Introduction to Oil Painting: Part 1: Still Life

1. Who Are You?: Hi, My name is Stephanie and welcome to Introduction to Oil painting. I am so excited that you guys are here. One of my main goals with this class is to de mystify oil painting and make it inaccessible Hobby for everyone. And no oil painting can be a little bit of an expensive medium to start out in. So I have compiled a list of materials so you can get started and complete this course for under $40. I started oil painting when I was quite young, about 11 or 12 years old. I loved art in all forms. I didnt really take well to acrylics because the medium just drive too fast for me. Watercolor felt counterintuitive personally to me. I greatly admire paintings done in both mediums. But oil's just kind of fit well with me. Uh, that doesn't mean that I had any idea what I was doing. Oil paintings was always a very mysterious process, made a little bit more daunting by the fact that it's been around for thousands of years. This is what great masters were using, and I immediately expected to be able to produce that level of artwork. And when I was unable Teoh. I was upset and kind of put off by, however, that didn't stop me from always returning to the medium being in the curious about it, I purchased books. I watched videos. However, there was still an element of mystery about oil painting that I couldn't quite grasp. This all cleared up for me when I took a landscape painting as part of my master's degree, and suddenly everything kind of came into focus. It's took still took me a little bit of practice to get where I am today. In my painting, however, I hope to try to clarify oil painting for you. So that way you can get started on your very own oil painting journey. In this course, I will go over a list of materials that you will need to get started oil painting for only $40 or less. I will also go through extra materials that you made which to buy. Should you want to make oil painting a more permanent hobby, I will go over some basic value and color theory. I will also go into some basic mixing and painting techniques, and then we will dive right in and finished a five by seven Still life of your own creation . Let's get started 2. Materials: Let's talk about materials. The thing to meet for oil painting can get quite expensive, so I've narrowed down the list to bare essentials to make starting a hobby more affordable . This list is great for those who are unsure if they'll like oil painting or want to give it a try but may not make it a permanent hottie. You will need four colors of paint to get started. Oil painting, titanium white, cadmium, yellow, Eliza ran crimson and ultra marine blue, also called French Ultra Marine. You'll notice that I did not mention black as an essential color. The reason for this is that it's very, very easy to make your own black. Ultra marine blue and Eliza in crimson are very dark colors, and when mixed, make a purple so deep that it looks black, which is my preference of use a black and also be achieved by mixing other colors together . In addition, mixing your own black and often produce a more interesting look on the canvas, then a pre made black, and we'll give you a deeper, richer and result. If you want to experiment with the purchase, black, by all means, go for it but I'm very strongly urge you to play around with making your own blacks. I recommend going with the larger 200 milliliters tube for titanium white. Since tinting or lightning your colors is something you will do very often the rest of the colors, I recommend buying in a 37 millimeter size, since a large quantity really isn't necessary unless oil painting to something you do extremely often. The cheapest place I have found upto by Paints Online is dick blick dot com. You can buy a 200 millimeter titanium white for 11 39 and all the other colors for 3 99 I personally like the brand Windsor and Newton, but there are many other good brands out there. You can also buy an artist's loft 12 piece set for Michael's for only 4 99 It will come with May more colors than you actually need, and we'll let you experiment with having a more diverse palates. However, the tubes are quite small. Next, let's talk about brushes. You really only need one or two brushes for this class. My most used brush is a flat number eight flat refers to the shape of the brush itself and the number reversed with size brushes could be really complicated, but I'm going to try to make it a simple as possible. When I started oil painting, I was recommended these very stiff bristled brushes. They are really great brushes and create some very lovely texture, but I had a very hard time controlling them in getting to them to do what I wanted. I had to press down very hard to get thicker lines, and this was very difficult for me since I am very light handed. I also realized that while I can appreciate texture in art, I tend to like my own pieces to be a bit smoother. I wanted a more pliable brush. I went to the store and found a bendy soft brush for brushes. I would recommend going to an actual art store and handling both types of brushes before making a decision, testing it against your palm or some other surface and seeing what feels comfortable to you for the brush shape, I would recommend starting with a flats or a filbert, a flat brushes exactly that flat on top. This makes it very versatile for blocking in larger shapes but also doing very detailed work when only using the tip. Filbert brushes are often described as a cat's tongue, as