OIL PAINTING

Admin Posts : 73 Join date : 2022-02-12

An Amateur's Guide to Portrait Painting ... PALETTE

The so-called OLD MASTERS used a minimum portrait palette of:

WHITE

BURNT SIENNA

YELLOW OCHRE

PAYNES GREY or PRUSSIAN BLUE or FRENCH ULTRAMARINE

I use:

TITANIUM WHITE (Opaque)

BURNT SIENNA (Translucent)

YELLOW OCHRE (Opaque)

PRUSSIAN BLUE (Translucent)

augmented by:

ALIZARIN CRIMSON ..........(Translucent) ...- lips and cheeks

NAPLES YELLOW ..............(Opaque) ........-highlights

CADMIUM YELLOW LIGHT ..(Opaque) .........-highlights

SAP GREEN ......................(Translucent) ...-shadows

DIOXAZINE PURPLE ..........(Translucent) ...-shadows

RAW UMBER ....................(Translucent) ...-shadows and hair

PAYNES GREY ..................(Translucent) ...-darkening

VIRIDIAN GREEN ..............(Translucent) ...-ornaments, clothing

CADMIUM RED LIGHT ........(Opaque) ........-ornaments, clothing

Black is made by mixing PRUSSIAN BLUE and BURNT SIENNA.
Caucasian face tones are a mixture of WHITE, BURNT SIENNA and YELLOW OCHRE.
A brown for "character lines" in the face can be made by mixing SAP GREEN and DIOXAZINE PURPLE in about equal portions.

Basic mixing:
RED & YELLOW make ORANGE
RED & BLUE make PURPLE
YELLOW & BLUE make GREEN
RED, BLUE & YELLOW make BROWN or GREY.

Lighten with WHITE. Darken with PAYNES GREY. Also darken with the complementary colors, which are opposites on the color wheel: RED-GREEN, PURPLE-YELLOW, BLUE-ORANGE. This works because one opposite is a primary color, and the complementary color is a combination of the other two primaries, thus making brown or grey, depending on proportions used.
Caution: Use Prussian Blue sparingly in tinting. A little goes a long way! On the palette, I put White in the center and surround it with the other colors since most applications are pastel colors. Circling the titanium white counter-clockwise, my own palette layout starting at six o'clock position is:

6:00 burnt sienna
5:00 alizarin crimson
4:00 dioxazine purple
3:00 sap green
2:00 raw umber
1:00 paynes grey
12:00 prussian blue
11:00 viridian green
10:00 cadmium red light
9:00 cadmium yellow light
8:00 naples yellow
7:00 yellow ochre

I put out colours only when I need them and in small amounts. Don't use toothpaste ads as your reference for quantity!
You can mix purple from red and blue, but it is such a fussy job getting the tint you want that I just use Dioxazine Purple to save time. Similarly with sap green.
You can seldom mix the exact same tint more than once, so mix enough to do the job. If you mix acrylics the mixture goes solid in a few minutes unless you keep it moist.
Say you want to lighten BURNT SIENNA to start a face. Mix the BURNT SIENNA with a dab of the TITANIUM WHITE between the two dobs of colour on the palette, either side darken or lighten ... smear it about a little. Add some NAPLES YELLOW or ALIZARIN CRIMSON or whatever you think will get you the colour you want. Then go to the particular spot in the multi-shaded smear to try it on the canvas. Make sure you have enough to do the job, but not enough to make you gulp when you scrape it off the palette next day.

Admin Posts : 73 Join date : 2022-02-12

An Amateur's Guide to Portrait Painting ... TRANSFERRING

Take a photo with a digital camera, or scan into a computer an existing photo of the subject.

Use an image editor to size the subject to a 3x4 ratio (9x12). My choice of size is 9x12 canvas since a colour printer will make 8-1/2x11 inch prints. A good free viewer/editor is Irfanview.

Be aware that the screen colour may differ radically from the printer colour, so adjust for brightness, contrast and hue on the printed copy.

Some programs like PhotoDeluxe will let you reduce the number of colours in the photo to, say, eight or ten to get sharper transitions in the colour groupings. This would be good for your first couple of paintings, and even for the acrylic underpainting.

With the image centred face-up on the canvas, tape the print to the canvas, with carbon paper face-down under it, using four pieces of masking tape. Trace all the major lines and highlight edges with a sharp 4H pencil. BE VERY CRITICAL WITH THE EYES, NOSE AND MOUTH. This will take 15 or 20 minutes.

