This semester in art class has been so fun! I absolutely love my oil painting class- my professor is very detailed in his instruction and I feel like I have learned so much in just a couple months.
Believe it or not, with all that learning going on, we’ve done only one piece so far this semester- a black and white still life done in gray scale. Leaving out the color allowed us to focus on turning color into value (yellow is not always a really light color, brown is not always dark so you have to learn to see value in objects rather than just color) and to focus on brush techniques. Did you know that as you become a better painter, your paintings aren’t just judged by composition and layout of values, but also by the quality of your brush strokes?! Who knew!?
Anyway, here’s how I’ve progressed through this painting and what I’ve learned in the process-
Here’s a photo of the actual still life that I painted from. I know, it’s a horrible picture- but I didn’t worry about quality when it took it because I wasn’t painting from the photo, I just took it for your own reference!
First we toned our canvases a medium grey shade by mixing solvent (we use Gamsol Odorless Mineral Spirits
After your canvas dries, mix your black paint with Liquin until you get it to a very thin consistency. Outline what you’ll paint with this mixture and let it dry. You’ll paint over these lines, so don’t worry too much. My teacher says that charcoal or pencil lines will eventually work their way through the paint, so it’s better to sketch in paint so it can be covered.
When your outlines dry, you’ll drop in your basic blocks of values. As you build up the foundation of your painting it’s important to remember the principle of ‘Fat Over Lean’. Basically, you want to start with as little oil as possible and work to using more and more. The solvent has none, so when we mixed it with our paint (which has a ton) we created a very lean mixture. On the next layers you’ll add medium to your paint. You’ll use more on the first layers, and less and less as you progress through your painting. Chemically, this allows your paints to best grab hold of your canvas so your painting will not crack or peel over time. This process can be changed if necessary, for example when painting transparent objects you’ll need some lean layers in there to make it look right.
At this point, allowing the painting to dry in between steps is less important- a fact that I’m slowly learning. (I’m so used to acrylics and watercolor that dry fast!) The Wet in Wet technique allows for some great shading. Once you get your basic values into place, you’ll go into each object to further define it. This is the part where I really began to learn about brush stroke technique. Each object has a different finish, and will therefore have a different brush stroke. The shiny bowl will have longer strokes, the pear will have small dabs etc. Try not to just brush all along the outside of the object, instead create contour lines with your strokes, allowing them to wrap around your object.
The best explanation on brushstrokes that I’ve heard is my teacher showing us how to paint a lemon. He mixed 10 different shades of gray on his palette. Then, holding his brush with all his whole hand (fingers around the brush, thumb facing up- like the hand hold you’d use to pull down the cord on your blinds), he looked at the lemon, got a shade of gray and made one stroke on the canvas. He then studied the lemon, found the next color he needed on his palette and make one stroke. And on and on, never mixing any paint on the canvas itself. This example is extreme, but is a great learning technique. I’ve never been able to make those beautiful, Impressionist like brush strokes but as soon as he showed me this technique I was cured!
And you just go on and on, filling in values.
All along the way, most of your paint can be wet. The time when it is important for things to be completely dry is when you do a glaze. A glaze is made with black (well, black for this painting anyway) mixed with your medium. The lighter you want the glaze, the more medium you can add. It can be used in lots of ways. For one, if you painted something and LOVE it except it’s just a little too light, let it dry and brush over a glaze to darken it up. It can add shadows to transparent objects. Or is can give an object texture. I did all three of those things between these two photos. Notice that my grapes got more shaped and defined, the bottle started getting dimension, and the copper pot got a scummy coating. All glazing!
Because your painting has to be completely dry to glaze, I got in the habit of planning out all my glazes first thing when I sat down. I did them all before I began to paint- you can paint into a wet glaze, but you can’t glaze over wet paint.
As you work on your painting, it’s great to turn around and look at it through a hand mirror. The backwards image gives you fresh eyes so you can see your mistakes, particularly perspective and value errors. I changed that stinking shiny cup a million times with that mirror!
If you wait for your painting to be dry before you add your highlights, you can just wipe them off if you make a mistake!
And, finally, DONE! I’m really excited for our next assignment when we get to put all this knowledge into a color painting!