What are oil paints?

Oil paints are thick, colorful paints that you can use to make pictures on paper or canvas.

Imagine you have a big jar of oil paint, and it looks like the inside of a chocolate bar, dark and smooth. When you want to draw something, you take a little bit of the paint and mix it with some oil, which is like what your body uses to move around. This makes the paint easier to spread on your paper.

When you put the mixed paint on paper, it starts to harden, just like how a piece of playdough gets stiff when it sits out for a while. The oil helps keep the colors rich and soft at first, but as time goes by, they get harder and stay that way.

Oil paints are popular because you can make them really thick or very thin, like how you can squish your playdough into a ball or stretch it out flat. You can also mix different colors together to create new ones, just like mixing red and blue to get purple.

They’re used by artists who want their pictures to look deep and shiny, like the way a rainbow looks on wet pavement after rain!