Oil Painting Video Lesson – The Spring House

Enjoy this three part oil painting lesson:

Part 1

Beginning a new oil painting of a Spring House in rural Pa. Here i am blocking in the sky and foreground underpainting:

Part 2

Underpainting the backround elements of “The Springhouse” oil painting.

Part 3

Unfortunately i had to skip videoing several sessions as i was in between cameras at thte time. So we’re here at the final session ;detailing in the foreground. Thanks for watching!!

Top 10 Tips For Improving your Oil Painting

LEARN HOW TO DRAW

You will be amazed at how much learning how to draw will help improve your oil paintings. In fact, years ago art students were not permitted to paint until they learned the fundamentals of drawing. Drawing gets you more in touch with value, line and form without the distraction of color. Find a good book on drawing fundamentals and start there.

LEARN ABOUT COLOR

Nothing can confuse a beginner more than color. You need to have a good understanding of color theory if you intend on producing high quality paintings. Concepts like color temperature, hue and intensity are very important and should be studied. Once you have a good understanding of color theory, you must then learn how to mix your colors. There is much more to color mixing then meets the eye. For instance, you cannot mix any old blue with any old yellow and get the perfect green. Certain blues and yellows behave differently than others, so you must learn about the properties of each color.

PERSPECTIVE

Perspective in painting is one of the biggest hurdles for beginners. Sometimes a painting just looks “wrong”, and often it is because the perspective in the painting is off. Learning about perspective will teach you how to properly translate a 3-dimensional world onto a 2-dimensional canvas or other support. Learning perspective is a necessary ingredient toward producing convincing oil paintings. There is of course an exception to this, if you are producing an abstract work and your intentions are to warp the perspective.

MATERIALS

Materials to an oil painter are like what a guitar is to a guitarist. A guitarist cannot play without his instrument nor can he play without understanding how his instrument works. Your painting materials are your instruments. They are what enable you to express yourself, so learning more about them is an absolute must. Learn about the different kinds of brushes and what they do. Know your paints. Not all colors behave the same. Some are more transparent or opaque than others. Know your supports and the difference between them. The list goes on.

TECHNIQUES

There are a plethora of oil painting techniques that you can learn to create your paintings. Techniques like wet on wet, glazing, alla prima, knife painting, etc. should all be explored. Working with various techniques will help you develop your own unique style and help you to produce more interesting paintings.

START WITH A CONCEPT

I remember not too long ago, what a frustrated painter I was. I had 10 or so incomplete paintings collecting dust in the corner of my small studio. I would attempt to complete these paintings over and over again, until finally I had to take a step back and try and understand what I was doing wrong. The reason I lost interest and was unable to complete these paintings, was because I did not have a concept in mind before I started. I would start haphazardly without a clear vision of what I really wanted to accomplish. Concepts are methods for solving problems in a painting. What do you want your painting to be about? When you have a blueprint or roadmap in mind before you start painting, there is no room for diversion. You must stick to your plan.

MASTER YOUR BRUSH

A very important part of oil painting is having control over your brush. Without good brush control , your effectiveness as a painter is limited. Make sure you have the best possible brushes you can afford. One of the biggest mistakes artists make, myself included, is not reloading the brush enough. Make certain you always have enough paint on your brush so that there is always a layer of paint between your brush and the canvas. Do not try and scrub the paint into the canvas. Paint your strokes and leave them be. Don’t over work your brushstrokes.

FAT OVER LEAN

Follow this rule and you will reduce the chance of your paint cracking. Each layer of your oil painting should have a higher oil content then the one below it.

ORGANIZED PALETTE

Having a clean organized palette is an essential part of good painting. Get into the habit of laying out your colors the same way every time you paint. Arrange your colors along the edges of your palette leaving a lot of room in the center for mixing. Don’t be afraid to squeeze out a good amount of paint, especially your whites. You will be more productive if you aren’t continuously stopping to squeeze out more paint. Make certain to include all of the colors you think you will need to complete that session of painting. It’s a good idea to continuously wipe your palette clean during the painting process. Keep some alcohol handy so that you can keep the mixing area of your palette clean.

INSPIRATION

If you are ever feeling uninspired don’t get discouraged. Try taking a walk outside, breath in the air, look around at the beautiful earth God created. Try playing music while you are painting. You will be surprised how music can affect your painting. Visit a museum or local gallery. Viewing other works of art can really get your creative juices flowing.