it is long and rounded. End is also an extremely versatile brush. I really love the brand Princeton and on dick blick dot com. They have Princeton real value brush sets, which give you between 3 to 5 brushes and range from $2.21 to $10. Ascent of three camel brushes for $2.21 is a great bargain. You also don't need real pricey brushes. If you care for your brushes properly, they should last a very long time. Next, you will need odorless mineral spirits. I strongly recommend going to Home Depot instead of an art store to buy. This Home Depot carries in one port can for 8 28 and you will easily pay twice that if you go to an art store next, you will need canvas. We will be working on canvas panels, which is just canvas on a stiff board. This is usually an easier option for beginners, says it doesn't have the spring genus of a traditional stretch campus, but feel free to go for that option, too. If you want, you could buy a five pack of five by seven canvas boards and Michael's for 3 99 or single boards from dick blick dot com for 86 cents each. Lastly, you will need a pallet. He was a super easy way to create your own. Find a local goodwill or other cheap thrift store. Buy an eight by 10 picture frame for $2 at home, disassembled the frame until you up on lee the glass left. Put a white sheet of paper on the back and take all around the edges, and you now have a quick and cheap palette. Make sure to take all of the edges up as the glass could potentially cut you, though now I will discuss some extra materials you may want to invest in. If you want to carry your hobby more, feel free to skip this section. If you're not ready to invest more into your painting, yet, you can always return to it later. The first thing I'm going to talk about his extra painting colors as you grow and learn as an artist, your problem will grow and evolve to be what's right for you. You may find that you don't use a particular color very much, so you can remove it from your palate, and you may find that you having trouble mixing a particular color, so buying it may be helpful as you learn more about it. Either way, here's a quick run through of my complete colors. I typically have worms and cools of each color. My main colors are French, ultra Marine, a lizard, crimson cadmium, lemon, cadmium, orange yellow, Oakar, Terra Rosa, cadmium red, medium already, and you sap green and burnt sienna as well as, of course, titanium boy. Next is a good palate night. I have to a larger one that I don't really use anymore because I switched pallets and it's kind of cumbersome and a smaller one that is quite effective for the glass palette. Now using palette knives are very diverse tools. However, I primarily use them to mix colors with, but you can also paint with them. I also find that when story pains, the outside of the pain will drive. There will still be wet paint inside, and this handy little tool is great for piercing the dry paint skin and accessing the usable paint below it. Liquid is a favorite tool of mine. Liquid is a jelly like material that is used to thin paint. You can also use odorless mineral spirits the same effect, which is why I didn't mention this as a necessary item. However, using mineral spirits that then you're pains can sometimes in the pigment as well. Liquid, then, is the pain, while keeping the richness of color. As an added bonus, liquid has a drying property in it. So instead of waiting weeks for your painting to dry, you only have to wait a few days if even that when I'm working, mixing my paints, I often like to use both liquid and mineral spirits within my paints. Next is an easel, and easel is a great tool to invest in. If you want to make your painting habit consistent, however, a good easel isn't cheap, but that doesn't mean that you can't start out with one. When I took my landscape painting class, I had to go on location to paint, so I decided to get a very cheap easel at Wal Mart for about $25. It was lightweight, very easy to set up, and it made location painting much easier. And it's still one of my great favorites. Tools to use. Another useful item is masters brush cleaner. This is not necessary item because you can clean your brushes with plain incentive dish up or incentive hands up. But I've just gotten addicted to this product, so I keep buying it. Extra jars are always a good idea to have to store new and old mineral spirits. You don't need anything fancy, and I just used old clean jars from preserves or jams that I've just cleaned out from my kitchen. They are also useful to keep your brushes in, as you want to keep the brushes bristle up to preserve them when you're not using them. Lastly, you may want to buy some heavy duty paper towels or a bag of rags. I like the blue heavy duty paper towels that you could find at Home Depot because they are very useful when Tony my canvas and they don't shed like normal paper towels Bill and that should be it for materials. Let's move on 3. Safety: in this video, I'd like to quickly address safety concerns. A lot of the safety concerns surrounding oil painting tend to be mostly rumors rather than fact, but it should still be addressed nonetheless. The first thing I'd like to talk about are the words cadmium and cobalt. Both of these words refer to types of metals that are added to the paint, and both are toxic. However, the only way to really get toxic poisoning from either of these metals is to inhale it when it's in powder form. If you'd like to take extra precautions, you can always avoid pains with these names