How To Oil Paint on Canvas

A good way to paint the canvas is with oil.Impressionist paintings such as those by Monet and Van Gogh were also oil-painted.

Step 1: Purchase the best quality oil painting materials.

If you're just starting out, you can find many of these things by looking at gift sets that include all or most of them, sometimes in a nice wooden storage box or a table easel.A stretched canvas is the size of the painting you would like to do.Purchase a few small canvas boards for practice and preliminary studies is a good thing.If the canvas paper or canvas that comes in pads is suited for oil painting, you can use it.Try to choose a small board with the exact proportions of the stretched canvas but if it's not, get one larger so that you can mark up that shape on it.There are tubes of oil paint in this picture.The most essential colors are included in a set.There is red, blue, yellow, Burnt Sienna and a large tube of white in the smallest essential palette.Lemon Yellow, Permanent Rose and Ultramarine are close to Winsor andNewton open stock.If it's choosing primaries out of a set with more colors, use Alizarin Crimson or whichever the more purple cast red is, not the orange red.There is a reason for it besides mixing.If you don't have it in your set, use the reddish brown.Purchase the oil and thinner.Linseed oil is a traditional oil painting medium.Some artists like walnuts.If you want your painting to dry quicker, you should use a medium like Winsor &Newton's "Liquin".Turpentine substitute, sometimes called turpenoid, or white mineral spirits, are also needed.This is a thin liquid that has a strong or slight odor, it's a paint thinner as opposed to a medium.When using volatiles, odorless paint thinners like Weber's Turpenoid or Gamsol should always be used.Oil paint does not give off toxic fumes like turpentine does.Some oil paints contain toxic ingredients that can be harmful if eaten.Don't eat, drink or smoke while using oil paint.The Damar varnish is intended for oil paintings.It's a good idea to apply varnish outdoors or in a well-ventilated area.It's definitely a good idea to choose aremovable artist grade varnish.After the oil painting has dried all the way through, the varsity should be added.A clear varnish is added to give it a glossy finish and protect the paint layer.Every 25 to 30 years, the varnish should be removed by the artist or owner with a varnish remover solution and reapplied, because the varnishes become yellow over time and aren't intended to be permanent.This is the reason old oil paintings turn brown.They need a clean and new coat of varnish to look the same as they did last year.You don't need to buy varnish until the painting is done and completely dried, since you will not use it until then.As soon as a painting is dry, "Retouch varnish" can be used.It doesn't hurt the paint layer, but the painting should feel dry and you should wait a good month before using it.If you want to sell the painting sooner, you need a temporary finish.Buy the brushes.People prefer stiff ones.bristle brushes are less expensive at the cheap end, but good ones of either white synthetic fiber that's as stiff as bristle brush are just as good.Some oil painters use a soft sable brush with a long handle.If you like detailed realism, get a range of sizes, large medium and small, for blocking in areas, painting in the forms and objects and quite small ones for final details.A soft "rigger" brush with very long thin soft hairs is used for rigging, cat's whiskers and other long linear details in realism, it can be used to write your name small or do long smooth lines.It's recommended that you try a variety pack of bristle or synthetic bristle brushes with different shapes and sizes to discover the style each one creates.You can use a painting knife or butter knife to mix paint.If you get the plastic ones, the Palette knives are cheap.The nicer metal will last a long time if kept clean.Painting knives have different shapes, each has a different effect and you can use those instead of brushes to do your whole painting.To sketch on the canvas, use a pencil or charcoal.While using the oil paints, you need a palette to put them on.You can either use a plain ceramic, glass or melamine plate or use an actual thumb hole.It's good that something can stand up to being washed off with turpentine.The colors show up truest on gray, which is why many artists prefer it.If you use a flat piece of glass on a table, you can put gray paper under it to make it easy to clean.There are two cups for oil and thinner.If your set comes with a "double dipper" that clips onto a palette, then it probably also has a palettes.The rags are being painted.These can be any kind of rags.If you wash cloth rags, you can reuse them if you want.Cloth baby diapers that have been washed and worn out make great painting rags.It's better to use old clothes that are soft like old t-shirts and actual rags, because paper towels wear out fast.Since you may be wiping out painted areas with the rags, try not to use fuzzy ones.Unless you want to wash them out and reuse them over and over, use rags that are at the end of their usefulness.An easel to work on, either on a table or standing.This does not need to be expensive.The cheapest easel will hold up any canvas at a comfortable working angle and its legs will adjust to a standing or sitting height.Unless you're disabled by age, disease or injury limiting the amount of time you can stay on your feet, it's much better to stand at the easel.This will allow you to see how the painting looks before you add it, which will make for a better painting.It is possible to prop up the painting against a chair or other support.A "painting horse" is a bench with a board sticking up at the end that you straddle and prop the canvas into a grooves.Drawing paper, pencil, charcoal, sketchbook, and even scrap paper are some of the sketching supplies that can be used to plan the painting.If you like your sketches, you might as well get an actual sketchbook and use a soft pencil or a pen or marker for it.To sketch with and to sketch on, your favorites.Your favorite drawing tools.There is a place to put the wet painting to dry that is free of dust.There are different Drying times for oil paintings.It takes up to a year to cure some types of oil painting.