Oil Painting Tutorial By Dan Dos Santos

About Dan:

Dan’s work spans a variety of genres, including novels, comics and film. He has worked for such clients as Disney, Universal Studios, Boeing Aircraft, Saatchi & Saatchi, Scholastic Books, Ace Books,The Greenwich Workshop, Penguin Books, Random House, Bantam Books, Tor books, UpperDeck, Wizards of the Coast, and Dark Horse Comics. Aside from freelance illustration, Dan also co-hosts a series of instructional demonstrations called ‘Art Out Loud’.

Dan has been the recipient of many awards. Most recently, he has received the 2007 Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artist, and was the Chesley Award winner for Best Paperback Cover of 2007. His illustrations have graced the #1 spot on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Visit Dan’s Site: http://www.dandossantos.com/

Step by Step Oil Painting Tutorial: “Moon Followed”

Please Click Thumbnails For Larger Views

“Secret Cove” – Step By Step Oil Painting Lesson By Mike Callahan

About Mike

Nationally recognized, award winning artist Mike Callahan is a fourth generation Nevada native who counts himself privileged to grow up in what he believes to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains near Reno, Nevada where he still lives today. While he has been painting since childhood, he has only been painting in earnest for about the last 5 or 6 years.

Says Mike, “The topography of this area is simply phenomenal; one can go from the high desert to mountainous alpine settings in less than an hour. It is this beautiful and varied landscape that ends up being the subject for a vast majority of my paintings.”

However, if you look through the paintings on Mike’s website, you will quickly see that the Sierra landscape isn’t the only subject Mike typically paints. He also enjoys painting Western themes as well as figurative and portraits.

As you look at Mike’s work, you will notice a great color harmony throughout. While the colors in his paintings run the full spectrum of color seen in nature, harmony is maintained by Mike limiting himself to only three colors plus white on his palette. Instead of referring to this as a limited palette, Mike thinks of it as an unlimited palette as he has not found any color he desires to use that he can’t create from those primary colors.

Mike’s work has been featured in numerous solo, group, and juried shows including the 54th Juried Exhibition at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, the second 100 in PaintAmerica’s 2008 Paint the Parks competition, and in May of 2008, Mike received national honors at the Oil Painters of America’s National Juried Show of Traditional Oils winning a coveted Award of Excellence for his painting “Wild Mustangs.”

Mike’s work can currently be seen firsthand at the Artistic Viewpoints Gallery in Minden, Nevada and the Truckee River Gallery in Reno.

Please click here to visit Mike’s website to view more of his work.

“Secret Cove” – Step By Step Oil Painting Lesson By Mike Callahan

Above is a shot of the Secret Cove, Lake Tahoe, Nevada. I shot this photo early on Saturday, Mar. 10, 2007.

Below is my almost that I painted this scene on. The canvas measures 24″ x 38″. To begin with, I mixed up a burnt-orang-ish color and applied it in strokes to my canvas with my palette knife just to get going. Follow along and see the progress of the rest of this painting…

1.) After applying the paint with knife as shown in the initial shot, I wetted a paper towel with Turpenoid and spread it evenly over the whole canvas. At this point, I will wipe the paint down till it’s as thin as I want it.

2.) From there, I dip a small bristle brush (about a size 2 flat) in Turpenoid as well and use it to draw with. I initially divide my canvas into thirds both horizontally and verically which aids both my composition and drawing.

3.) I dove right in and painted my sky right on top of my wet underpaint. I was sure to practice my “fat over lean” principle by mixing plenty of medium ( I use M. Graham’s Alkyd/Walnut oil mix and thin it about 50% with Turpenoid) and mix it liberally into my sky colors (making them “fat” with oil). It slides right off my brush and sticks to the “lean” under-paint.

4.) I got a late start on this painting because I had to stretch the canvas and by then it was late in the day, so I painted in the far mountains keeping them light and very blu-ish to pull off the atmospheric perspective I’m after. I mix a fair amount of sky color with the greens and browns for the small bit of the middle mountain slope and then called it a day.

5.) The next morning, I got up at 4:30 AM and painted for a little over an hour before going to my day job. I paint in the foreground trees and since my sky is now pretty dry, I mix in some of the left-over sky color around the edges of the trees where bough meets sky.

6.) Tuesday morning’s progress continues with the painting of the bank and snow. The snow which is mostly in shadow is very blue, but somewhat purple-ish in color because it is the reflection of all the ambient light but not the direct early morning sunlight (except in a couple of spots). Since the ambient light is mostly from sky and water to put it in simple terms, then the snow in the shade will be very blu-ish.

7.) Wednesday’s hour plus is spent concentrating on te reflected water in the distance. This painting posed a particular challenge for me because I had to paint reflected water as it comes forward and turns into the clear see-through water that will make this scene unmistakeably Tahoe.

