Materials
After many years of using traditional oil paints I began to develop allergic reactions to both the paints’ linseed oil medium and the volatile elements of cleaners / diluents such as turpentine. This prompted a change to water soluble oil paints (real pigments in a carrier of modified linseed oil), and citrus based cleaners / diluents.
My personal choices, for whatever they are worth (and, no, I’m not sponsored) are Cobra Artist quality oils and Zest-It medium.
Please use the hypertext links if you want to find out more about them.
Supports
My personal preference is for primed cotton duck (a corruption of the dutch ‘doek’) canvas stretched over wooden bearers. For the budget minded (e.g. me) I’ve found shop bought ready to use canvases disappointing on the whole, due mainly to the ‘weight’ (thickness) of the canvas material used in their manufacture – usually around 9oz . My recommendation is to buy shop bought ready mades, but then strip off the canvas supplied and replace with heavier weight unprimed duck canvas in the 12oz to 15oz range. All this requires is to buy, upfront, quantities of heavier canvas material, then cut to appropriate size and fit. The only additional gear required being stretching pliers and a staple gun: (there are plenty of videos on YouTube to show you how to use them).
Once you are at this point, coat the bare canvas in two to three layers of acrylic gesso , and then congratulate yourself on ending up with what is a superior product at a much more acceptable cost.

Canvas stretching gear (shown here on 15oz canvas)
Colour palette and brushes
My usual colour choices for monotone underpainting are various mixes of raw umber (darkest dark) and titanium white (lightest light). Here is my (full) colour palette for painting , but it’s not often that they are all in use at the same time.- Titanium White
- Yellow Ochre
- Lemon Yellow
- Sap Green
- Olive Green
- Ceulean Blue
- Ultramarine
- Paynes Grey
- Raw Umber
- Burnt Umber
- Burnt Sienna
- Pyrrole Red
Very recently I have started experimenting (for portraits mainly) with a limited colour palette approach (also known as a Zorn or Apelles palette)…… which consists of just four colours: Titanium White, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red and Ivory Black. The jury is still out on this for me – at the moment I’m using it for underpainting skin tones. The internet houses many, many articles on this, and I commend you to have a butchers.
I use a variety of brushes from anywhere I can get them. I also use a whole selection of other mark makers, (toothbrushes, fingers, scrunched up paper etc etc). It doesn’t seem sensible to me to be too precious about how marks of paint get onto the canvas just as long as you end up satisfied with the result!