Step 2: A pencil, a pen, and a gray pen are all you need to sketch a "notan" of the painting.

If it is a square, that's square.If it's rectangular, decide if it will be a portrait orlandscape orientation.Place the light, dark and medium areas on the design with notan drawings.They can range from a large postage stamp to a small business card.Don't worry about the details until you find the best design.

Step 3: You can make a value drawing using charcoal or the pencil.

It can be shaded or just loose to show you where the shadows and highlights are.Depending on how realistic you want the painting to be.A looser painting style can have a sketchier value sketch, but should still have one with more than "white middle and black" so that you can tell where there are at least five values.Some painters use "light, light middle, middle value, dark" for the five values and don't use pure black and white.It depends on the effect you want.Try different versions of the sketch until you find one you like.In the sketch, make sure the light falls on the person, objects or landscape in the same direction.Look at where the shadows go.They should all go in the same direction if the sun is high and the lamp is low.All the objects will look better with directional lighting.Most of your subjects will look three-dimensional when you draw the shadows.Good Impressionism or realism can be achieved by this.If you want to do an abstract, it's a good idea to sketch with a pencil and work out your effects.Proceed to the next stage if you skip the sketch stage on paper.The canvas board, canvas paper or canvas pad can be used to sketch the subject.You can use charcoal or violet pastels.If the canvas isn't the same shape as in the planning sketches, you should mark up the proportions on the board or pad.The drawing should be drawn as pure outlines.If you want to get detailed for realism, you can either mark up eyes, mouth, any important shapes on it or keep it simple.When the sketch is done, it should look like a Paint By Numbers canvas.If you make a mistake, wipe the charcoal or pastel pencil off with a damp cloth and draw again.Very correct.

Step 4: You can mix your colors by squeezing out a little of the paint.

Set out your colors with some distance between them.It's possible to use Burnt Sienna as well.If it was a gift set, leave the other colors in the box.

Step 5: "Alla Prima" is the color study.

You can paint the sketch into the areas of each color.The color study doesn't need to be detailed, so you can use a knife to paint it.If you don't like any of your color choices, you can use the palette knife to remove that bit and put the mixed-up paint off to the side.The mix of all three primaries will harmonize throughout the painting and so the mixed up paint can be separated and mixed with a little more to turn it into pale or dark grays.There is no waste with a simple primary palette.Continue to play with the Color Study until you like it as a simple, bold painting done with a fairly big brush and not much detail.If you have to, do more than one of them until you know what you like.You're practicing painting with the paint out of the tube.It doesn't have to use either oil or thinner.If you like the look, you can do the big painting the same way, just by using the palette knife and tube paint with bold strokes onto the canvas, no extra oil and no thinned out layer.That style of oil painting is fast and powerful.

Step 6: The outline can be drawn with a soft pencil or a stick of charcoal.

It's a good idea to use a violet pastel pencil on a landscape painting because it blends well with all the other colors.Don't worry about making changes to the sketch, charcoal and the violet pastel pencil are easily corrected with a damp tissue or rag.If you get it wrong, wipe off the wrong part and try again.

Step 7: Prepare oil in a cup and thinner in another.

The brushes and knife should be wiped clean.You can wash the brush if you used it for the color study by dipping it in the turpenoid and squeezing it out with a painting rag.

Step 8: It's a good idea to put a small amount of Burnt Sienna on your makeup.

If there isn't any white in the three-color mud mix, use that for your brown thin layer.You can thin it out by dipping your brush in turpentine or Sansodor.Put the wet brush into a little bit of paint and squeeze it around until you have a light, transparent paint.You can paint in the light areas on your painting.Using a little more paint, do the medium light and successively darker areas with Burnt Sienna, still thin it, until it's like ink in texture.There should be a fair amount of paint thinner in the dark areas.The faster the Burnt Sienna value layer dries, the thinner you use.Wow.The transparent value painting in Burnt Sienna looks pretty cool at this stage.It's not hard to change if you have it too light or dark.If you don't like the part, take a rag, wipe it off, or add more color to it.Change the shape by wiping out.It's very easy to correct and make changes all the way through oil painting.Within a few minutes the stage will be dry.The parts that are the thinst may be dry by the time you finish the other corner.It only needs to be dry.