in the title of the color. Or you can always paint with gloves. Despite its name, odorless mineral spirits does have a very slight odor. Odorless Monroe Spirits takes the place of Turpin time, which can also be used as a solvent to paint with. It has always recommended that you paint with a air purifier or an open window. Next, I'd like to talk about the container that you hold your odorless mental spirits in. It is recommended that you keep them in glass or in some kind of metal cup. The reason for This is because any kind of plastic will get chewed through by the mineral spirits. I recommend using any kind of leftover jars from your kitchen or any kind of left over can , such as from canned tomatoes or canned preserves. I would also urge you, Teoh, make sure that you keep your mineral spirits in some kind of identifiable container. If you are like me, you like to have some kind of beverage while you're painting. And a mouthful of turpentine is not the best thing in the world, and that should be all for safety. Let's move on. 4. Value and Color: this is going to be a very quick touch on value and color. There are other really great classes on color theory on skill share. If you want a ward in depth lesson, what is value value is the lightness or darkness of a color. You can also think of it as gray scale. What would this image look like? We're in shades of gray. This is an important question because you could help direct viewers. ID's in value. One of the main ways to create a focal point in your painting is to use high contrast, meaning opposite values close together. If you have a painting with a lot of grey shades, they're very similar to each other. You're painting will lack interest, and perhaps that's the goal. However, at the majority of painting, you will most likely want a focal point if you have a lot of similar shades of gray, and then one area with a dark black and a pure way suddenly that one area has a lot of contrast will draw attention. This is what we want to accomplish by controlling your values. Values can also be useful in showing deck, for example, the closer something is the dark of the value usually is. If something is much further way distant mountains in a landscape, for example, then the values will usually be very light. Because of the atmosphere between here and there, values have also become much easier to see with the smartphone. A little cheating tip. If you're having trouble seeing values than just turn your camera on their phone to black and white, next is the color wheel. This is a very important thing to get to know and to play with when starting out painting. Mixing random colors is a really good total learn, especially because many times pigments mixed differently than you think it would. For example, mixing black and yellow will often produce a greenish color and not a dark yellow playing around the color wheel. And how colors mix is really good to know. But here are some very quick fundamentals. Warm colors on the wheel include red, orange and yellow. Cool colors are green, blue and violet. However, all colors have a warm and cool version. Mixing colors with white is called a tints and often results in pastel colors, mixing colors with black. It's called shade and usually creates a darker and Richard version of that color. Mixing colors with gray or black and white is called its home and usually results in a more de saturated version of a color. Mixing two opposite colors on the wheel, like red and green will create a neutral color, often brownish appearance. This can create some really lovely earth tones. If you're planning on creating a landscape, you may want to play with mixing different colors to see what they do. You will almost never want to paint with colors straight out of the tube, so playing around with mixing colors is a very good practice. Having a color palette in mind is also useful when approaching. Painting using every color on the color wheel can sometimes create a jumbled or overbearing painting. Choosing a color palette could help harmonize your colors and create focus. An analogous palette consists of colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel. These colors often automatically harmonized because they share a common color. For example, if you choose to create a painting with orange, yellow and green, the colors will automatically harmonize because yellow is present in all three colors. A complementary palate is also popular as the complementary colors caused contrast in the viewer. In complementary pallets, one color is usually dominant and it's used in 90% of the image, while the complementary color is then applied in small amounts, and this causes it to be more focus. There are many other limited color palettes available that these two are great to start with. A limited color palette is very useful to draw interest and create harmonious paintings. As always, practice is the best way to learn, and now that we've got that out of the way, it's time to set up our workstation. 