Painting artists have been using oil paints for hundreds of years. Actually, they have been seen from as early as 13th century in England, where they used oil paints for simple decoration. In the early years, however, many artists preferred to use paints called tempera instead on using oil paints as they were able to dry faster than oil paint. In the 15th century, Flemish artists came up with the idea of mixing oil paint and tempera. Nevertheless, it was not until the 17th century that pure oil paints became a more usual art medium.

Oil painting dries slowly than any other forms of paint because they are made of small particles of pigments that are balanced in a drying oil. While some of the artists might find this slow drying quality troublesome, most artists believe oil paints to be a required type of art media that must be taught to every art student. This is partly because of the many oil painting reproduction, which have been developed using oil paints.

There are several advantages of using oil paints, aside from its robust quality. Oil paints could as well be left open for a long duration. In fact, oil paints could regularly be left opened to air for up to several weeks without drying. This characteristic makes it possible for an artist to work on a painting over different sessions with no fear of the painting drying up too early. Of course, this attribute could be seemed at as a disadvantage by some artists, because it takes few weeks for the project to be completed and the slow drying process could make it difficult to move on to the next stage of the project.

Oil paints are as well outstanding for blending with surrounding paint. When blended on canvas, oil paints are able of creating artistic brush strokes and other blends, which are not possible with other forms of paint. For some artists, though, this advantage to oil paints could be viewed as a disadvantage, as it is possible to by chance blend colors while painting that were not meant to be blended.