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Ah! Oil paints! The rich creamy texture! The luminous color! I love all art mediums, but there's something so luscious about oil paints. I have a real soft spot in my heart for them.

And then there's alkyds. As far as I know, only Windsor-Netwon makes them, but they are fabulous. I like to think of them as a cross between oils and acrylics.

Grumbacher Pre-Tested Oils - Good brand of oil paints, in all the colors. There are differences between Flake and Titanium White. I used to think that white was white, but when you are talking about oil paints, it ain't so simple! (I usually use Titanium White.) Dick Blick's site explains the differences between whites on their Grumbacher oil paints page.

Windsor-Newton Oils - Very nice. Rich and creamy. Windsor-Newton oils are fabulous. The cream of the crop. I usually get at least a few tubes.

Gamblin Oils - Rich, nice quality oils. I like to use these too.

Permalba white oil tube - This white was always in the paint box of my first art teacher, Shirlee Prescott Morgan. I usually have a tube in my box as well. It's an excellent, creamy white.

Liquin - Liquid medium, for oils (and alkyds as well). Made by Windsor-Newton. I have used many oil mediums, but this has ended up being my mainstay. It makes the paint creamier and flow easier. It also assists in speeding up the drying time.

Alkyds - A new kind of paint, from Windsor-Newton. Thinned with turpentine, but not exactly oils. Fast drying time. I love it. (An example of one of my alkyd paintings.)

All these products are available at Dick Blick Art Materials. They have a vast inventory, with all the popular brands (and also the obscure ones). I find it less of a hassle sometimes to order whatever I want from Dick Blick, rather than hoping that a local art store has all the stuff I am looking for.

I could rhapsodize for quite a while about oil paints. There is nothing quite like the feel of painting in oils. But, they are messy, require proper ventilation, and can be expensive. And - they can take forever to dry! But all this inconvenience is worth it.

I have tried out a multitude of different oil paint brands. Some are cheap, but when you use them, you see that they are full of oil, and the colors are not very rich or saturated. (You need to use a lot to get the desired intensity.) Sometimes, you get what you pay for. Also, some cheaper oil paints are made with materials that are not light-fast. Meaning, that they will fade in time. Consider this when you are shopping for oil paints.

But, just like I advised on the watercolor page, you might want to go ahead and get some cheap oils, and go crazy. If they are cheap, you might not worry so much about the expense, and this will make you more at ease with experimenting. Being worried about "wasting paint" is the death knell to a lot of creativity. If you are a newbie artist, you might feel more comfortable using cheap oils, until you get your confidence up. (Or, at least have a cheap set of oils around, so you can fool around with them when the mood strikes.)

Alkyd paints are great too. A bit on the expensive side, but worth a try. I found them to be creamier and easier to blend than acrylics, but waxier than oils. They often are not as dense and opaque as oils (it depends on the color). It takes about half a day for a layer of alkyds to dry, and then you can paint another layer on the canvas. This means that they don't dry so fast that you run out of time when you are blending (this is a problem with acrylics sometimes). But, it dries fast enough so that you can get your painting done within a reasonably short amount of time.

For both oils and alkyds, I use canvas board, or stretched canvas. Stretched canvas is better, but sometimes the cheapness of board is convenient, especially if you are just goofing around.