5. Mixing Colors: in this video, I'm going to show you how to mix some colors on my palette. I already have some titanium white Eliza in crimson and French ultra Marine, and I've just squeezed out some cadmium yellow. What you see is a decent amount of paint to get you started with. You will probably need a lot of white, so I usually put more than I actually need on my palette. It is a good idea to squeeze out more than you need and mix more colors than you actually need. That way, you don't have to run out of color and worry about re mixing and matching the same color. I also like to reuse some colors that I've already mixed so I could get some extra color harmony. I'll explain more about this later. Here you can see me Mixing yellow into red red is a very strong color, so only quite a bit more yellow to create a nice even orange. Always make sure to keep your palette knife nice and clean When mixing colors here, you can see me using the wrong side of the color in order to add a new splotch by using the wrong side. I have inherently picked up a little bit of red and I don't want that one trying to mix a green. However, this is a color that I will use later to create a neutral color to tone or canvas with. Here you can see me mixing a green from yellow and blue. I'm using very, very little blue, since it is an extremely strong color, much stronger than red. If you mix too much blue in too quickly, you can get a very dark color. In this demonstration, I only mixed a very, very little amount, so it ends up being more of a yellow green than a true green. But I kind of like it like that. Feel free to experiments if you want to add a more darker or deeper green color. Now I am creating my black by adding red into blue. This creates a color that is really dark purple. However, it looks black on canvas and it looks black on screen. You do want to be careful when you're lightning this black because it will show up as slightly purple. I don't mind this. I actually tend to like this as it adds more visual interest into my colors. But if you don't like it, feel free to try mixing a black using different colors. There are many different ways to make your own black. Here I will add a little bit of white to this purple mixture. That way you can see what it looks like when it's like end up. I have just finished adding a little bit of white to each color to show you how you content each color to make a more pastel version. Now I am mixing red with green to show you what happens when you mix complementary colors together. I didn't mix too much of these pains together. However, you can see that they create a lovely rust earth tone. Mixing any complementary color in the right proportions will most likely end with a deep, rich, earthy color that makes for really great landscape paintings. Lastly, I will be making a color to tone our canvas with. I start out by adding a little bit of yellow to black, and I create this rich, dark brown color. It's a little bit too dark for me to tone a canvas with, so I take a little bit of that color and put it to the side, and I'm adding much more of this slightly orange yellow mixture to it. And then, after I create a shade that I like, I'm gonna lighten it just a tad bit with a little bit of white. When we're done, we're gonna use this final color to tone our canvas. - Now let's tone our canvas. Toning are can. This is a great tool because it gets rid of the white canvas. So if you mix a spot when you're painting, you don't have to worry about this stark white canvas showing through. In addition, it also helps get over the fear of a blank canvas. I am starting with a little bit of liquid and mixing it to the color that we have premixed before using our mean four colors, I am using liquid to thin the paint. When I'm going through this process, I tend to like to use both liquid and some mineral spirits. If you don't have liquid, you didn't purchase it in your initial supplies. It's fine. You could also just use mineral spirits too thin. Your paints. One of the main techniques that you will use when using oil pains is painting what's called fat over lean. What this basically means is you will use thin paints to begin with and slowly build up thicker paints. The reason for this is that dinner paints dry faster and you don't want to layer a thin paint over a thick paint because then it could cause you your paints to crack when it dries . It can just create all kinds of problems in addition than our pains will have a much harder time attaching to the thicker paints. Here you can see me wiping in the paints. I have applied quite a bit of pain, just kind of randomly scratching it in with my paintbrush. And I have taken a blue paper towel, one of the thicker, heavier duty paper towels, And I'm just rubbing the paint in all over and creating a nice even tone. And now we have a toned canvas. You don't always have to use this yellow tone if you don't want to. You can also use a blue or an orange color. I tend to use warmer colors. I have toned here one yellow ochre and one cadmium orange tone. You really Cantona canvas in whatever colors you want 6. Setting up for the Project: in this video, I'm gonna talk about setting up your composition. What I really want you to do is walk around your house and find items that are of sentimental value to you. Then I want you to experiment with setting it up in different ways. Find a way that's really eye catching and sets up the items so that some of the darks and light tones are close together to create a focal point. As you can see, I've chosen my teapot and I've set it up with a bunch of different backgrounds and also in different positions. In the end, I like this position with the cup using the intense ALS slightly in front of the teapot with the rose at an angle. In front of that, I also really quickly want to talk about the painting technique that we will be using. It is called fat over lean, and basically what this means is that we will use the thicker paints containing more oils towards the end of our painting. The beginning layers. We want to dry faster, so we want to use thin or paints with less oil in it, which means paints that are thin down using liquid or other solvents such as odorless mineral spirits. Then, as we continue, painting will use less of these mediums to dull our paints and paint and thicker layers on top. The reason why we do this is because if we put a thin layer on top of a thick layer, it will cause the paint to crack, as it will not dry successively. 