You can try this: Go to the kitchen and get a little powdered saffron, powdered red food or cocoa and add a little oil (sunflower, poppy, walnut, safflower, it dosen't really matter which) and mix it up with a knife or spoon. You have now produced a genuine oil paint ( and unlike many others, one you could eat it without harm). Find some zinc cream (used as a sunscreen) in the bathroom cabinet and now you have a white oil paint - now some black boot polish and you have a decent black oil paint. If it is a little thick or hard to mix you may add a little turpentine, thinners or petrol which will obviously cause it to mix easier and dry faster.

Note: it is usually the chemical pigment or the thinners that causes the extremely poisonous nature of most commercial oil paints (lead, cadmium and arsenic are old culprits). If the powder you use is unusually strong you might be tempted to add a filler to bolster up the mixture. This could be chalk or ground marble or some other neutral powder. Student oil paints usually have more filler than Artists' brands. Filler is cheaper than pigment so you get what you pay for!

OK, so now what do we do with our mixture? If we had two lumps of ‘mixture’ (paint) say a red and a yellow and made them very oily and put them side by side on a flat surface they would gradually spread out and merge and take ages to get dry. So more oil will help paint to blend and merge as oil is also the lubricant for the pigment and helps it slide around on the canvas.

How can we reverse this and stiffen up the paint?
We could add more pigment or filler, or we could get rid of some of that excess oil.
How do we remove the oil? By putting the mixture on blotting or absorbent paper and waiting. The paper will absorb the oil and a little of the pigment. Obviously to make it more runny we could add more oil and to dry faster and spread thinner we could add turpentine, thinners or petrol.
Get the general idea!

One more thing - we can also add other things that are mixable with oil like certain resins and varnishes which will make the mixture sticky and shine and maybe dry in a layer like a clear plastic sheet. This might allow what is underneath to shine through. And when we add a little strong pigment to this sheet we can maybe make what is called a ‘glaze’. Then again we could add some egg yolk for a 'matt' type finish.

What now?
Like a potter you have now made you clay, only in your case it is called paint. Instead of water you have added oil and some pigment and, instead of a wheel, you will be putting your mixture on a flat vertical surface, although you will mix it on a bench or pallet. There is no rush with your paint though - it is oil based and will mostly take a long time to dry and this you know you can control adding oil or white spirits.
One main point before you apply your paint; if you first apply a thick layer of paint to your canvas it will take ages to dry because the oil will have to dry out. If you have ever watched oil dry out you could probably also hear you own hair growing. When thick paint dries it shrinks and sometimes cracks. So if your first layer of paint is very thick and you add a thin layers on top of it before it is totally dry it will crack all the layers applied thereafter - and as it continues to dry the cracks will get bigger - especially if the color on top is darker.
Painters prevent this by painting the thick slow drying layers last and usually begin with thin fast drying paint - as their background.
'Thick over thin and light over dark' is an old painters saying.
If we don’t want to wait we can paint what is called 'wet in wet'. That means putting wet layers of paint on other wet layers all in the one session (or over the total time it takes the paint to dry). There can still be hours - or days until a ‘skin’ forms.
This is an important point as many painters would like to finish their painting quickly and are thereby forced to paint 'wet in wet'.

STUDENT ACTIVITY: See next lesson. Using someof the pigments, and oils I have mentioned make up a pallet of colors and paint a small picture. Allow 40min.