Oil Painting Lessons – Tips on Color Mixing and Theory
When I first began painting some 10 years ago, I recall how intimidating it all seemed. With all of the various colors, mediums, brushes and other tools available, it was enough to make my head spin.
How do I make a color lighter or darker? What about making realistic shadows or highlights? This article will shed some colorful light on the situation, and with practice, working with color in your oil paintings will become easier and more enjoyable.
Thank God for the beautiful Sun, for without it, we would not see color. Everything would appear dark and colorless.
Launching Your Oil Painting Career
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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