Oil Painting Resources

Amazing Books:

What Painting Is: How To Think About Oil Painting by James Elkins

n What Painting Is, James Elkins communicates the experience of painting beyond the traditional vocabulary of art history. Alchemy provides a magical language to explore what it is a painter really does in her or his studio - the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable, the special knowledge only painters hold of how colors will mix, and how they will look.
Written from the perspective of a painter-turned-art historian, What Painting Is is like nothing you have ever read about art.

Artist's Painting Techniques : Step-By-Step Workshops from professional artists
Published by DK
By Hashim Akib, Colin Allbrook, Marie Antoniou, Grahame Booth, John Chisnall, Graham Webber

About Artist's Painting Techniques

Kickstart your creativity and create a masterpiece with step-by-step workshops and advice from professional artists.

Whether you want to try your hand at painting for the first time or brush up on your artistic skills, Artist's Painting Techniques is for you. Learn how to work with watercolours, oils, and acrylics and discover everything you need to know about tone, colour, pattern, brushwork, and composition with detailed advice for beginner, intermediate, and advanced painters.

Fully illustrated, step-by-step workshops from professional artists guide you through more than 80 painting techniques including laying a flat wash, painting fur, and creating impasto sculptural effects. All techniques are accompanied by inspiring exercises and projects to try at home to help you develop your skills, discover your own style, and grow as an artist.

Master every aspect of painting with this essential guide, from choosing a subject to mounting your first piece. Whatever your level of expertise, you can learn to paint with confidence - and perhaps create a masterpiece (or two) along the way.

ALLA PRIMA II - Expanded Edition
Everything I Know About Painting - and More
By Richard Schmid

For fifteen years, the original edition of ALLA PRIMA has been considered one of the most comprehensive art instruction books on the market and the standard in classical art education both in the United States and abroad. Whether you're the owner of an original ALLA PRIMA or a first-time reader, you'll love the new ALLA PRIMA II. Richard Schmid spent two years updating the original edition giving him the opportunity to fine-tune and greatly expand what is generally regarded as the art world's foremost book for painters seeking serious instruction in representational painting.

Oil Painting Techniques and Materials Harold Speed

Harold Speed has distilled years of painting and pedagogical experience into an expert instructional program covering painting technique, painting from life, materials (paints, varnishes, oils and mediums, grounds, etc.), a painter's training, and more. Especially instructive is his extensive and perceptive discussion of form, tone, and color, and a fascinating series of detailed "Notes" analyzing the painting styles of Velasquez, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Franz Hals, and Rembrandt.
Nearly 70 photographs and drawings illustrate the text, among them prehistoric cave paintings, diagrams of tonal values, stages of portrait painting, and reproductions of masterpieces by Giotto, Vermeer, Ingres, Rembrandt, Titian, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hals, Giorgione, Poussin, Corot, Veronese...

Classical Painting Atelier
A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice
Juliette Aristides

Students of art hailed Classical Drawing Atelier, Juliette Aristides’s first book, as a dynamic return to the atelier educational model. Ateliers, popular in the nineteenth century, teach emerging artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. The educational process begins as students copy masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. The many artists at every level who learned from Classical Drawing Atelier have been clamoring for more of this sophisticated approach to teaching and learning. In Classical Painting Atelier, Aristides, a leader in the atelier movement, takes students step-by-step through the finest works of Old Masters and today’s most respected realist artists to reveal the principles of creating full-color realist still lifes, portraits, and figure paintings. Rich in tradition, yet practical for today’s artists, Classical Painting Atelier is ideal for serious art students seeking a timeless visual education.

Palettes from Gamblin:
https://gamblincolors.com/exploring-color-palettes/

Free tutorial videos from Youtube

Zorn palette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlf_2GAfFDs&list=PLtG4P3lq8RHGAxuX188_gGc__cMGj-RtH&index=4

Practical advice for oil painters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p3bJCaUq-M&list=PLtG4P3lq8RHGAxuX188_gGc__cMGj-RtH&index=9


Make a colour study
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UR9Q1XiKd4&list=PLtG4P3lq8RHGAxuX188_gGc__cMGj-RtH&index=11


Skull study
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_mI4GU6zEg&list=PLtG4P3lq8RHGAxuX188_gGc__cMGj-RtH&index=17

Flesh tones tile method

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wkJjMon4o&list=PLtG4P3lq8RHGAxuX188_gGc__cMGj-RtH&index=19

Develop your Style by Studying the Old Masters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P8hos5PL_4&list=PLtG4P3lq8RHGAxuX188_gGc__cMGj-RtH&index=20

Christian Jequel painting with Van Gogh oil paint and a palette knife instead of brushes

https://www.youtube.com/@christianjequel4890



Community:
old.reddit.com/r/oilpainting

Last edited by imageryhand on Mon Nov 18, 2024 11:39 am; edited 1 time in total

Notes:

Keep it simple - you don't need complicated recipes for your oil painting medium (what you use to thin the paint.) A little drop of linseed oil or of walnut oil when you use light colours, is all you need. You can also eggs-periment with using a few drops of egg white or yolk for texture and glazing. Traces of eggs have been found in Rembrandt's paintings! You can also paint straight out of the tube with nothing added for a thick, impasto look.

Go solvent free - you don't need turpentine to clean your brushes or thin your paint. If you do end up using that, make sure your studio is very well ventilated. Banning toxic pigments in your studio - if you have children or pets who might eat them - is a good idea. If you are not actually eating your paint, you can buy and use cadmium and cobalt safely. I always wear gloves when painting anyway. You must also be careful not to throw your paints into the environment, but recycle it responsibly - your local art store will probably have a recycling program for old paint tubes.

Toxic oil painting pigments list: https://ehs.umass.edu/painting-safety-arts

Personally, I don't like water soluble oils but you can try them.


Palette notes:
Your first palette should be a simple one. Try burnt sienna, ivory black, and titanium white. Mix 3 parts ivory black with 1 part burnt sienna to make a quick drying black paint. Then you can make monochromatic paintings until you are ready to expand your palette: if you add cadmium red, yellow ochre, ivory black, and titanium white, that's the classic minimal Anders Zorn palette. Look at how lovely his paintings are with just those tubes: https://www.wikiart.org/en/anders-zorn

and look at how many colours you can mix with it: https://michaellynnadams.com/zorn-limited-palette/
Try the Zorn colour mixing project yourself!

When you're ready, you can add a pair of blues: ultramarine and cobalt or ultramarine and pthalo (less expensive than cobalt, but can give you the same hue as cobalt though your final paint mix will be semi-transparent instead of fully opaque)

So your final palette should be

Titanium white
Burnt sienna
Ivory black
Cadmium red
Yellow ochre
Ultramarine Blue
Pthalo or Cobalt Blue

I recommend you get 2 big tubes of Titanium white and 1 big tube of ivory black. The rest of them can be small and you can replace them as needed. A little 37ml tube of oil paint goes a long way!

A fantastic article on mixing your greens in oil painting:
https://antondymtchenkoart.com/mixing-greens-pt-1