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:

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Launching Your Oil Painting Career

Oil painting is the ideal medium for the novice. It is an excellent way to study, because changes and corrections are easily made. Unwanted passages of color can be scraped off the canvas any number of times without injury to the surface.

One color can be painted over another, drawing and proportions can be corrected, and all the nuances of light and shadow can be studied experimentally. The painting can be put aside at any time, to be picked up and continued at a later date.

Some beginners choose oil without considering other media because of a reverence for the “genuine oil painting.” When they take up painting as a hobby they want to produce “pictures that show the actual brush strokes.”

Many other amateurs, who would like to work in several media but feel that their time is too limited, select oil after checking with teachers or schools or experimenting on their own. Even a person who is more interested in another medium may find, as I have, that by using oils he can more easily study color subtleties and can acquire basic knowledge that will later be applied to the medium he prefers. The old adage, “One medium helps another,” is especially true if the first one is oil.

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