My Favorite Wedding Painting Supplies

Ever wonder what, exactly, your live wedding painter is using? I’ll break down my favorite painting supplies!

First of all, the medium:

If you yourself are not experienced in art, you might not know how many types of paint there are! From what I’ve seen, most wedding painters use acrylic paint. Some use oil and a very few use watercolor. There are other types of paint as well, like gouache and egg tempera, but I’ve never seen a wedding painter use those materials. I use a mixture of acrylic paint and oil paint. I use acrylic to create a fast drying underpainting, and then complete the work in oil.

Tip: do not paint acrylic paint over oil! Oil paint is far more flexible and can bend while acrylic cannot. If you paint acrylic paint over oil, it will likely crack.

I don’t fuss too much about what acrylic paints I use for the underpainting. I typically use Liquitex or Golden. For oil paints, however, I do fuss.

The Paint

For all my wedding paintings, I use professional grade oil paints. My preferred brand is Michael Harding. I have yet to buy a paint from them that is not insanely pigmented, lightfast, and smooth like butter. I do use a few other brands as well, however. Winsor and Newton Artist’s Grade paint tends to also be very high quality, as does Gamblin. Remember to get the Professional/Artist’s Grade paints. Student paints are fine for beginners, but you should not be using them on commissioned works. I know the prices can be… startling to say the least. I bought a small tube of Genuine Naples Yellow Light that cost me upwards of $80. However, these professional grade paints are loaded with so much pigment, it’s worth it.

I do think there are some colors you can get away with buying at a lower quality. For me, Titanium White tends to be a “workhorse” color. I use a TON of it, often adding just touches of more chromatic paints to create tints. Sometimes, if I want a weaker white, I’ll buy student grade.

If you are wondering what colors are on my palette: it varies. I bring a ton of colors with me everywhere I go and then parse it down to the ones that create the correct atmosphere. Here is a list of the colors I lug around with me: (paints with the asterisks are almost always on my palette)

Yellows:

• Yellow Ochre*

• Cadmium Yellow Light*

• Transparent Yellow Oxide

• Indian Yellow

• Genuine Naples Yellow Light

Blues:

• French Ultramarine*

• Cobalt Blue

• Prussian Blue (I rarely use this one)

Greens:

• Viridian*

• Chromium Oxide Green*

Reds:

• Vermillion*

• Alizarin Crimson Pastiche*

• Transparent Red Oxide

• Venetian Red

• Quinacridone Magenta

Purples:

• Cobalt Violet

Oranges:

• Cadmium Orange*

Browns:

• Raw Umber*

• Burnt Sienna

Neutrals:

• Titanium White*

• Ivory Black*

• Flake White

The Canvas

What you paint on is a major factor in how long your painting will last. I prefer Centurion Linen Acrylic-Primed canvases. It has just enough tooth for my preferences, and is graded to last 500 years. It’s also not that much more expensive than cotton duck canvases you might find at a craft store.

The Brushes

Here is perhaps the only area of my art supplies where I don’t splurge. I am very hard on brushes. I scrub, I push, I am brutal. For this reason, I tend to shy away from high ticket brushes like those made with Kolinsky Sable or other genuine fur or hair. I buy mid-range brushes, typically filberts, rounds, and squares, and I paint with them until all the bristles have fallen off. This does not take as long as it probably should. I prefer synthetic brushes. I rarely use hog-hair or hog-hair-synthetics: I prefer a smoother application of paint.

Is that all?

Nope! There are a few more key supplies that go into a painting. One is the mediums I use. A medium is something you mix with your paint to create a desired effect. Often, I want my oil paints to be a little smoother than they are. At weddings, I use Gamblin’s Galkyd Gel. I like it because you don’t need a separate container for it. It comes in a tube, and you squeeze it on your palette like just another paint color. In the studio, I use primarily linseed oil and drying poppy oil. I’ll often cut the linseed oil with thinner as well to obey the fat over lean rule of oil painting.

The final step of any painting is, arguably, one of the most important: varnishing. A good varnish will protect your painting from dust, UV rays, and all other hazards of hanging on a wall for a few centuries. I use Gamblin’s Gamvar Gloss varnish and love it. It was actually developed with the help of the National Gallery of Art to best protect paintings. Another bonus is you don’t have to wait until the painting is fully oxidized to apply it. Oil paintings don’t “dry”, they oxidize. It can take months and months for a painting to be fully oxidized, even if the top layers are dry to the touch. Gamvar is designed to be applied once the entire painting is dry to the touch. This allows me to send the paintings home much sooner without worrying about any damage.

Gamvar is also removable with Gamsol. This is actually a huge bonus. If your painting gets severely scratched or damaged, the varnish can be removed and the painting repaired. Other forms of varnish never come off and may yellow the painting as well.

I hope this post helped you understand a little more about the thought and expertise that goes into choosing supplies for a painting. And, if you are a new or aspiring wedding painter, I hope this was helpful!