7. Final Painting: in this video, I'm going to show you how I go about my painting. It sped up quite a bit, so you don't have to sit here for an hour and 1/2. But I will explain all of my processes. I start out by using an at yellow ochre color, which is the same color I used to tone the canvas. I have been down the paint, so it's got quite a bit of ink like consistency. You want to keep your paint very thin wall sketching in your forms, but not thin enough so that it drips. If it drips, simply wipe the paint off the canvas and add a little bit more color to your mixture. You can thin the paints using mineral spirits or by using liquid or both. As you can see when I make a mistake, I simply wipe it off with some paper towels. I am also not exactly following my reference image completely. I'm kind of winging it and deciding where I want things to go on the fly. I'm using my reference image more as inspiration rather than a literal depiction of what I want to paint. As you can see, I've also drawn in the handle and disliked where it was, so I redrew it, but I didn't wipe away the paint. This is because it's very easy to cover up at this layer. Now I am going in with the first passive color. I have decided that I want the back harder to be a kind of light yellow color. I still have my paints, then down quite a bit, but thicker than the original sketch layer. I do this so that I can cover up previous mistakes but still have the ability to paint over it later. Here I have mixed the color for the table. I have decided that I didn't quite like the color. I wanted it to be a little bit more de saturated, so all I did was simply wiped the color off and start again. This is very easy to dio, and oil paint is very forgiving because you could do this at any stage of the painting process. You just wipe off the mistake or whatever you don't like and try again. I have d saturated the color a little bit more. It's still not quite to my liking, but it's almost there. I know that later in the process, I can simply layer some more de saturated paint on top, and it will come to be what I want it to be. So don't get too hung up. If you can't mix exact color you want can always try again later, - I apologize for the slight jump in the video. Apparently, my cameras decided to stop recording. What you missed was me painting in the forms of the pots and of the container, which holds my bamboo sticks. But I simply just continued what I did before. For my teapot, I simply used a thin down version off the black. As you can see, it shows up as purple, which is completely fine with me. If you want to use a thin down version off black, but you don't want it to look purple again, feel free to buy your own black or try mixing a black. Using different colors for the cup, I decided to mix a little bit of the color of the wall in the background with the color of the table. By doing this, I can create the color I want while creating some consistent color harmonies since the colors are present in each other. - At this point, I am going back over the wall because I decided that I want a slight vignette to it. Basically, all I did was I took the color that I used for the cup and I am painting around the edges. I am painting using a slightly thicker paint so it will stay. Now. What you see me doing here is I'm kind of blending the colors. You want a clean brush to do this? So after every stroke, I am wiping it off on the towel. I apologize. Also, for some of the inconsistencies in the lighting, I realized it was a little bit too bright and as the painting video goes on, it gets a little bit darker. Unfortunately, I am using natural light, which is recommended so that you can view your colors. But it has the added problem of changing. Natural light tends to change every three hours, so you will see some clouds go in and out of the video. I am very sorry for this. Now you can see me painting in the final color of the table. I'm actually using a much thicker paint in this because I don't expect to add any more details on top. I want the main focus of the painting to be the teapot, so I am making the table quite lacking in detail. However, I am using this as an opportunity to flesh out my forms. I noticed that the bottom of the cup wasn't as round as I wanted it to be, so I used the paint to define where the end of the cup waas. The only addition I am making is to add a little bit of shadows on top of the table. This adds a little bit of depth to the image. Here I am adding in the final colors for the teapot. As you can see, I am not just filling in the entire painting. I am choosing to Onley fill in certain parts. I do this because I know that I want to add some highlights in, and I don't want to have to use thick paint on top of thick beat. The reason for this is while it is possible, you will have to add a brushstroke, then wipe off your brush and add more paint onto your brush and it becomes a very slow and tedious process. The reason for this is it becomes very hard to put on brushstrokes without getting some of the inherent color onto your