4.9/5
Here's the short answer on acrylic vs oil paint. Pick acrylic if you want to paint tonight, rinse your brushes in the sink and stack finished pieces by the weekend. Pick oil if you want time: time to soften an edge an hour after you laid it down, and to come back tomorrow and still move things. Which one is better depends on the job you hand it, and most people who keep painting end up with both in the cupboard.
If the question is which paint has the longer record, oil wins by several centuries. Almost every museum picture you could name from memory is an oil, which is also why the studios that still copy old masters by hand work in oil rather than acrylic. Acrylic is the young one. It arrived in the 1950s, and that youth explains both its strengths and its weak spots.
The difference between acrylic and oil paint
Both paints start with the same pigments. What changes is the glue holding them together.
Oil paint suspends pigment in a drying oil, usually linseed, sometimes walnut, poppy or safflower. It doesn't dry the way a puddle dries. The oil reacts with air and slowly turns into a tough film, and that film keeps hardening for decades.
Acrylic suspends pigment in a synthetic resin carried in water. When the water evaporates, the resin fuses into a flexible plastic skin. Before that happens you can thin it with tap water; after, it's waterproof. That's the whole trick, and it's why a jar of acrylic left open overnight turns into a hockey puck.
| Acrylic | Oil | |
|---|---|---|
| Binder | Acrylic resin in water | Linseed or another drying oil |
| How it dries | Water evaporates and a film forms fast | Oil reacts with air over days, then keeps hardening for decades |
| Blending time | Short, unless you add a retarder | Long; you can rework the same passage the next day |
| Cleanup | Soap and water while wet | Oil or solvent, then soap |
| Color while drying | Darkens a little as the binder clears | No milky binder to clear |
| Layering | Can go under oil | Never under acrylic |
Drying time decides almost everything
Every other difference traces back to the clock.
With acrylic, a thin stroke is dry to the touch before you've rinsed the brush. Great for building layers fast or blocking in a background in one sitting. Miserable for a soft sky that fades from blue to peach, because by the time you've mixed the peach, the blue has set and you get a line instead of a gradient.
Oil flips that. A thinned oil layer is tack-free in a few days, a thick one takes much longer, and some colors dry faster than others because of the pigment. (If you want the real numbers, here's how long a thick oil layer takes to dry before you can varnish it.) The wait is annoying if you want a finished picture on Sunday. It's a gift if you want to model a face, because you can blend skin tones on the canvas for as long as the session lasts.
What are the disadvantages of acrylic paint?
Speed is the obvious one. There are others people only find out after a few paintings.
- It shifts darker as it dries. The milky binder clears as it dries, so the color you mixed wet comes out a shade deeper. The fix is to mix a step lighter than you want and test a dried swatch.
- Your palette dries too. A puddle of carefully matched green can skin over while you're still on the first leaf. Stay-wet palettes and slow-drying acrylic lines help, but you're always racing a little.
- It can't go on top of oil. More on that below, but it rules out using acrylic to touch up an oil painting.
- Its long-term behavior is still being studied. Conservators are still working out how acrylic films age and how they react to cleaning, which makes sense for a paint that has only been sold to artists since the 1950s.
Why do artists choose oil over acrylic?
Blending is the honest answer, and it's the same reason painters switched to oil in the first place. Oil was already used for panel painting in Northern Europe in the 1200s and 1300s. Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin pushed it further, and by the early 1400s it had reached Italy. Compared with egg tempera, which dries fast, slow-drying oil let a painter lay thin layers over one another and melt one tone into the next.
That slowness also means you can change your mind. Take Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte, an oil on canvas painted in 1884–1886 and just over ten feet wide. Seurat went back to it two years after he started, enlarging the silhouettes of some figures and adding new ones (the monkey on the leash was one of the additions). Then, in 1888–1889, he added a painted border around the edge. Oil tolerates that kind of second thought. It's one of the paintings people ask to have copied most, and you'll find it among the masterpieces everyone recognizes on sight.
The last reason is depth. A thin glaze of oil over a lighter layer glows in a way that's hard to fake with acrylic. You can get close with acrylic glazing mediums. Close is the right word.