Keep one side taped and flap the print open to see if you missed anything. Once you take off all the tape it is difficult to realign the print onto the carbon tracing. A couple of pins through key locations (eyes) on the print may help to relocate if you screw up.

Eyeball the missing edges of the tracing and approximate them with a pencil. For portraits larger than 9x12 inches, electronically divide the JPG into four or more and splice them together with tape prior to tracing.

If you have no computer, etcetera, you can make a grid with tracing paper to place on the photo, and draw a larger grid on the canvas. Use a soft pencil or charcoal to manually copy the grid contents of the photo onto the canvas.

Canvases can be bought cheap for about a buck each at Wal-Mart or a Dollar Store. Thin canvas paper such as Strathmore and others can be bought for about seventy-five cents a sheet in books of ten. If you want to frame your portraits (in homemade frames), you will have to glue the canvas paper to thick cardboard to keep it rigid. The extra 25 cents is worth the trouble in cutting, glueing and finding the cardboard in the first place.

Admin Posts : 73 Join date : 2022-02-12

An Amateur's Guide to Portrait Painting ... EXAMPLES

These examples were scanned in, but the scanner clipped the 9x12 inch canvases to 8-1/2x11 inches. The scanned images are not a true colour since my scanner adds a few streaks due to the canvas not lying flat on the platen.

Now a series of HOW-TO shots of waitress Nancy.

The 8.5x11 inch cropped original digital JPG with good definition. The printing process, however, may blur some of the colour transition lines.

The 9x12 inch canvas with carbon tracing. Looks pretty gruesome at this stage, doesn't it!

The 9x12 inch canvas with acrylic underpainting. This is ready to take oils for touchup and blending.

The finished 9x12 inch canvas.

I feel that I did not show enough intermediate steps in Nancy's painting, so we'll do a series of Jason, the cook where Nancy works.

The original cropped head shot.

The 9x12 inch canvas with tracing and a little bit of acrylic under-painting. Notice the splotches in the green background where the canvas manufacturer put too much or too little gesso on the canvas. I painted around the carbon paper lines to make them stand out better in this scan.

Two hours later, still acrylics. Looking better! This is ready to take oils for touchup and blending.

This is the finished painting. Perhaps it is not what a pro could do,but it's not too bad for a regular person like you and me.

Admin Posts : 73 Join date : 2022-02-12

An Amateur's Guide to Portrait Painting ... BRUSHES

You can spend a lot on brushes, thirty bucks each or more. However, for the novice, I find that some from the Dollar Store do a good job, and you can modify them to suit your needs. One package contains six assorted brushes for a buck.

You will need some fine brushes 000, 001, 002. A 10/0 liner is about the smallest I have. You can carefully trim long, bushy brushes smaller in diameter with a razor blade. A smaller length runs out of paint part way through a line sometimes.

I use bristle brushes only for stippling, and for outdoor scenes. Floppy brushes are ok for watercolours, but I like some spring in the bristles for oils. They give you more control than painting with a wet mop.

If you don't have an easel, use a piece of Masonite or thin plywood about two feet square, propped up on a desk. Rest your hand on a 1/2-inch diameter stick to control a shaky hand. My stick has a hook to grab the top of the Masonite.

Also get one or two pieces of 2X4 wood a foot long and drill 5/15-inch holes in it to hold clean and dirty brushes. Maybe pieces of foam block would do if you have no drill, or get creative with holes in a small cardboard box.

Some brushes I cut down to rub color into the under-painting to give highlights and texture. I call these blenders.

Special brushes called RAKES can be used for painting multiple hairs. Fan brushes can do this too if you can find one small enough. You can make your own by squishing a cheap, flat brush with pliers after filing off the edge metal to allow splaying of the hairs.

Have two of the finer brushes and blenders for different colors since you sometimes switch back and forth, and don't want to keep wiping off what is on the brush.

Put dirty oil brushes in a separate holder to stop them from rolling around. Be sure to clean them in the thinner jar at the end of your session. Put the lid on the thinner jar when not in use to stop evaporation.

An upside-down salmon can with small holes in it made with a hammer and nail can be inserted into some plastic peanut-butter jars, to assist in cleaning the brushes. Used paint settles under the can and you can re-use the contained thinner till dooms-day.

Put dirty acrylic brushes in the water pot since acrylics go hard rapidly.