Easy Oil Painting Techniques EVERYONE Should Know! (Step by Step Oil Painting Tutorial)

For most beginners, oil painting is something difficult, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, it's pretty simple to paint a portrait study like this one. Today, I'll be showing you how to practice. We'll start with a very simple form, an egg, using the three most basic pigments we can find, and then I'll show you how this simple process can evolve gradually to achieve this. I want to show you that oil painting doesn't have to be intimidating. You can start today and follow along, and make sure you stay till the end because I'll be telling you my most important recommendations if you are teaching yourself. Alright, let's go! If you want to follow along, just put your egg next to your easel with a black background and light it properly so that the volume is nice and the shadows soft and diffuse. In this case, I'm using a piece of MDF board coated with gesso. To start, we're simply going to trace the outline of the egg with a pencil. Nothing could be easier here. Just draw an egg. Why an egg? Because it's simple. It's a nice, overweight volume with colors that are very similar to skin tones. It's perfect to practice if you don't want to start with a portrait straight ahead. Plus, for this exercise, we're going to simplify the colors to three pigments only, but you'll see that we can get an incredible range of warm and cool hues with this super limited selection. We'll start with these three pigments, titanium white, ivory black, and transparent red oxide, or in this case, burnt sienna. Just look for the pigment code PR101, transparent version, and this selection of pigment is great to replicate skin tones very easily. Ivory black is close to the black pigment of our skin, named pneumelanin, and the red oxide is very close to the reddish pigments that create, you know, red hair and freckles called pheomelanin. And all human skin colors, and in fact, most of the colors of the animal kingdom, are composed of various combinations of these two pigments. The idea of this video is to start with this super simple three pigment selection to get the form in the first exercise and then transpose it to a more complex subject. If you think that you need to dive more in depth into oil painting and explore more advanced techniques, this simple tutorial won't be enough, obviously. So you can have a look at my course if you want, it covers everything there is to know about materials and techniques, and it can really help you take oil painting to the next level. The link is in the description. For the moment, let's start with the black of the background. It's a common thing to start with the darkest color because we can use it as a reference to key all the remaining colors. So here, that's what we'll be doing. Now obviously, how about medium? Let's keep it simple for this exercise, no medium. Use paint straight from the tube. At the very least, if you feel that the paint is too sticky and stiff and dry, just add a few drops of linseed oil or any type of medium of your choice. To create the impression of the volume of the black box, you just have to paint a medium gray tone to create this plane, and don't forget to add the cast shadow of the egg with soft edges and a darker shadow core to replicate the penumbra. Next, we're going to start painting those wonderful beige skin-like tones by mixing the three pigments in various proportions. The burnt sienna is almost a perfect match to mix the color of the egg, but we are dealing with natural color here, so the hue of your egg might be very different from mine, and the hue of your burnt sienna, which has a lot of variants and nuances from one brand to another, might also be very different, so don't lose your mind over it. We're simplifying here, so you don't have to worry about this type of thing, just try to get the closest hue that you can. Pure burnt sienna is very warm and has a red-orange hue, whereas ivory black is very cool and has a more bluish tint, so usually burnt sienna alone is going to be a little bit too strong on the orange side, but with a small touch of black to neutralize it will lower the chroma and make it look more natural and more skin-like. So now the goal is to lay down values progressively by comparing to the black of the background that acts as our value reference. This is called keying. I begin with the darkest values to establish the value key. Keying the values consists in establishing a link between the darkest color of the painting and the darkest visible color on the model, which is called the key. It is then admitted that the two colors are equal in terms of value, and the idea is to compare all the remaining colors to the initial value key and check if the difference between any given color and our key color is the same as the difference between these two colors on the model. Basically we are not just trying to find the right color, we are comparing the jump, the delta between the desired color and the reference color on both the model and the subject. If it's complicated in the beginning just do some test strokes with small touches to see how it looks on the painting. Just apply a very subtle stroke and see if the key color indicates something. It doesn't need to be lighter or darker and if it works you can just spread the paint by trying to follow the volume of the egg. The whole painting process now consists of comparing the colors to each other and evaluating whether the difference between the new color and the previous one is the same both on the model and on the subject. Many people think that oil painting is complicated and it's true that it can be intimidating at first but in reality oil painting is the most forgiving medium of all because you have all the time you need to make corrections. It dries slowly and it's very versatile. There are some annoying things like the fact that you can't clean the brushes with water directly but when you have a paint brush in your hand contrary to what many beginners think, oil painting is actually the easiest medium you can find. Sure when you see what some great artists are capable of painting you might think