Friday Live Colour Study of a Painting by Isaac Levitan Live Oil Painting Demonstration

Today I'm painting a quick colour study of a painting of a tree by Issak Levitan.

Colour studies like this are a great way to learn about how other painters have approached painting nature. One of hte main problems to solve in landscape painting is how to compress that wide value range that we see into paint.

Another is how to simplify very complicated and detailed subjects down to the big shapes that make it work. A colour study can also be a good way to practice that.

You can grab a copy of the pic I'm working from on WikiMedia Commons here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Issak_Levitan_-_The_Oak.jpg

I'll start the stream by looking at the image in ChromaMagic to get an idea of the colours, then go to mixing them.

The study will be very simplified - I'm mostly interested in learning about the colours Levitan mixed.

Materials:

Surface: Whatever you want, oil painting paper or panel is fine.

Brushes/tools: I'll be using mostly bristle hogs of various sizes.

Paint:

White (lead or titanium)
Cad yellow
Possibly bright yellow lake
yellow ochre
cobalt blue
green gold
tranparent red oxide
Raw Umber
Ivory Black

Medium: Linseed oil and a little solvent (turps or OMS)

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Brushes: Ive got a flower-painting brush set including the main brushes I typically use for flower paintings up on Rosemaruy's Brushes site, you can see it here:

https://www.rosemaryandco.com/brush-sets/teachers-sets/paulfoxton-set?u=PFOXTON

The app I use to investigate the colour is called ChromaMagic. You can find it on the Apple and Google Play stores, and there is also a Windows version. It's very inexpensive and extremely useful! If you struggle at all with judging values and colours, or with mixing, this is a great tool to help you calibrate your estimates by giving you immediate feedback on how close your guesses come.

You can get the Munsell value scale - which allows you to translate values from the app directly to your painting - from Paul Centore on Ebay here, also very inexpensive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223003792036

Subscribe to my email list to get notifications of future live streams and other helpful info about painting in oils: https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/subscribe

If you're interested in learning with me, you can see the online art school I run here: https://courses.learning-to-see.co.uk/bundles/paul-foxton-online-art-school