Painting wildlife and animals in oils can seem like a very daunting prospect for beginners and novice painters, but it needn’t be. When you follow a few simple rules and procedures.

Oils the most forgiving medium Beginners often perceive oil painting as a difficult medium, but actually it is one of the most forgiving. Over the years I have used just about everything, but always come back to oils. I find Acrylics just dry too fast, and you need many layers to get the coverage of oils. Watercolor is all about timing, put a wet color in to another wet color at the wrong time and you can have all manner of terrible things happen such as run backs, bleeds etc.

I have found watercolor to be by far the most difficult medium to master - particularly for beginners. Oils on the other hand give me enough time to relax as I think out the next stage and plenty of time if I want to blend one color in to another, when creating a nice smooth sky colour for instance. The New Oil Paints Also new developments with oil paint manufacture means that they can now dry over night - these are called Alkyd Oil paints and odorless thinners means that you don’t have to stink the whole house out with the smell of turps, so there is no reason why a beginners 1st painting should not be done using oil / Alkyd paints. Wildlife Art Secrets (what I learnt in 10 years) Wildlife / Animal painting is very popular - lots of people would love to be able to paint their pet, or perhaps they had a special holiday in Africa and would love to paint their memories, but beginners can be disappointed with their 1st attempts at capturing animals. I know I was when I started to paint wildlife about 10 years ago - I read just about every book on the subject and watched lots of video footage as well, but they all seemed to have one thing in common - they left out the detailed instruction and jumped too many steps, it was quite frustrating. So