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Jan 20, 2024 · In this guide, we'll cover the basics of oil painting, including essential supplies and materials, step-by-step techniques, and expert tips to help you create stunning, expressive oil paintings. From preparing your canvas to mixing colors and applying different brush strokes, we'll walk you through each stage of the painting process.
- Glazing
- Wet-On-Wet
- Blending
- Scumbling
- Impasto
- Dry Brushing
- Underpainting
- Imprimatura
- Blocking in
- Chiaroscuro
Glazing is the technique where you apply a thin layer of translucent paint over a dried surface. This helps create subtle shifts in hues, add depth to shadows, and refine details in your oil painting. For this oil painting technique, mix paint with an oil medium and apply thin layers of (translucent oil paint) over the first layer of paint that has...
Wet-on-wet oil painting, also called Alla Prima, is an oil painting technique where the painting is done in layers of paint without waiting for the previous layer to dry. Alla Prima is Italian for ‘all at once’, which describes the technique perfectly. It is a direct oil painting style, and instead of finishing an oil painting in months, you could ...
Blendingis when you use soft strokes with your brush to blend two colors together on the canvas instead of using pre-mixed transition tones from your palette. This is a more common oil painting technique and is pretty straightforward. All you need is a soft brush to execute this painting technique. The best thing about oil paint is that it dries ve...
Scumblingrequires applying paint with a stiff, dry brush straight from the tube. This will create texture as you paint. In this technique, you use a relatively dry stiff brush without any medium to paint on a layer of your painting with a soft hand and expose parts of the previous layer. The stiff brush would pull some of the paint from the opaque ...
Impasto is one of the more impressionistic oil painting techniques, where brush strokes are left visible for added oil paint texture. You’ll need a medium to thicken your oil paint, and a palette knife or a stiff brush to make an impasto painting. The thick paint, mixed with the medium, is applied directly on the canvas with either a knife or a ver...
You’ll need some dry brushes and paper towels for this painting technique. There is no need for mediums like linseed oil to thin the paints – we want the raw paint only when dry brushing. Apply the paint directly from the tube or after mixing your colors with a palette knife. Then use a paper towel to remove the excess paint from your brush. Start ...
Underpainting lets you focus on your work’s tonal depth and value before adding in the paint colors. For this reason, it’s considered one of the essential oil painting techniques for beginners to start with. All you need to execute this technique is some solvent and earthy tones of oil paint. Paint a base layer of an earthy tone using a ton of solv...
In this technique, you paint the whole painting surface with a thin layer of paint mixed with a solvent to establish a mid-tone. Imprimatura and underpainting are the two oil painting techniques where the canvas is first tinted. After the first base layer has been painted with thin paint, you can start applying thicker paint and create multiple lay...
With the blocking in technique, you will block out the entire canvas with paint in rough shapes. Study your reference and decide what the basic shapes are that make up the composition. Then add those shapes roughly onto the canvas in the colors you think would fit. This will all be done in one tone. Use enough paint so that no white gessofrom your ...
The word Chiaroscuromeans ‘light-dark’ in Italian. It’s used to create noticeable contrast in paintings. Most paintings done with this technique use a one-light focus to create drama with a strong contrast between light and dark tones. Many artists use this technique to paint dramatic portraits. The trick is all in how you develop the contrast in y...
- Oil painting for beginners: Supplies. Getting good quality materials will make a huge difference to your painting experience. It’ll make the process so much more enjoyable and your finished pieces will look a lot better too!
- Follow the most important rule… Oil painting involves layering paint on a surface—there is an order to the way paint is layered. Oil painters build paint layers according to the fat over lean rule.
- Keep your materials clean. Trust me—it’s better to just clean brushes and other materials as you go. When the paint dries, it’s much more difficult to clean from your materials.
- You don’t have to use solvent for oil painting. The idea of using solvent puts a lot of people off learning to oil paint. This is understandable—breathing in solvent is bad for your health.
- Glazing. Glazing involves painting a thin layer of transparent or semi-transparent paint onto a surface. In doing this, each subsequent layer changes the appearance of the color below and results in a multifaceted hue.
- Underpainting. When painting, there are few things more daunting than a totally blank page or canvas. Underpainting solves this issue by being the first layer of paint applied to a work surface.
- Wet on Wet. There is a lot of waiting time in painting. To apply a new layer of pigment, you must stand idly by while the previous coat of paint is left to completely dry.
- Palette Knife. The palette knife is often used to mix paint, but consider using it as a way to apply pigment to your canvas. Depending on the shape of the trowel, you can create textural strokes that you couldn’t duplicate by brush alone.
- Jonathan Hardesty
- Hold the paintbrush correctly. There are many ways that an artist can grip the paintbrush when painting, but there's one 'go-to' method that every artist should know to get the most fluidity and sensitivity from each stroke.
- Master your brush orientation. When you're painting, it can be very easy to forget that your brush has two sides or orientations. There's no need to limit yourself to always making wide strokes using the flat side of your brush.
- Vary the amount of pressure. Avoid using 'heavy hands' on your paintbrush. Sometimes the amount of pressure that you apply to a stroke can make the difference between perfection and a mess.
- Harness the power of the painting medium. Oil painting isn't only about the paint. An essential part of controlling paint comes down to your use of a painting medium – typically a mixture of solvent and oil used to modify the paint and make it behave in different ways.
12 Oil Painting Techniques. There are 12 main oil painting techniques, each of which can form the basis of an artist’s oil painting practice. Use multiple oil painting techniques in conjunction with one another to achieve a particular effect. For example, to paint realism, you may want to use a combination of glazing and blending.
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Apr 29, 2021 · This is a guide to oil painting for beginners, where we list the essentials, such as the right paints, brushes and canvas, and suggest some useful additional extras to help you begin an exciting journey as an oil painter. If you’re curious about oil painting and want to know what you need to get started, this is for you.