8.) Thursday brings more challenges. The reflective water becomes clear, but on the left, the clarity is also a bit in shadow and reflects the trees a bit as well. I concentrate a lot on value and color to get it right and as a result, as you can see, my progress is slowed considerably.

9.) Friday’s hour is slow going too. This water, with rocks above and below it is tricky to paint so I move slowly deliberating with myself over nearly every stroke.

10.) It’s now Saturday morning and I begin to paint the clear water as it is in direct sunlight. What you see here is about an hour’s progress too. Go to the next page to see how I continued for most of the rest of the day.

11.) More rocks and sand – as the water nears the viewer, the less it reflects the sky and since Tahoe is so clear, the more sand color one sees.

12.) As I continue, I have to bear in mind that most of the rocks I’m painting are under water and therefore have a darker value, however, as they break the water’s surface, but are still wet, they take on a different value than either the part under water or the totally dry rock surface.

13.) For this hour I paint in the wet and dry rocks in the shadows of the trees. Another factor to consider is that contrast increases the nearer an object, in general. This is a little tricky to be sure.

14.) I finally near completion by painting in the ripples that are in the shallow sand area as well as the rippled surface reflections…below is the final piece.

“Secret Cove”
24″ x 38″ Oil on Canvas
SOLD!

Tips on Oil Painting – Know Your Paints

By Remi Engels

In this discussion we assume that you use a basic 6-color. The 6-color palette could consist of the following colors:

1. Lemon Yellow
2. Cadmium Yellow
3. Cadmium Red
4. Permanent Rose (Alizarin Crimson)
5. French Ultramarine Blue
6. Phthalo Blue
7. Titanium White
8. Ivory Black

You could use a no. 10 filbert.

As a beginning artist, the first exercise to try is to color eight 2″ x 2″ squares with each of the above tube colors and study the result. Try to memorize how these colors look. Use a cheap canvas or a sheet of thick drawing paper.

Lemon Yellow is, of course, yellow, but can you also see the green undertone or bias? Stare at it for a while and see if you can discern the underlying green. Do the same for:

- Cadmium Yellow (orange bias)
- Cadmium Red (orange bias)
- Permanent Rose (violet bias)
- French Ultramarine Blue (violet bias)
- Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) (green bias)

Memorize and visualize the bias of the six colors on your palette.

Next, you can color 2″ x 2″ squares with mixtures. Start with Lemon Yellow and Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) which both have a green bias. You should get a clean green. Then:

* Mix French Ultramarine Blue and Permanent Rose (both have a violet bias) which yields a clean violet.
* Mix Cadmium red with Cadmium Yellow (both have a violet bias) which yields a clean orange.

Again make an effort to remember the colors of these new mixtures.

Now you can cross mix your tube colors two at a time. For example, mix Lemon Yellow with French Ultramarine Blue. This should give you a green but because Lemon Yellow has a green bias while French Ultramarine Blue has a violet bias it will be different from the one you got before. Compare the two greens and try to remember the difference. Then:

* Mix Cadmium Yellow with Phthalo Blue (Red Shade)
* Mix Cadmium Yellow with French Ultramarine Blue

This will give you all together 4 different greens. Look at them and judge them regarding hue, value, and intensity.

You can do the same with the two blues and the two reds which will you give four different violets. Finally, repeat the process with the two yellows and the two reds which will give you four different oranges.

Next, use different amounts of Titanium White to create tints of, say, French Ultramarine Blue. Mixtures of a tube color with white are called tints. Study a number of French Ultramarine Blue tints to see how Titanium White lightens the mixture and if the tints become chalky or not.

You can also mix each of the six tube colors with black. These mixtures are called shades. And finally, you can mix any tube color with any other tube color or with blank and white (i.e., with varying degrees of grays) to get what are called tones.

What is important here is to create a habit of observing and remembering the mixtures you produce. By now, you can probably guess the potential diversity of color a 6-color palette can produce. We haven’t even added the tertiary colors, i.e., the mixtures of three colors.

Make sure you save your painted squares and that you duly record the colors involved as well as the approximate amounts of each of the colors that make up the mixture. In other words, save your color charts and study them at regular intervals.

The ultimate objective is to accumulate enough active knowledge about mixtures that you can reproduce just about any color without having to think too much.

At that point all your attention can be directed towards artistic expression. Although it is a rather tedious job, it is nevertheless a necessary one. So do a little bit of it every day.

Remi Engels, Ph.D., is a pencil portrait artist and oil painter. Samples of Remi’s work can be found at Remi’s Pencil Portraits and Remi’s Oil Paintings. You are also cordially invited to subscribe to his Free Portrait Drawing Course and his popular Art Tip Newsletter.

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