that it's out of reach in terms of complexity but it's just like everything it can be very simple if you want it to be. The goal of this video is to get you started and get you inspired, prove that oil painting is for you, prove that it can be simple and just to get a good warm-up exercise with this egg. I have to nuance a little bit though and say that if there is one difficulty with this exercise that I'm saying is so simple, this difficulty is in the blending of the egg and it's very subtle and you don't have room to mess up with the gradation of values here. It has to be very soft because the slightest mistake would make it look like the egg has a dent or a bump and something weird in the volume which would just look very weird. Actually this gradual blending is so subtle that I seriously think that this exercise is more difficult than the face study coming up. Talking about that let's jump to our next exercise and you'll see that it's actually not more complicated. All right so let's start this portrait study like the previous one you can follow along you just have to follow the link in the description to download the picture. Let's start with the drawing. This time I won't use graphite pencil because I will later apply a wash which would dilute and erase the lines. Instead I'm using a hard cutted pencil, this one works. Make sure it's not a soft pastel pencil but a hard cutted pencil like this one by Faber-Castell which is very good. About the drawing in itself, I'm not going to elaborate here but if you feel that drawing is too complicated for you well first I have to tell you that it's better to be good at drawing if you want to paint figuratively so work on your drawing skills. Don't hesitate to spend some time with the drawing board, it will help you a lot. However if you want to skip this stage you can also use a couple of techniques to work your way around drawing like making an oil transfer or you know scratching the back of a printed copy of your model. There are many ways to sort of avoid drawing it's not necessarily the best thing to do because drawing skills are still needed when painting but it can save you time and allow you to paint right away and just go ahead without hesitation which is a good thing. Let's start with a wash of odourless murospirous and a mix of burnt sienna and black. You can make it more or less warm as you prefer. Be aware that both ivory black and the red iron oxide so burnt sienna are relatively slow drying so it will stay wet for a while and give you more than enough time to work on your study properly so don't dilute it too much though and make sure that you apply a very thin coat just to get a nice background tone and avoid the harsh whiteness of the canvas. Now this should dry very slowly so it will give you a couple of days so if you work on this over the weekend don't have plenty of time to improve and make all the corrections that you want. As you can see the lines are not erased by the wash of murospirous although it might be a good idea to test your cutted pencil before because I can't guarantee that yours could work the same. Some are erasable and some will will just hold on and as you can see the lines become a lot less visible so I'm just going to retrace them with a brush just so that I have a clear outline to work with and about the outline I'm mostly trying to get the very basic shadow shapes with my drawing nothing more. With the same three pigments we had before make a nice soft gradient starting with the lightest value and ending in the darkest range. Simply feather it with a brush until you get a nice even gradation like this. Note that the lightest value on the right is not pure white and the darkest value on the left is not pure black. In general it's just not a good idea to use pure white or pure black in any portrait at least on the face. Like in the previous exercise we are starting with the darkest dark and keying. Last time we started with the black background but in this case we don't have one so we need to look for the darkest value on the face if possible not too far from the lightest value. This way we can get a bridge between the two and get the full range of value gradations in a small clearly visible space which is going to be super helpful for value building. Usually it's a safe bet to start with the eye. You can always find the black of the eye or the eyelashes and there is generally a lighter value either on the eyeball or on the eyelid and this is what I'll be starting with. As you can see my darkest dark is the dark value of the eyelashes and just above the eyelid has a very cool bluish mid-tone value so I mix a little bit of white with a more concentrated ivory black than burnt sienna. This way I get something much cooler. To make the light areas easier to paint it's a good idea to lift off some of the background paint with a small piece of folded paper towel or any type of rag. It will reveal the white of the canvas and remove some of the wet paint from the impermatura that can pollute the lightest areas of the painting and it's going to just make it easier to paint the light areas. As you can see I almost created two gradients of value. The horizontal one is rather warm and the other one which is more or less here is a lot cooler. If you want to see this more clearly you can be more organized than me and create two separate value strings on top of each other one warm and just below one cool and this way you have both of them next to each other. If this exercise can teach you one very important thing it's how to use the right brush for the right job. Regarding the brush there is no need to have one for each color with the three pigments that we have in our palette now. It's definitely not needed but I don't recommend doing this even with a regular palette with more pigments. When choosing the right brush consider the size first. Use the biggest brush at disposal for the area that you're trying to paint. For the area around the eye I use a small round or a small synthetic filbert because the space is tiny but for the larger areas like the big volume of the cheek or for the forehead I use a large synthetic flat or an oval wash brush. Once