Custom canvas paintings are more accessible than ever these days. You can order a custom oil portrait or watercolor landscape by simply sending a professional artist a picture or pictures as an example. They can turn your photo into a beautiful customized painting within a reasonable budget and with a fast turnaround. If you’re considering ordering a custom painting, you might be wondering which medium is best.
Companies like Paint Your Life make finding an artist and ordering a custom portrait so much easier than it was in days gone by, but there are some decisions you’ll need to make before you order. You can start by choosing a medium, but you’ll likely first want to know why exactly most people choose oil paints.
Why Oil Paints?
Oil paints are by far the most popular choice when people are purchasing custom paintings. This type of painting has been around for centuries and has been the dominant art medium since the 15th or 16th century. Why are they so popular even today?
Oil paints are very versatile and allow the artist a lot more play because this type of paint can completely cover paint that has already been laid down. Plus, since these paints take a long time to dry, they can be altered for hours after paint is applied. This means that the artist is able to change the painting as they go, completely altering the portrait’s composition if they’d like.
They also provide rich, realistic colors that can give a fantastic sense of light and shadow. Oil paints have a luminous effect, as well. Historically speaking and even today, oil paintings are looked at as something of an investment since they tend to be costly as they take so much time to complete.
Choosing a Medium
In order to choose the ideal medium for the look you want to achieve, you’ll need to learn a little about the available mediums so you can compare and contrast your options:
- Oil: Oil paints use pigment mixed with a drying oil like linseed oil or poppyseed oil to create colors that are precisely what the artist needs. Because of this flexibility, they vary in opacity. This allows artists to create many effects and therefore photorealistic pieces within one artistic medium.
- Acrylic: Acrylic paints offer a similar flexibility to oil paints since they are water-soluble. Instead of oil, an artist can use water to create paint that varies from nearly translucent to completely opaque. Like oil paints, this allows for very photorealistic renderings.
- Watercolor: Watercolor tends to be a softer, less precise medium than oil or acrylic. Pigments are mixed with water to create the desired opacity, and many techniques can be applied to achieve the desired look. This medium is especially popular for landscapes.
- Pastels: Pastels are unique in that they combine a lot of the tenets of drawing and painting to create a piece that exhibits the best of both. They have the precision of drawing and the dimension of painting. They’re great for a slightly softer photorealist look.
- Charcoal: Charcoal is a medium where special pencils with “leads” composed of charcoal are used to create black and white renderings. This may sound like a flat medium, but by shading black, gray, and white, amazing dimension can be achieved using charcoal.
- Pencil: Pencil, whether black or colored, is about exactly what it sounds like. Everyone has used a pencil or even colored pencil before, but the effect of a pencil in a trained artist’s hands can be amazing. Shading and blending techniques can be used to create very realistic drawings.
Choice of Artist is Important, Too
Choosing the right artist to complete your painting from a photo is just as important as choosing the right medium. Each artist uses the medium a little differently and has their own style, which leads to vastly different aesthetics.
The best way to find an artist whose aesthetic you love is to look through galleries for portraits that speak to you. If you find a few paintings that you really like by the same artist, it’s a good bet that they’d be able to turn your photo into a painting that you’ll love.
On Paint Your Life, you can hover over each picture in the galleries to see who painted it, and you can even simply click on the “I want this artist to paint my photo!” button directly from the gallery to begin your commission. A professional artist of your choice can then create a custom piece of art for you in as little as a few weeks.
