Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil. Oils used include linseed oil, poppyseed oil, walnut oil, and safflower oil. Painters often use different oils in the same painting depending on specific pigments and effects desired. The paints themselves also develop a particular consistency depending on the medium.

Always lay your oil paints out on your palette in the same order so that, with time, you’ll be able to pick up a bit of a colour instinctively. The proportion of oil (medium) should be increased for each subsequent layer in an oil painting because the lower layers absorb oil from the layers on top of them. If the upper layers dry faster than the lower ones, they can crack. Avoid using Ivory Black for an under-painting or sketching as it dries much slower than other oil paints.

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Young children are often overlooked by the traditional drawing curriculums that tends to focus on children over twelve or thirteen years old, who are blessed with natural talent and who can usually draw already. School teachers do craft projects and provide younger children with free time to do symbolic stick-figure-style drawings. Yet, unless children are given instruction and guidance, before they stop symbolic drawing they will assume they weren’t born with the ability to draw realistically. The closer they get to preteen years, the more they will resist the activity and not want to try at all.

However, if children are given structured lessons in realist drawing from the time they are very young, they will quickly graduate to sophisticated and skilled drawings right after giving up their symbolic drawing styles.

Everybody can enjoy drawing, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin. Many people make the mistake of drawing what they think something looks like, instead of really looking at it carefully first. Hervey Bay artist, JoAnn Clarke, said that a set of simple general principles are required. Just as a composer and musician can break things down into their basic components, so too by breaking down a subject into a series of simple elements a child can analyze what they ‘see’ and then put it into drawing.

By utilizing the basic components of shape a student is able to create any possible image with the fewest number of lines. This has been termed the “alphabet of shape” that consists of five basic elements; circle, dot, straight line, curved line and angle. Any object that a student wants to draw can simply be analysed in terms of how these elements of shape are combined. Thus children can be trained to see each general shape and then be free to interpret the detail in any way they wish. Thus, every child is able to achieve realistic representation of the subject drawn and still be creatively unique.

Besides the obvious benefit of learning to draw, students also develop fine motor skills, problem-solving abilities and improved concentration. Case studies have also shown how children, who have undertaken tuition in drawing, within a positive, non-judgmental, non-competitive environment, have made marked improvements in areas such as disorientation or misrepresentation of images, hyperactivity, communication ability and reading readiness, introverted behaviour, resistance to participation and inability to observe or remember instruction sequences.