Step 9: The rule is "Fat Over Lean".

The structure of this is structural.The value sketch was very lean and almost all turpentine was substitute for oil.The amount of oil in the paint is what makes it show up.It looks like watercolor on paper.If you want to do a fun technique at the "wash" layer, you can do successive washes in different colors.The next layer is called "Alla Prima", which means "from the tube" in Spanish.Medium fatness is like someone who is not fat or skinny.The fatter the paint is, the more oil or Liquin you add to it.Lean Over Fat has a problem with the oiliest layers drying the fastest, so the quicker drying paint should be under it.The inside might remain squishy and sealed if the outside is not dry.A painting with Lean over Fat can slide off the canvas on a hot day.This happened to a student of the teacher.Don't use oil pastels under oil paint because the oil formula includes mineral oil that never dries.Oil pastel marks can be added to the last layer of an oil painting when it's dry.

Step 10: First, block the colors in general for major areas, then add a little more paint to make the details lighter or darker.

Half of your colors are on the canvas.Get the main areas of light and shadow blocked in with the right general colors, then add in more paint to modify them.You want the paint to be smooth without showing a lot of brush strokes.Leave it where you want it to be and use knife strokes to make it bolder.Some parts of the painting are raised "impasto" texture and others are smooth and carefully painted.You can vary the amount of texture you put on.If you want to keep the paint smooth, mix some of the oil into it and brush out the brush strokes.If it's still wet, you can mix more oil or paint in to make it thinner.Don't put anything leaner over what has fat in it if it starts to dry.If you want a really ugly special effect, like painting a zombie's face and putting a big pocket of fat in on the cheek, then letting it dry wrong, and then ripping it open to have the paint skin dangle down and the clump of brownish-red fat paint hit the airIf you know how it works, almost any mistake can be turned into a special effect.

Step 11: Oil paints stay wet for days if you make changes as needed.

This means you can paint all day, fool around with it, go to bed, put an empty box over the palette so your cat won't walk in it and keep making changes while it's wet.If you want to get rid of it before it dries, use the knife.Oil paint's slow drying time allows for a lot of changes before you decide to let it dry.

Step 12: It should be left to dry.

Unless you used Liquin as your medium, it would take at least two weeks.Liquin dries faster than paint from the tube, so use at least a bit of it into all the paint so that it all bonds well.It's not fat but oil from the tube.The main ingredient of Liquin medium can be obtained right in the tube paint, where the painting can take only a couple of days to dry.You can speed up the drying process by storing the painting in a warm, well-ventilated room.

Step 13: One of the traditional Old Masters techniques doesn't rely on brush textures.

If you want to do a realistic black and white painting with all the details of your subject, you should start with the thin Burnt Sienna layer, then use tube texture paint and brush it to make it look realistic.Let the "grisaille" or "dead layer" dry out.It will look a lot like a black and white photo.Start painting over the grisaille layer by mixing oil with all your colors and using them very thin.The light will bounce back and forth within the dried layers of the black and white painting if you cover it with transparent colors.The colored pencil rendering is close to the effect.It's one of the things oil painting is famous for.If you have a lot of time, you can try this method.If you don't want to take that long, just let the grisaille dry, add a bit of oil, paint over it in the right colors and add one final glaze when it's dry.You can get as simple as you want with oil painting.

Step 14: You can clean your brushes by dipping them in the thinner and then using the painting rag to squeeze the paint out of them.

It's best to repeat several times until most of the paint is off.Store your painting rags and supplies away from anything that can cause a fire.If you have one, seal them in a metal can.You can use the squeezed out paint more if you store it in the fridge.Don't think it's for food.

Step 15: If possible, store the paintings in a place that is dark and cool.

A home built cabinet can be used to build a vertical drying rack where you put peg board panels a couple of inches apart to lean one wet painting into each slot.If you do a lot of oil painting, this is a good project to do yourself.Since you are creating fumes with the thinner, it's a good idea to use the garage and other areas that people don't spend a lot of time in.The amount of dust that falls on the painting while it's drying is reduced by storing them in vertical slots.

Step 16: You don't need to frame an oil painting with a "Gallery" canvas that is an inch and a half deep.

Wrap the painting around or paint them black and do something fun with it.If you want to sell it in a gallery or give it as a present, you don't need to buy a frame, it's ready to hang.

Step 17: Retouch varnish should be used at least a month after the painting is dry to give it a shiny, finished look.

It can be annoying if you don't like the colors until the varnish is on.Let the varnish dry for a few days before you add it.Your painting will last longer than you think.

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