I generally use Gamblin and Winsor & Newton paints, 10-12 oz stretched canvas, and occasionally aluminum composite panels. I prefer to stretch my own canvases as it gives me a firmer substrate and the option of painting in non-standard sizes. I am fond of the Opus Legato series, and have painted with them throughout my 28 year career

I've tried so many different products over the years. For most artists, product becomes an addictive focus of their guilty pleasure. Over the course of my career, I have taught a lot of people to paint - over 1500 in the past 15 years.

I have always used the Winton line of paints when teaching them as I feel that it offers the best value for a student painter in terms of both affordability and quality. A good deal of Winton paint made it into my own work over the years, but I keep a special reserve of Gamblin paint for my own work nowadays. Working with high quality pigments, one soon learns that a little goes a long way - and using a lesser quality, more cost effective paint can often be a false economy.

Nowadays I'm not a huge purchaser of product. My studio is pretty old school - canvas by the roll, stretcher bars, linseed oil, 8 or so different pigments, and I'm good to go.

Oil paint has always been my medium of choice, and as contemporary as my work may look, I use a lot of master technique - the cornerstone technique for most of my paintings being grisaille. 

Oil paint is obviously perfectly suited to reductive techniques in the underpaint, but also in capturing the subtle nuance and shifts in values and contours of the form in the overpaint. The process of using oil paint is very sculptural and in many ways, very forgiving - and in other ways, less so. 

Glazing in thin layers of complimentary colours often adds depth to a painting,and I often use glazes to effect temperature and value towards the completion of a painting. I often add a medium such as Liquin to my paint in the final layer. Liquin is a "flow medium" and as such, kind of 'greases your wheels' and assists with a cleaner finish. 

Both archivally and aesthetically, a final coat of varnish is essential. I generally make my own, however if I wasn't I would be using Gamvar. 

I often use silver leaf as a background to my paintings - painting directly on silver leaf certainly provides its own challenges - it feels very much like painting straight onto a sheet of metal.

The inclusion of silver leaf often provides an ethereal aesthetic that I enjoy getting into my paintings. There is a luminosity there that is difficult to create without it. Even in a landscape I will occasionally silver leaf the sky and water and then build the colour in glazes. The effect can be magical.

The slow drying properties of oil paint allows me to utilize the grisaille technique reductively - as opposed to acrylic, which would require building the values by adding paint rather than taking it away. 

Painting directly to silver leaf required a shift in my approach as it requires a few very important steps which allow you to work with the substrate as though it were gesso. The use of oil grounds as opposed to acrylic "gesso" also affects the luminosity of the overpaint.

I'm a pretty resourceful painter and I can usually find my way around most situations. I love to break the rules and test the limits of what you should or shouldn't do. Most of the time it works out, and when it doesn't it often leads me in a different direction - so it kind of works out anyway. 

We ride on the shoulders of great painters before us. The impressionists for instance gave us all license to break the rules and create a little pandemonium. We think of the impressionist style as mainstream now, but those brave souls were flying in the face of convention 130 years ago. Thank God for the impressionists. 

That did little to address the question, but I guess that I'm trying to say that it's fun to try something new occasionally and the solution as to how best to work with a new medium will present itself to you during the struggle.

I don't - and it doesn't. If "mummy brown" were still a thing I would likely have a bit of a problem with that- but beyond that, not so much. 

On further thought - OMS - odourless mineral spirits - I couldn't live without it. I hate the smell of turpenoids and can't have it in my studio. The OMS that I use gets thoroughly recycled and can be used and reused - and never, ever goes down the drain. 

I'm not fond of paints with heavy metals in them, so I tend to avoid using paint with cadmium etc. There are safer options nowadays.