brush. By wiping off your brush every time you use it, you avoid mixing the colors on the can miss and causing a money color to happen. Another way of avoiding this is doing what I am doing and selectively putting down color here. As you can see, I decided that I don't like this part of the bottom of the teapot. I think it's not rounded enough for my tastes, so I simply wipe off a little bit of the paint and repaint it. Here I am adding in a little bit of detail to the cup. I'm still using thin down pain. At this point, however, each layer that I put down is a little bit thicker than the last, so I'm using a little bit less liquid at odorless mineral spirits each time for the rose. I just kind of wing it. I don't have any real reference since that Rose in my picture is actually a dead rose that I kept because it just still smells so good. So I want this roast look fresh and lively, so I'm just adding some very, very light shadows and highlights to it. The very last thing I do is add some highlights to the teapot and some detail. I add the highlights in selectively letting some of my edges blur so that the viewer can use their imagination to fill in the details. While I am doing this, I am using a paintbrush that is loaded to the top with paint. This is because I am painting on top of very thick paint already, between each brushstroke, I wipe off the brush and I start new. This is because since the paint on the canvas is quite thick, the paintbrush will naturally pick up some of the underlying colors. I am using very different colors, using a gold for the detail ing and black underneath, so I obviously do not want those colors to mix. This will money the canvas and create some soft edges where I really want some hard detail . Therefore, what I need to do is load up my paintbrush with a lot of paint and then wipe it off every time I put a stroke down, and that is the end of this video. I hope you've learned a lot, and I look forward to seeing your paintings. 8. Cleaning Up: in this video, I'm gonna show you how to take care of your brushes so they last you a long time. I started out by, typically just getting my brush nice. And what a word of caution. You do not want to use hot water. Hot water will dissolve the glue in the feral with the metal part of the brush and will cause even the most expensive rushes to come apart. I usually use a cool toe, lukewarm water. Next, all I do is swirl the brush into the masters brush cleaner. Once I have gotten a decent amount of brush cleaner onto the brush, I get a little bit of water onto it, and then I swirl it around in my palm. When I do this, I can see the paint becoming loose and coming off of the brush. I then rinse and repeats. Once I think I've gotten a decent amount of paint off of my brushes. I grab a blue paper towel and I squeeze the paintbrush. If no paint comes on the bristles great, However, we also want to keep an eye on the feral, which is the metal part of the brush. If you put your fingers over the paper towel right over the barrel and squeeze and kind of wiggle a little bit. You'll see that sometimes paint could get stuck in there, in which case we need to continue cleaning and hold your brush at a downward angle so that the water can really get in there. You basically just want to continue in this fashion until all of the paint has been removed from your brush. Lastly, to keep your brush nice and conditioned, I use hair conditioner. Yep, you don't need any sort of fancy conditioner. I literally used the exact same conditioner I use for my own hair. This will condition the brush and keep it nice and like new for a very long time. I use a very little amount of conditioner, just kind of reshaping the brush. And then it's good to go When storing your brushes, you want to keep the brush tip up to preserve its shape. In addition, one painting you do not ever want to leave your brushes laying in any kind of liquid. Keeping the brush tip in a liquid will not only ruin its shape, but it will make it harder to clean and eventually wear out much faster 9. Final Thoughts: Hi, everyone. If you're watching this video, that means you've completed my course. Congratulations. I am so proud of you. And I am so excited to be seeing what you have been working on this entire time. I hope you've come out with a lot of new knowledge and a new hobby that you love. One of the great things about oil painting is that it's such a forgiving medium that you can continue to work on one piece, continue to edit. You can wipe away part that you made a mistake on a try again. It's one of the really great things about oil painting, and I really hope you continue to oil paint and continue to improve. And I hated it when Mom said it. But practice makes perfect. I am still learning, and I really hope that you want to continue your journey and share it with me finishing thoughts. I am currently working on a second still share class where I will teach you how Teoh create a mythological seen based on a character you love. Using reference pictures that you shoot yourself, I really hope you keep an eye out and plan to join me for it. In addition, if you want to keep in touch, I am always available through my website and through my YouTube. Please subscribe for some additional inspiration. I am hosting digital speed paintings as well as oils on my YouTube. I also have a playlist of some other artists that I greatly admire that you could also watch for some inspiration. I am so excited to see what you have been working on, and I hope to see you soon by.