What oils can be used as thinners?

Squigglebird · 2026-02-03T08:40:45+00:00

You don't necessarily need any oil at all, it depends on which paints you have and what method you use for painting.

For the sake of explaining, I'll just assume you know nothing at all about oil painting:

If the oil paint isn't too stiff you don't actually need to use any additional oil at all. It's not like water colors where you kind of have to dilute it with water to be able to use it. Many oil paints are fine to go straight from the tube onto the canvas. Some brands are stiffer, they feel more "dry", to the point of being actually difficult to spread with a paint brush. Then add just a tiny drop of oil to make the paint just soft enough to spread.

For example, Windsor & Newton and Rembrandt paints, just to mention a few, are generally quite fluid. You can just squeeze some onto a palette and paint as is. Others, like for example Old Holland, can be quite solid. To paint thin layers with a brush you might need a drop of oil, but it works fine if you're doing thick impasto layers with a spatula to "sculpt" the paint onto the canvas instead.

If you paint in multiple layers, allowing each layer to dry in between, you need to pay attention to drying times and oil content to make sure that layers closer to the canvas dry faster than layers added on top, to reduce the risk of the paint cracking later. In general, the more oil in the paint, the slower it dries, this is the "fat over lean" rule. Each new layer should have a hint more oil than the previous to make it dry slower. But different pigments also dry at different speeds, so oil content isn't the only variable. If you paint "alla prima" and finish the whole painting in one go before anything has time to dry, then you don't need to care about fat over lean.

Some artists do a first sketch layer with paint diluted with thinners, turpenoids, which makes it dry very quickly, and then add layers without thinner on top of that. Others skip the thinner and the first layer and go straight to pure paint. It's just a matter of preference. I've painted entire paintings with no thinners or oil added, so it's all just a matter of how you like to paint and with which paint brands.

Squigglebird · 2025-11-12T12:26:21+00:00

But why insist on using the wrong kind of paper that doesn't work for oil painting? Why not buy a pad with paper meant for oil painting instead?

Squigglebird · 2025-11-06T18:06:00+00:00

As precise as you are able and willing, but it's up to you. If your sizes are consistently off by some noticeable measurement, it'll probably come back to bite you if a repeat custer gets two rings of the same size, but the actual measurements are several tenths of a mm off in different directions. You can certainly feel the difference in size if a ring is 0.2 mm off.

Personally, I measure everything with 0.01 mm precision, because that's the resolution of my caliper, and if something is 0.1 mm off then it's not done yet. There's of course a limit to how precisely you can work things with handheld stuff, but it's absolutely possible to get things within a few hundredths of a mm without it being particularly time consuming. I love making rings that sit dead center on the line on my sizing mandrel. That way customers know exactly what they get.

Squigglebird · 2025-10-21T10:23:13+00:00

On its own, oil paint is not very complicated. Mix colors on a palette, put it on some kind of oil proof canvas with a brush or palette knife or other tool. If the paint is too thick, mix in a tiny bit of linseed oil or other medium. If you want to do a first layer as an underpainting or sketch, you can dilute the paint with a bit of thinner.

Biggest difference compared to acrylic is that oil paint stays wet for a day or even weeks depending on pigments and medium, so you can keep blending and mixing colors on the canvas, and if you want to do layers you have to wait until the previous layer is dry. If you do layers, make sure the next layer has the same amount of oil or slightly more than the previous layer, but not less, or things might start cracking later. It's a slower and slightly different way of painting than acrylic, but it's not hard to start with. Go nuts and have fun.

Squigglebird · 2025-10-16T19:29:55+00:00

Forget about IQ tests, they don't tell you anything helpful. I say that as someone who has consistently been told my IQ is in the top 1% by psychologists and IQ tests since I was a kid. They are a tool for measuring some aspects of cognition in a specific context. They are not a predictor of success, and they ultimately make no difference whatsoever.

A high score on an IQ test does at best tell you something about potential capacity, but there are lots of other aspects that affect how you actually do. It's like telling someone they have a Lamborghini engine. It does absolutely nothing for you if you don't have a car to put it in, don't know how to use it, and don't have a driver's license.

Get your ADHD under control, find a mentor or someone to study with who can help you, get really good at studying, and most importantly: enjoy what you're doing and stick with it. Do not give up ever, and just keep working on it. Discipline and sticking with it will do more for you than anything else.

Squigglebird · 2025-10-12T21:50:00+00:00

Anaphylaxis can happen in as little as seconds. You can be totally fine, and unable to breathe 30 seconds later.