Oil over acrylic works; the reverse doesn't
This is the one rule worth memorizing before you mix the two.
You can paint oil on top of acrylic. If your canvas came primed with acrylic gesso, you're already doing it. You can't paint acrylic on top of oil, because the oil film is tight and water-resistant and the acrylic has nothing to grip. It may look fine at first, then peel.
If you want to block in with acrylic and finish in oil, the paint maker's guidelines for oil over acrylic are specific. Let a thin acrylic layer dry at least three days, and give a quarter-inch layer two to three weeks or more. Prefer a rigid panel over stretched canvas, and matte acrylic over glossy gels, since the acrylic underneath stays flexible while the oil on top grows more brittle with age. That mismatch is one of the reasons why oil paintings crack as they age.
A warning from a refectory wall in Milan
Choosing a paint for its working time, and ignoring how it will age, has gone wrong before. Leonardo painted the Last Supper in 1494–1498 on the dining hall wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie. True fresco would have forced him to work fast into wet plaster. He didn't want that, so he painted on dry plaster with a greasy tempera made with egg yolk, which let him work slowly and revise, the way he could on a wooden panel.
It held for barely twenty years. By 1517 the paint was already decaying. By 1568 visitors could make out little more than a stain, and by 1625 flakes were falling off the wall. The refectory's own history of the damage puts the blame on that technique: the pigment sat on top of the wall instead of sinking into it.
What survives is fragile, so it's no surprise the picture lives on through copies, including a hand-painted version of Leonardo's wall on canvas. The lesson for anyone weighing oil against acrylic is plain enough: the paint has to suit the surface and the room it will live in, and your working speed comes second.
Did Bob Ross use oil or acrylic?
Oil. Bob Ross painted his landscapes in oil using the wet-on-wet method, also called alla prima, where each layer goes onto paint that's still wet and the whole picture can be finished in one sitting. He picked it up from William Alexander after leaving the Air Force, then built his own version with custom paints, brushes and knives. His company tells the story of how he found the technique in more detail.
The choice matters. Wet-on-wet only works because oil stays open long enough to pull a mountain out of a wet sky with a palette knife. Try the same moves with acrylic and the sky dries before the mountain arrives. Between 1982 and 1994 he recorded more than 400 episodes of The Joy of Painting, and he produced almost 30,000 paintings over his life.
Do professional artists use acrylic paint?
Plenty do, and some of the best known pictures of the last sixty years are acrylic. The first water-based acrylic artist color went on sale in 1956, and the medium went mainstream in the 1960s, when David Hockney used it for several of his most celebrated paintings. Andy Warhol and Bridget Riley worked in it too. Flat, hard-edged color and fast layers suit acrylic better than oil, and a heavy-bodied acrylic with an oil-like consistency has existed since 1963.
Smell, solvents and the kitchen table
People worry that oil is toxic. The colors themselves use the same kinds of pigments you'd find in acrylic or watercolor. The fumes come from the solvent used to thin paint and wash brushes. Use an odorless mineral spirit with the aromatics refined out, or skip solvent entirely with a solvent-free medium, and clean brushes in oil before soap. One paint maker's studio safety guide recommends changing the room's air ten times an hour, which in practice means an open window and a fan.
Acrylic wins this round easily for a shared apartment or a kid's desk. Water and soap, and you're done.
So which should you buy first?
If you're starting from zero and paint in short sessions, the oil painting vs acrylic choice is easy: buy acrylic. You'll finish more paintings, and a failed canvas can be painted over the same evening.
If you already know you love blending, portraits or soft landscapes, and you can leave a wet canvas somewhere for a week, go straight to oil. A small palette, a jar of solvent-free medium and a couple of primed panels is enough. And if you can't decide, start in acrylic and finish in oil. It's an old studio habit, and it works as long as you respect the rule about which goes on top.
Buying the painting instead of painting it
Some readers land here while deciding what to hang, not what to paint. If that's you, the medium question is simpler: most of the paintings people want on a wall were painted in oil, and a copy reads best in the same paint. Art & See makes a hand-painted oil copy of a museum piece on canvas, stroke by stroke, so the surface catches light the way an oil painting should.
