Archive for the ‘Basic Oil Painting Tips’ Category

I’m working on a new orange still life at the moment. Again this is on home-made board and uses the following palette: Titanium white, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue. The first stage was to roughly paint the outline of the orange halves with yellow ochre and Sansodor. [...]

I’ve got two still life’s in progress at the moment, one with red apples and one with lemons. Each painting has had two passes so far, the first was just to establish positions on the canvas and get the canvas covered in thin paint. After this layer had dried a bit I went over them [...]

I eventually got round to finishing off the loaf painting. I decided I didn’t need to do any more to the loaf itself, so I added the knife in the foreground, made the table recede into the background and added a blue glaze to the left hand side to show some cool light entering the [...]

Still life oil painting of three oranges. Box canvas 12 x 16 inches with sides painted. I started with a green-toned canvas which gives this a slightly cool feel as I let some of the colour come through in the background here and there. I have tried to keep more colour than usual in the [...]

Beer and sweets might seem like an odd combination for a still life painting but despite the obvious differences they have quite a few things in common too. Sugar, health, addictive qualities… I am not going to list them all however, thats what I want the viewer to think about! Overall this one was quite [...]

As promised here is the Monet copy I did a while back. The original is entitled “Bridge at Argenteuil” Doing this was a great challenge but also a very enlightening process. I learned pretty much what colours he would have used and how he applied the paint in short thick strokes. Colour mixing was fairly straightforward with simple [...]

I decided to try a blue background which is fairly unusual for a still life but the slightly ‘orangey’ copper lustre cup complements it well. I started off with a little turps for a change and got the paint to flow. I used Cobalt Blue for the background but added the warmer Ultramarine Blue (and [...]

Still life oil painting of strawberries, oil on board, 6 x 6 inches. I thought I would have a go at creating my own surface to paint on. You can paint on all sorts of surfaces from canvas to copper as long as its well primed to take the paint. In this case I have [...]

It used to be considered standard practise for artists to learn from the preceding generations of masters. Many famous artists have sat in galleries and copied the works of great artists before them. It is a great learning process to scrutinise the colours and brushstrokes, shapes and forms and try to understand what makes these [...]

This is the second of three paintings I promised using the Braeburn apples. For this one I decided to use direct bold brush strokes that emphasise the form of the apples. I found I had to think more about each stroke before putting it down to make sure it would look ok. I didn’t want [...]