Who uses a palette knife?

Almost every painter who uses oil or acrylic paints will have a palette knife (also called a painting knife) in their artist kit. They’re usually used for mixing paints together and applying paint from tubes onto palettes.

Palette knives can be used alone or (more commonly) in combination with a paintbrush to add extra details and effects.

Many traditional Western artistic conventions were challenged in the 19th century, and it was at this time that palette knives became more widely used as a primary (sometimes even the only) tool in painting. French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) is often credited with popularizing palette knife painting through his landscapes. Nineteenth-century painters like Cezanne, Pissaro, Chagall, Van Gogh, and Matisse also painted with the tool.

As artists became less concerned with perfectly representing reality and more so with expressing mood, light, and color, the palette knife became an increasingly popular tool, and abstract palette knife painting became more common.