Exploring Oil Painting for the Serious Beginner
Learn how to create a realistic oil painting of an egg on cloth, from start to finish. This course covers color mixing, texture replication, palette management, and more. Perfect for beginners or those looking to enhance their oil painting skills. Join now and enjoy the journey!
What you’ll learn
- How to copy a simple, realistic image from a photo onto a canvas in oil paint.
- How to accurately mix colors for this specific class.
- How to paint in oils to replicate certain textures: the soft, folded cloth and the hard, matte eggshell, both with a strong light source and high contrast.
- How to manage palette space and maintain cleanliness for a frustration-free and low-toxicity oil painting experience.
- How to set-up, clean and care for oil painting supplies.
In this course, we will work from start to finish to create a beautiful, realistic oil painting of an egg on bright red cloth. We will begin by prepping our work area, talking about materials and how to use them, discussing a positive mindset and drawing our image in pencil.
Next, we will mix all our colors for accuracy to match our photographic image and discuss having a good quantity to last between painting sessions, which may be up to a week or more apart. Then we will put our first layers of oil paint on, starting with the background, then moving onto the egg. We will apply the paint on the background in a rudimentary way, then go back and refine and blend the colors. We will do the same with the egg.
From here, we will break for several days to a week or more…as long as it takes for our first layer to completely dry. Then we will apply our second layer for increased opacity and richness of color, as well as a new opportunity to blend and adjust colors, textures and edges as we see fit. Finally, we will make finishing touches, sign our paintings and enjoy the feeling of having new knowledge and experience with this incredibly versatile medium.
Specific skills you will gain in this class are how to:
mix colors to match the colors in a realistic reference
mix enough paint so that you’re less likely to run out
manage your palette space for cleanliness and control to limit frustration
create an effective underpainting
layer over your underpainting for richness, opacity and texture
apply paint for different textures
layer oil for richness and texture
create different shadows and highlights
identify different shadows and highlights as they fall on a three-dimensional object
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. Enjoy!
Who this course is for:
- Beginning oil painters who have never painted before and want to learn good habits and effective techniques from the very beginning.
- People who have dabbled in oil paint but become frustrated, and want some concrete tools and techniques to improve their experience and enhance their knowledge.
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