Introduction to Oil Painting – Ten Sessions

Description

Oil Painting

 Introduction:

In this short video, LFAS Director Ann Witheridge introduces the scope and goals of this oil painting series, with an emphasis on the importance of sequentially building your skills. Starting from an exploration of materials, you will then move from canvas toning, to proportion, shadow, and colour. Celebrating the flexibility and possibility of the medium, this course will invite you to focus not just on how to paint, but on how to see, and how to translate that vision onto the canvas. 

Unit 1: Setting Up

In this first session, your LFAS teacher Nneka will walk you through the necessary supplies and preparation to begin your oil painting exploration. This will include an in-depth look at the different materials needed in your painting kit, including paints, turpentine, palette, tissue, brushes and canvas panel. You will also look at how to set up your home studio, how to prep your canvas, working with turpentine, what colours should be included in your initial limited palette, introductory mark-making techniques, and how to handle your brush and palette. 

Unit 2: Proportion & Composition

In this second session, you’re going to be looking at proportion, composition, how to create a relationship between your chosen objects, and approaches to setting up your still life at home. With the goal of learning how to intentionally place your object(s) of choice on the canvas, you will begin by making your anchor lines–essential first marks that will shape the proportion and scale of your image. Moving from these initial marks, you will then explore multi-object composition, adding horizon lines, gestural marks, and the importance of analyzing and editing as you work. 

Unit 3: Mass & Values – Transparent

In this third session, you will learn the essential skill of creating the shadow shape of an object, and then massing in the dark and light area. Working with high-contrast artificial light, you will begin to train your eye to see in two shapes–the light and the dark–from which you will create your shadow line, and eventually begin to mass in and unify your darks. This session will focus heavily on training your eye, and the skill of stripping back your visual world to its essential shadow shapes in order to begin correctly representing objects and light.

Unit 4: Mass & Values – Opaque

In this fourth session, you will move beyond light and dark into a 4-value exploration. Working always from your initial scaffolding–canvas toning, proportion lines, shadow edge, blocking out darks and lights–you will then go deeper into your value study, adding mid-tones, highlights, and accents. This session will focus on reducing and simplifying information while attempting to accurately and skillfully portray the essential values of light and dark in your composition.

Unit 5: Focus & Focal Points

In this fifth session, you will continue to work on your four-value study, now with a new emphasis on edges, transitions, and how to understand focal points and the creation of a focused subject. Practicing seeing exclusively in light and shadow shapes, you will explore how to describe edges with your paintbrush, working from soft edges into sharp ones and honing in on transition values. You will then explore how to use light, detail, and value contrast to build a focal point of your composition.

Unit 6: Colour in the Light

In this sixth session, you will rely on the painting skills you have built thus far as you begin to put down colour. Adding in the complex variable of colour, you will begin to consider new factors in your composition: colour harmony, how to bring your painting up together as a whole, and how to continue to center value relationships even as you explore this exciting new dimension. The session will also go into depth on colour mixing on your palette and how to begin to work towards creating accurate colour matches. 

Unit 7: Colour Harmony

In this seventh session, you will build on your exploration of colour, with an emphasis on the creation of colour harmony. Working from a warm subject, you will move from shapes and abstraction into detail, while continuing to focus on simple value patterns and a limited palette. Working methodically, you will focus first on creating average darks and lights and then building up your value range, stopping often to step back, analyze, and edit. This simplicity will actually support the creation of a more sophisticated work, and allow you to really explore how to create balance, colour, and harmony in this more detailed painting.

Unit 8: Extended Colour

In this eighth session, you will extend your use of colours even further. After methodically toning the canvas and creating your initial drawing, you will then focus your session on training your eye to catch the subtle differences in value and colour across your composition. You will reflect this understanding as you work into increased specificity in your painting: using your limited palette to colour mix with precision, learning through doing how to analyze and build each colour to accurately represent your objects, and practicing how to use colour relationships to make your colours really sing. 

Unit 9: Steps to Final Painting

In this ninth session, you will focus less on the idea of product, and more on the importance of process. Splitting your canvas into thirds, you will draw the same composition three times, each panel focusing on a different stage of the process. Your first will look at proportion, anchor lines, widths, and shadow shapes; your second will add on working in two values and blocking down the darks; and in your third you will build up the lights and increase your value range. By repeating this method and not erasing the evidence of your process, this exercise visually exemplifies the value of these steps and gives you a chance to see what repetition can reveal and inform. 

Unit 10: Modelling the Form

In this tenth and final session, you will create a more in-depth painting with a subject, composition, and focus of your choosing. This final painting is an opportunity to practice your scaffolding methods and rigorous attention to value, while also having opportunities for decision-making and to explore what it looks like to really develop a painting. Focusing on creating a variety of edges, accurate value relationships, and colour harmony, this final exercise will encourage you to explore where and how you want to push the painting, which information you want to center, and what areas of artistic growth you want to explore.

Conclusion

In this final video, LFAS Director Ann Witheridge summarizes the learning journey of this course, from materials to mark making, composition to gesture, and shadows to colour. This conclusion reiterates the value of the methodical approach–following the same set of simple steps every time you arrive at your canvas–celebrating its ability to create a stable ground from which your creativity can flourish.