people share photographs of their oil painting using olive oil as a paint medium on sites such as Instagram but they usually only publish their photographs directly after finishing their work.
This tends to prevent the potential long term issues of using olive oil as your medium of choice from starting to show and cause problems with your artwork. We feel that people only showing photographs of their olive oil based painting directly after finishing their work is why we have noticed a spike in the people reaching out to ask about using it as a medium. In our opinion, you should always be sticking to one of the following seven mediums for your oil painting:-
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Can Olive Oil Be Used For Oil Painting?
Although olive oil can be used as a medium for oil painting in the sense that it will work with many oil paints directly out of the tube for their initial application to your canvas, paper or other surface, things tend to go down hill rapidly. We will now be going over the more common issues that tend to occur if you do use olive oil as your medium of choice with your oil paint.
Although there are additional issues that are able to happen depending on the specific situation, these tend to be the main issues and reasons that people tend to avoid using olive oil. We hope that offering this breakdown will be able to convince our readers to go with an alternative medium and get considerably better results from their painting sessions.
Olive Oil Is Not A Hardening Oil
The main reason that you should never use olive oil as a paint medium is that it is a non-hardening oil similar to mineral oil and has the exact same issues associated with it. All non-hardening oils are essentially useless for oil painting as they never dry and cause no end of issues for your artwork.
If you try any layering with them then your layers will all blend together ruining your art. Due to the olive oil not hardening or drying then even the slightest touch or application of friction to the oil paints cause them to smear and smudge too.
This is why we always recommend people look for any follow ups on social media when people post paintings using olive oil as their mediums. They are almost always posted as soon as the artist completes their work with no follow ups on how the artwork has aged so people new to oil painting presume that it holds that quickly when in reality, it rapidly fades.
Olive Oil Yellows Very Quickly
The vast majority of the popular oil paint mediums tend to be refined versions of their original raw oil where the elements of the oil that would yellow have been removed. To our knowledge, there is no refined olive oil available on the market meaning that all olive oil will result in a slight yellowing of your work over time.
Depending on the specific type of olive oil that you are using, the yellowing process can start to occur in as little as a week. Unlike some of the other lower quality mediums that also yellow, olive oil tends to be able to add a yellow tint to darker colors too.
As you can probably guess, this can quickly spoil your artwork and add a yellow look to the whole piece. Although we have seen some people claim they have ways to prevent this yellowing from occuring, to our knowledge, it will always take place when using olive oil as your paint medium.
Olive Oil Can Cause A Film To Form
As olive oil starts to oxidise, a thin film can also start to form on your paints that tends to dull their colors. This coupled with the yellowing effect covered above can really take away from your artwork as it looks like your artwork has a matte effect over it while also having a yellow tint too.
Although this film does not occur on all types of olive oil, it does seem to happen around half of the time and is just another reason to avoid using it as a paint medium. There are plenty of other options on the market that you are able to use that perform much better without this risk.
Olive Oil Can React With Canvas
We have seen people describe this as a “rotting effect” but it is not actually rotting, it is due to a chemical reaction that weakens the bonds of your canvas and can potentially cause it to frey. This does tend to be rare and is not specific to just olive oil as it can occur with some mineral oils too but it is just another risk that is not worth taking.
The worse part is, if you do notice this chemical reaction occurring on your canvas there is nothing that you are able to do to stop it. The usual signs are the strands of canvas appearing to get thinner and they will sometimes frey with the paint often warping in shape due to it not drying correctly too.
Olive Oil Results In Bugs And Mold
Although we have not experienced this personally, we have seen reports from other people that over time, their oil-based art experiments where they have used olive oil as their medium have attracted bugs then end up stuck in the paint as well as encouraging mold growth. Although this may be down to a few reasons, the reports that we have seen all use olive oil as their medium so there is that as one consistent factor.
This in addition with the other problems that we have listed should be enough to put anyone off using olive oil as a painting medium. There are just too many downsides to using olive oil when there are better alternatives available at a similar price tag that just outperforms it in every way.
Can You Mix Pigment With Olive Oil?
Mixing your own pigments directly with your oil mediums is becoming increasingly popular and we have noticed some people asking about using No products found., No products found., and even No products found. with olive oil. Although you are able to mix these pigment options with olive oil, it still has all of the issues listed above that essentially make it a waste of time for oil painting.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over using olive oil for oil painting to an end and we hope that we have helped our readers understand why they should not be using olive oil as a paint medium. With any luck, we have been able to help convince you to use any of the more popular mediums for your artwork due to them usually being a similar cost to olive oil but usually offering superior performance in the long run for your artwork.