you've considered the size think about the hair type and more importantly the softness that you require in your stroke and finally think about the shape of the brush and try to visualize the quality of the brushstroke before touching the canvas. This entire exercise will be a great opportunity to work on your brush skills and don't think that brushwork is just about being a virtuoso with a brush in your hand it's just as important to select the right brush for the right job as it is to actually use it. So really brush selection is key and use this exercise to work on this. With the limited value gradient that we've created the goal is to paint a good impression of volume and make the painting look three-dimensional. Focus on the form and try to make the portrait look as 3d as possible just like we did for the volume of the egg. Try to really think about the angle of incidence of the light, how it hits the surface of the face and the various planes and volumes that compose it. All right so I hope that you see that making this wasn't that much more difficult than painting the egg actually. It was easier in my opinion so there is nothing to fear really. What can we make with a painting like this done with only burnt sienna white and black? Is it something we can use to make more elaborate paintings? Absolutely! That's why I say that it's so easy not only this exercise but painting in general. The idea is that you can paint an entire portrait and use a layer painted only with these three pigments as an under painting. This technique actually has a name since it doesn't have a lot of variety. It's usually called dead color layer. It means that it's just a representation of the volume but it lacks you know the pink the blue and yellowish tints that are actually part of how the skin appears. So you can use this combination of pigments very very simple as an under painting instead of using a simple grisaille. You can just add this burnt sienna and simply let it dry and add new pigments for the next layers or use glazes and scumbles. You can increase the complexity progressively step by step starting with something super simple and straightforward. Now we don't have to wait for it to be dry. We can make this study better right now wet on wet. Let's start by adding new pigments, shall we? Cobalt teal blue to bring a nice turquoise hue that will work as a sort of a neutralizer for the red orange hue of the skin. It kills the vitality of the skin colors and has to be used very sparingly but it's pretty useful. Alizarin crimson permanent is going to bring a nice pink touch that will suggest blood flowing under the skin. It's a super important pigment for portrait especially around the cheeks, around the nose, the ears, all areas that have an important subdermal blood flow. And finally yellow ochre is useful for areas where skin is thicker or closer to the bone. So by blending small touches of cyan, cobalt blue, magenta, alizarin or yellow in the skin tones we can achieve all the subtle nuances that were missing from our painting when we only had like those three starting colors burnt sienna, ultramarine, burnt sienna, titanium white and black. And from there all the colors can be created really. Our three starting pigments were just sort of a mixing base, a very flat neutral base. Great to create a nice impression of form and volume but you know a little bit flat and monotonous in terms of color. But now with the addition of those extra pigments we can get the full spectrum and you can add all the pigments you need really as long as you start simple and bring complexity progressively. That's a very safe strategy if you're just starting to paint. It makes the entire process super smooth and makes oil painting a project like this one a piece of cake. No, really. If you struggle consider that maybe you went crazy with complexity so you probably tried to go too fast towards higher levels of complexity that are out of your reach for the moment. But if you chunk the process into easy digestible parts like this like what we've seen and if you practice enough very soon you'll paint with ease and confidence. As I said the only thing that might hold you back is your drawing skills but other than that painting is pretty simple if you start with simple. And obviously as I already mentioned if you want to explore more advanced techniques you can check out my course. With all this talk about making oil painting as simple as possible there is still a truth that needs to be said. Oil painting can be simple if we make it simple. Oil painting can sure be simple however in a way the entire learning experience of learning how to paint with oils might still be hard at first and if your goal is to paint realistic looking subjects you're going to need a lot of hard work and dedication. This one exercise might be simple but the next one will probably be more of a challenge and you will need to practice a lot before you have a sufficient level to paint anything you want. Oil painting can be simple but making art is still hard. So my recommendation if you're teaching yourself is to focus on strengthening your eyes first, give the priority to accuracy, technique and then it will come, the emotions and inspiration, all the more artistic and creative fun things about art will naturally flow when you are more confident with your technical skills. Figurative realism in art is hard and the trend in modern art have pushed artists away from the painstaking efforts required to get a satisfying realistic result. So by trying to paint figurative realism you are trying to do what only less than a percent of all artists dare to do. So don't feel bad if the first very early results are not meeting your expectations. You have a very difficult journey ahead of you. The entire experience is still difficult and if it feels too complicated just go back to practicing on simpler exercises. Go back a level below what you think you are capable of just to improve your skills a little bit more and feel more confidence. Always remember to go from simple to complex and add complexity progressively. And you can do it, one small step at a time. And as always, I believe in you.