Oil Painting Using Only THREE Colors ❤️💛💙

Today's video is brought to you by Squarespace. Stay tuned until the end for a special offer. Hello dear friends and happy new year! Hope you're all enjoying your holiday breaks so far. I have just returned from my own holiday travels about two days ago. My partner and I were gone for almost three weeks scuba diving in Belize and Honduras. And while I'm always so grateful and appreciative especially to be able to scuba dive and marvel at the world's beautiful coral reefs while they're still here, I definitely felt homesick and artsick after probably like 10 days. I just couldn't wait to get back into painting and so pretty much after we got home at 2am and I went to sleep, the very next morning I went straight for the easel again and worked on this painting. As usual I'm currently trying to improve my proportions, my proper human anatomy, and I am trying to render things a bit more realistically, paying attention to the technical aspects of what I'm doing and always trying to improve my process. So this is yet another oil painting portrait study done in a semi-realistic style. I wouldn't say it's perfect yet but I am definitely trying and hopefully making small improvements with each piece. And I'm also trying to streamline and be able to paint faster. So I guess in that sense this piece is a slight improvement because the last oil painting study I did around the same size which is 5x7 inches, that one took me four and a half hours and this one took me three and a half hours. Although the last painting I did split up into two different sittings and two different layers whereas this one it was all done in one sitting, one layer. But this one was I guess an a la prima painting because it was all done in one layer. I honestly wish I had time to do two layers because when I was finished with it and looked at it there were so many little areas that I spotted that could have used a second layer just to refine things and make things look a little bit more polished. But sadly I booked my return flight to be on December 30th knowing I had a lot of deadlines on December 31st so it's my own fault I didn't give myself more time to come home and finish up my end of the month deadlines. But oh well, I think there's a great learning experience in painting a la prima and just doing one layer because it forces you to be very purposeful and intentional with each brushstroke and also forces you to mix colors a lot more carefully and make sure that you have the correct color on your brush before it even touches your painting panel. If you would like to see a 60-minute version of this video with a helpful voiceover tutorial and also a color mixing demo and hundreds of hours of other tutorials from the past feel free to check out my Patreon page at patreon.com slash happydeeartist. Similar to my last few videos, this piece also uses a limited color palette of just the three primary colors red, yellow, and blue and black and white. I found that with color mixing at least having a limited palette actually makes things a lot easier for me because there's less decisions that I have to make and if I think the skin tone needs to be rosier I know to add red if I think the skin tone needs to be cooler I know to add blue if I think it needs to look more sun-kissed and tan I know to add yellow and so there's only pretty much three decisions and three directions that any color can go and to me that simplifies the process and reduces the amount of cognitive overload I have to worry about and you would be surprised at the variety and range of colors especially with skin tones that you can mix using only three primary colors. My go-to for the specific names of the colors cadmium red medium for the red cadmium yellow medium for the yellow and phthalo blue for the blue titanium white for the white and chromatic black for the black and I primarily use Gamblin but you can pretty much find these colors in any brand. So if you're just starting out and don't want to spend a lot of money on all these oil painting supplies I highly recommend trying out this limited palette because you pretty much only need five tubes of paint and you can already mix such a dynamic range of different colors and skin tones to fulfill so many needs and concepts and also you can learn a bit more about color mixing and color theory along the way. All right and that about wraps up today's oil painting time-lapse. I hope you all enjoyed watching it and thank you all so much for your continued love and support on YouTube. I know that I haven't been able to devote as much time and effort into making content as usual so I really appreciate you sticking by me. If you're interested in adopting this painting she is available in my shop at happyd-artist.com and speaking of which I'm still having my annual holiday sale so for 20% off your order of prints and originals including this one just use the code HOLIDAY at happyd-artist.com. And if you're interested in learning more about how to paint and draw I have lots of art educational content on my Patreon page including exclusive video tutorials, step-by-step photo tutorials, live streams, podcasts, and even surprise art gift boxes all available at patreon.com happyd-artist. I'd love to have you join my Patreon family. I wanted to quickly thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video and for supporting my channel and the art community. I've actually enjoyed using Squarespace for four years now to build and host my online shop and website. So whether you need a domain, website, or online store make your next move with Squarespace. Start your free trial today at squarespace.com and visit squarespace.com slash happydartist for 10% off your first purchase. Also if you want to check out more artworks, works in progress, and just random daily artist adventures feel free to check out my Instagram and you can follow me at the handle at happydartist.