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Painting on paper for demo purposes may afford an inexpensive way to show an example, but it is a wasteful use of time in learning to use oil paints.
I spent far too much time in my early training working on the wrong ground, with the wrong paints and the wrong brushes. Canvas board, acrylics, synthetic brushes, I shudder to remember. I feel I lost 13 years of my portrait career because I was using acrylics (absolutely inappropriate to use for a portrait), and discouraged from using oils, "...too messy/smelly/expensive...."
If you want to learn how to paint with oils, use a good quality cotton duck or linen canvas, or primed masonite. Masonite is a great surface, and quite easy and inexpensive to cut into sizes and prime with gesso. Use real brushes, hog bristle are fine and inexpensive at around $5 a brush. Use the top quality of paint. The student grades are usually wimpy in chroma, off in color, and usually have fillers, like tin or aluminum in the cerulean and cobalt, and barium in the cadmium colors. If you are trying to learn to mix paints, and you learn with the student grades, everything changes when you shift to the better paints. A good quality cadmium (around $18) will last for years because the paint dries more slowly, and the tinting strength is so great you need much less of it.
Bottom line, your time is worth more than the amount of money you might save on the materials. Fighting poor/inappropiate materials is an extremely frustrating exercise. I will repeat something I may have expressed before on this site in another context. I don't go out of my way to make painting difficult. It is hard enough as it is to learn the most basic principles without adding to the problems. If I am fighting the good fight over a portrait, I want it to be because I'm trying to find a likeness, or get a luminescent skin tone, not because the bristles on the brush are flaring, the paint colors are dead, or the oil is getting sucked into the ground and won't mix.
Peggy
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