Is there digital oil paint that stays wet and blends?
Easel by Zaweba has oil paint that stays wet for about ten minutes of real time and blends on the canvas, and saved files keep it wet.
There is. In Easel by Zaweba, a free offline painting studio for Windows, oil paint stays wet for about 10 minutes of real time and mixes on the canvas, so you can work wet into wet the way oil painters do. When you save a picture as a .zeasel file, paint that has not dried is still wet when you open it again.
Oil painters value that open time. It lets you push one colour into another, soften an edge with a clean brush, or scrape a passage back and start again. Many digital programs give you an oil brush that blends at the moment you paint, but the paint is effectively dry the moment your stroke ends. Easel keeps the paint in a wet state on the surface until it really has dried.
What wet actually means in Easel
Each spot of paint carries water, body and pigment. While oil is wet, a new stroke through it picks up and moves what is already there, and the colours mix as pigments do. Easel uses the Kubelka-Munk model, which Zaweba wrote itself, so blue and yellow make green rather than grey, and a dark into a light behaves as it would on a real canvas.
Oil also builds height. Thick oil makes impasto, and paint height becomes a surface lit by a light you can move, so ridges from the brush or knife catch highlights. Flat light switches the relief off when you want to judge colour on its own.
Ways to blend
There are a few distinct approaches, each with its own tool. A brush dragged through wet paint carries colour along with it; Easel includes the badger blender, filbert, flat and mop among its brush shapes, in sable, synthetic and hog hair. The finger smudges. The rag lifts paint. The scraper pushes wet paint aside into ridges and reveals what is underneath.
Brushes get dirty when dragged through wet paint, just like real ones. By default each stroke dips a fresh load, which keeps colours clean. Untick Dip each stroke and the brush runs dry and carries the dirt from one stroke to the next, which is often what you want when blending. C cleans the brush and D dips it.
Controlling the time
About 10 minutes is roughly how long oil stays workable in Easel at the normal speed. The drying speed slider runs from 0.25 to 4 times, so you can stretch the open time while you work on a difficult passage, or shorten it when you want to glaze over a layer sooner. Dry now locks wet paint in place whenever you need a passage set. Humidity and warmth are also studio settings that change how paint behaves.
Mediums matter too. Linseed oil, glazing medium and solvent are all available, and Easel follows the old rule that lean paint dried over fat paint cracks, which is worth knowing before you start layering. Alkyd and water-mixable oil are among the paints added in version 1.1.
Coming back to a painting
Oil painters rarely finish in one session, which is why the .zeasel file matters. It keeps the paint state, the surface, the palette, masks and the time-lapse together, so you can close the program at night and carry on blending in the morning. Undo keeps 80 steps by default.
A good place to practise
Real oils are slow and costly to learn on, and digital practice will not teach the smell of turpentine. What it can teach is how colours mix, how much paint a brush holds and how long you have before a passage sets. For that, a free program with oil that genuinely stays wet is a useful thing to have on your desktop.