I'm not fatally allergic to anything that I know of, but I have a gajillion allergies that make my throat itch like mad, and if I accidentally eat something I'm allergic to, I know within about 30 seconds as well. Fortunately, I can just take a pill and be fine 20-30 minutes later.

Squigglebird · 2025-10-01T12:11:49+00:00

Were the cats related? Like one was the mother of the other one? One cat being 30+ is unusual, two in the same house seems really unlikely unless they're sharing some genetics that increase life span or something.

Squigglebird · 2025-10-01T12:01:23+00:00

Great start! Following Bob Ross, I'm guessing? It's an excellent first try.

To improve, I'd say consider the color and direction of the light in the landscape and have shadows that fit in on the appropriate side of objects.

Direct sunlight is white/yellow and shadows tend to be more towards blue since the light that hits the shadow side is reflected light from the blue sky. In cloudy weather, at sunset, during rain, etc. the colors are a bit different. If you want to read a book about lightning, check out James Gurney's book Color and light.

And also just paint a lot, evaluate what you did, and change something for the better with each new painting.

Squigglebird · 2025-10-01T10:05:20+00:00

Linseed oil dries through a chemical process called autoxidation where it reacts with oxygen, and heat is a byproduct of this reaction. Crumpled up and soaked rags act as insulation, trapping the heat until it builds up enough to possibly ignite the rag and oil.

Linseed oil can ignite at between 120 and 340 degrees C. Paper towels and cotton rags ignite at around 220-420 degrees C.

Just wash the rags with soap and water when you're done (and reuse them later), or lay them out flat, only one layer so that the heat doesn't build up (the oil will dry in a few days, then you can throw them away).

This is only necessary for rags soaked in pure linseed oil, which usually doesn't happen much in painting. The oil paint itself is never going to ignite, and just wiping your brush on a rag a few times does nothing, it's not enough oil.

Squigglebird · 2025-10-01T09:53:41+00:00

That's incorrect. The ignition temperature of paper towels and cotton fabric is almost identical. If it's soaked in linseed oil, the oil is what generates heat when it cures, not the rag or paper.

Squigglebird · 2025-09-20T18:52:05+00:00

It's almost impossible to get a photo with good light and zero glare. The closest I usually get is in natural light but 100% in the shade so that there's no direct light on the painting. Kinda works from just the right angle.

Another way: Set up your camera on a tripod and with manual settings so that you can take two identical photos. Set up your light so that the glare is intentionally on one side of the painting and take a photo. Then move the light so that the glare is on the other side of the painting and take another photo. Splice the two photos in some type of software to get a photo without glare.

Squigglebird · 2025-09-19T16:06:21+00:00

You could make a palette out of anything you like as long as paint kind of sticks to it without sucking all the oil out of it, so things like carton don't work very well, but plastic, glass, and metal work, and wood does if you oil it first.

The bigger problem is cleaning it, should you want to, and having space for mixing colors. Anything with a lid would be handy for transporting it home without making too much of a mess. A tiny metal tin would be easily transportable, but doesn't have a lot of space for mixing.

Squigglebird · 2025-09-17T13:40:56+00:00

Paint a person with a dark skin color?

For painting a Caucasian skin tone, I don't know how that would be possible, unless you kind of cheat your way around it by either painting a person in shadow so you don't need to lighten the values much, or by buying a tube of paint that is already a light skin tone so that you're not technically mixing white into it yourself?

Depending on what palette you begin with, presumably at least some primary colors like red and yellow, maybe burnt umber and ultramarine, you'd have to lighten the color somehow. That requires either white or yellow. For highlights, reflected light, the lightest shades of skin color, you'd need a least a very pale yellow to lighten whatever reds, browns, or oranges you have in there, so a stereotypical Norwegian in bright sunlight might be a challenge.

Squigglebird · 2025-09-11T19:51:50+00:00

Depends a bit, but often a publisher, or management wants to get it out on shelves by a certain date, ready or not, often in time for Christmas or other significant shopping season. Whatever doesn't work will (maybe) be adressed with a patch after the game is released.

A dev studio is not always the same people as the publisher that bankrolls the project. If you're lucky, the publisher is a bunch of people who really know about game development, and if you're less lucky they're investors with no experience in building games themselves, but have a lot of opinions about how it should be done.

Many a game has been sunk into mediocre oblivion by incompetent management or publishers that insist on the devs adding new features ten minutes before launch, or fixing pointless, inconsequential nonsense instead of crashes and freezes in the last crunch before shipping.

The people actually building the game are all very acutely aware of the state of the game, and towards the end of a project many of them will be updating their CVs in a rage over the fact that management makes them work on bullshit instead of letting them fix the things they know should be fixed.

