Painting is a great skill that many people possess innately, but it is also a hobby that can be learned by almost anyone. Painting can be done with all sorts of mediums. Watercolor painting involves using hard and solid when dry pallets of watercolors (or paste like watercolors in tubes) to produce paintings that have a light feeling and are often pastel in overall color.
On the other hand, acrylics and watercolors produce paintings with generally darker colors in thicker layers of paint. Oil paints especially can produce paintings with paint that comes off the canvas as much as a half inch to an inch.
Just as painting can be done with many different mediums, the actual act of painting can be done with different tools and accessories as well. Some people paint with their fingers, and this is of course called finger painting. Some people paint with many different sized brushes, and this is likely the most common way of painting. Believe it or not, there are actually markers that can paint as well. But one way of painting that is quite popular and produces extraordinarily beautiful results is painting with a palette knife.
A palette knife is actually a tool that is used mostly in oil painting and acrylic painting. Before we go on, the difference between oil paints and acrylic paints is that oil paint is not water based, and it does not dry as fast as acrylic paints. Many oil painters from hundreds of years ago used their pallet knives to create the beautiful hues and shades that later went on their canvases. Because the oil paints did not dry very fast, they could save these mixed paints on their pallet.
It was with a palette knife that these great artistic masters first mixed their paints on their palettes, then they would save their palettes for the next day of work, and when they went back they would reactivate the paints with their palette knives.
A palette knife itself is a small utensil that usually has a wooden handle. Out of the wooden handle, a metal rod supports the actual tool at the end. Palette knives come in different shapes, but a common shape for a palette knife is a triangular shaped piece of very thin and bendable metal.
With this tool, a painter can pick up a small amount of one color of paint, put it in a clean area of his or her palette, wipe off the palette knife with a rag, go back to his palette and pick up a small amount of another color, and put it with the first color. He can then mix the two colors with the palette knife. Painters often use more than two colors to mix new shades and hues of paints.
Many beginning painters make the mistake of mixing their colors with their brushes, and this results in paintbrushes that have clogged bristles. Painting with a palette knife means not using brushes at all. After the mixing takes place on the palette, and all of the necessary colors have been combined, the painter who paints with a palette knife will apply the paint in large globs onto the canvas. Often palette painters use pointillism as their technique of choice.
Pointillism is a painting technique that involves applying paint in small points, globs, or dots. From afar, the colors blend together to give an overall hue or shade, but when one gets up close to a pointillist painting, he or she can see that none of the points or dots are blended together. When painting with a palette knife, it is possible for the artist to blend the colors together, but it is not common. In general, the point of the palette knife is used to apply globs of paint to form a sky or a lake, and the edges of objects may be blended sightly. It is a technique that many artists enjoy for its ease of application, and many artist lovers enjoy it, because it produces a beautiful and often very colorful painting.
For those who are interested in painting with a palette knife, all you need is a canvas or surface to paint on, a pallet to mix colors on, a few basic tubes of oil paint or acrylic paint, and a few palette knives. Have fun with it, and paint something you are interested in. Painting with palette knives is a great way to introduce yourself to the world of painting and art.