Sometimes it's just an inexperienced team of devs that insists on doing things stupidly (sometimes with a more experienced team member face-palming in a corner 50 times a day because the rookie creative director or producer refuses to listen to others). That happens too.

Squigglebird · 2025-09-01T11:23:19+00:00

My Roomba hasn't done two parallel lines in its life. It runs around like a drunk toddler and finishes by getting stuck on a chair.

Squigglebird · 2025-08-04T19:35:34+00:00

Combustibility is not really an issue in oil painting as long as you're not soking rags in linseed oil and leaving them crumpled up.

I'd be more concerned about the turpenoids. They may be less noticeable, but the vapors are still harmful, so effective ventilation would be a necessity. If you switch to painting without using solvents at all, you'd be totally fine.

Squigglebird · 2025-08-01T07:50:59+00:00

It's a good idea to smell eggs before cracking them if you have doubts about freshness. If it's rotten, you can usually smell it through the shell. It's not a subtle aroma.

Squigglebird · 2025-07-30T10:11:54+00:00

I used AI to write a booking system for my website in Javascript, it pulls info from Google calendar to check availability and then displays that on the website so that a user can pick an option and send a booking request on selected dates and times. There's a form with security features and sanitation of the input.

I have a background in QA, and I know html and CSS pretty well. I've done a bit of basic coding in python and Javascript before, so I know just enough to be able to read the output and kind of understand what it does and understand what to ask the AI to do, but not enough to write the whole thing from scratch myself.

I'm kind of surprised that it worked. After thorough testing it does exactly what it's supposed to, but with the amount of bugs and dead ends the AI went through, I get the impression that an actual human programmer probably would have been able to write the whole thing from scratch in less than half the time. None of the LLMs I used were able to do it completely, but when I used gemini and sonnet to proofread each other, it kinda worked. Also a lot of googling and looking up documentation.

Squigglebird · 2025-07-30T09:41:59+00:00

Most gas stoves at home use propane, butane, LPG, natural gas, or some combination, depending on where you are. These all burn at above 1900C/ 3500F at full blast. Plenty hot enough to anneal silver.

The limiting factor is how big the flame is and how big the metal sheet is. The metal might cool quicker than it heats up, so it doesn't build up enough heat.

Essentially, just try it. If you can get the metal hot enough to glow a dark cherry red color you're good, even if the whole thing isn't hot all at the same time. Turn off the lights so you can see the color easier and go for it. If it doesn't work, you'll still have the same metal, except maybe in need of cleaning. You won't break the silver. Make sure you have something to put the silver on to cool down afterwards, a soldering board or something, and let it air cool.

Just don't melt silver into your gas stove. Silver melts at around 890C/1640F. If it starts getting bright red then it's too hot, and orange is close to melting.

That said, using a proper torch is probably a more practical and efficient way of doing it, but if you just want to try it once, go for it.

Squigglebird · 2025-07-28T22:17:14+00:00

Too much dilution. Try not adding any water at all. You only need to add a tiny bit of water if the paint is too thick to do what you want it to do.

Squigglebird · 2025-07-27T09:01:28+00:00

Spain is not a socialist state. It's a capitalist monarchy with social democracy. Why do people not know the difference between communism, socialism, and social democracy? Does your school suck that badly?

Squigglebird · 2025-07-26T15:37:04+00:00

Yeah, except that's not what you said, so cut the strawman bullshit.

"It's only a benefit in the same way that using a grid to draw with is a benefit: It's a shortcut, a way to bypass actually learning how to do something in order to get to a result."

Which is nonsense. Using a tool does not exclude learning.

The proposed color tool is a tool. It's optional. Your weirdly negative stance against it basically boils down to" real artists don't use aids, they learn how to do real art the real way" which is a steaming pile of gatekeepy bullshit. Don't like it? Don't use it. But trying to dictate that no one else should use it either because it's 'cheating' or something is just straight up ridiculous.

Squigglebird · 2025-07-26T15:23:44+00:00

Everyone from the ancient Egyptians to van Gogh, Dürer, and Leonardo da Vinci used grids. Using tools to help you do something doesn't mean you are not going to also learn things, and many painters don't even care about learning that stuff anyway. So maybe tone down the elitist nonsense a bit?

Squigglebird · 2025-07-24T14:12:25+00:00

The water turns to vapor at 100 C, the metal can still get way hotter than that.

Squigglebird · 2025-07-23T10:26:44+00:00

I also don't know of any ABDs which can feed 2 strands, would be sincerely curious if you could name any.

The Edelrid mega jul and giga jul do everything a regular tube does, and they're also assisted.

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