My 10 Best Oil Painting Short Cuts

so my first oil painting shortcut is actually a color mixing shortcut which is using the combination of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna can come in handy a lot now it depends on how much of each one you use and how much white you put into it I find myself using this combination of colors for a lot of things and a lot of things that are hard to figure out what the color of them are for example sand I remember when I first moved to Florida in 2019 and I was Plein Air painting and I was having a lot of trouble painting sand on the beaches it actually wasn't until I did a one-on-one workshop with Bill Farnsworth and he taught me how using a little ultramarine blue and burnt sienna and some white was a quick way to get a sand color I was like huh that's really interesting he also showed me how you can tone your canvas with that and that was really helpful too I just used a little bit of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue kind of turns out to be almost like a burnt umber but it's a really good neutral value and also neutral in temperature it's like not too warm not too cool and ever since I learned that I've always toned my canvases for Landscapes that way now I think this is a good combination because burnt sienna acts as a red but it's already pretty desaturated it's not like a very vibrant red and so it's good for a lot of things in nature like it's really good with tree trunks I find myself using that I'd probably use a little more burnt sienna with the tree trunks to push it right a little more it's really good with rocks if you ever have any gray rocks speaking of gray I never think of gray as a color I think of gray as something I do to a color like I gray it down so if you think gray you're just going to think oh black and then white and then get gray and you're going to miss the opportunity to have some more interesting colors in so it's really good for sand tree trunks rocks it's also great for mountains like the rocks in the mountains I guess that's rocks too like I always struggled getting the light side of the rocks and mountains the right color because in photos it can look very bright and very warm but it's not as bright and warm as you think it is so using the burnt sienna which is already saturated and working in some blue and some white is going to help you get a almost desaturate created purple like kind of like a warm desaturated purple and it just works really good for the rocks on mountains it's also helpful when painting pavement I always struggled painting paper like what color is that then a lot of times it's like a desaturated purple like I just did a painting for patreon where there was like a sidewalk and I actually chose to make it more red than the photo to contrast with the greens and Landscape because there's a lot of grains and palm trees and greens complement is red so whenever I can push complement colors I try to so I pushed the red and the sidewalk a little bit and I got that color using a combination of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue all right so before I go on to my next oil painting shortcut I also want to say that all these shortcuts that I'm going to be talking about are things that you can just do right away that will help your paintings or at least set you on the right track I know there's no real shortcut to oil painting it takes practice but these are just things that I know that when I heard for the first time I was like oh well that's really helpful to know so just keep that in mind as we move on to number two which is know where to put the color in the eye when doing a portrait a lot of times in photos it's hard to pick up the color of the eyes like a lot of times they're shadowed or a lot of times the photo's just not a good enough quality to pick out that color of the eye but a little trick to know where to put the color that because you don't want to just put it on the whole thing is put it on the opposite side of the Little Dot of reflected light see when light hits the eye part of it gets reflected where it's hitting and that's little reflected light which is everybody's favorite part to paint but the light actually goes through the eye and comes out on the other side and that's where you're going to get the most color now a lot of times you can see this in the photo it's easy to pick up but sometimes it's not but since now that you know it you're not going to be limited by a subpar photo I remember exactly when I learned this is when I got Michael Shane Neal's book portrait painting my point of view as remember reading that being like oh that is very helpful to know all right shortcut number three is paint it small first now what do I mean by that I mean if you have an idea for a big painting and when I say big I mean anything bigger than 16 by 20 inches try and paint it small first I would say if you can't get it to work in like a little three by four inch study or even like a six by eight it's not going to look any better when you blow it up to 16 by 20 18 by 24. it's actually going to probably look worse because your mistakes are going to be Amplified you don't have to spend a lot of time on these you know 30 or 40 minutes will save you so many headaches when you actually move to the bigger painting because in these little small ones it's going to be easy to figure things out to test out colors and values you're going to understand the big shapes and the big forms like it blows my mind when I look back to all the big pains I started without ever doing any kind of sketch whatsoever and a lot of times it led to so many headaches and so much like reworking on a big painting which takes forever and again very demoralizing like now I can't imagine starting a painting without doing a little SketchUp at first even portraits doing like a small little study with no detail can help you so much just figuring out the light patterns like how the lights hit in the face what are the colors what are the big shapes what are the big values painting small is such a shortcut to you figuring out what makes a painting really work and it's not the details it's the composition the drawing the big shapes and the big values which can all be figured out in a small little study all right number four is don't go too white too quickly what I mean is when you're mixing up a color and you need to make it lighter don't just immediately go for white to light in the color I see students do that a lot what happens is their colors get very chalky and don't have quite as much punch to them an example of this is if you're painting the leaves in a tree and you got the shadowed side of the tree it is a dark green and now you need to make a lighter green for the leaves that are getting hit with sunlight you don't want to go to White yes it will make the green lighter but you're going to wash out your color a way to think about it is green is made up of blue and yellow now blue is a darker value and yellow is a lighter value so start by trying to mix a green that has a little more yellow in it now yes you're still going to have to play around with it and add red to desaturate it and mess around but you can get a lighter Value Green without using any white now yeah sometimes you will need to use white but in my experience teaching students go to it way sooner than they should all right this week's video is brought to you by hellofresh I'm actually really into health and fitness so in hello fresh that they wanted to sponsor a video I was like absolutely I'm super busy painting and making videos so it's so nice to be able to skip the store skip the lines and spend more time painting knowing I'm going to have Chef crafted recipes delivered right to my door hellofresh now has 40 weekly recipes to choose from they're all so good I had such a hard time figuring out which one I was gonna make but I ended up going with the tacos and it's so great because I'm not that great of a cook so having their easy to follow recipe cards with 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whoa like their pal is just a bunch of like isolated little piles everywhere like it doesn't seem like there's any organic branching off from one pile and making it lighter you know branching off making it cooler or warmer it was like every single time they need a new color they just started a new pile and one I feel like it gives your painting color Harmony because they're being derived a lot of times from the same pile of paint but also I feel like it helps me mentally like the physical act of like understanding how I'm getting to a certain color it's like all right I have this color and now it's going further into the distance so I'm going to push it a little more blue I it's like oh like it's not it's too saturated I want to make a desaturated version so I'm going to you know push a little more of its compliment like oh I need to add a little more white I'm going to push it a little more white it just helps things make more sense in my mind than just a bunch of different colors all splattered around my palette all right quick side note here if you struggle with color mixing I actually offer the color mixing video for my foundations of oil painting course for free if you want to check that out there's a link to it in the description of this video all right number six is always try and start with the darkest light that you can what I mean by that is when you're blocking out your painting in a lot of my videos I've talked about how I like to block out my paintings with big shapes of flat color you know blocking out the shadow family and the light family but when it comes time to blocking out the light family or just any light shapes try and start with the darkest light that you can because you want to be able to build lighter values on top of that with oil paint it's a lot easier to work dark to light than light to dark it's just a lot easier to lighten paint as you go opposed to darken it as you go a lot of times I see students start out too bright and they don't have anywhere else to go to make it lighter and they either one make it too bright and put a ton of white in it to make up the value difference or they just leave it and the area kind of ends up looking flat because they don't have any smaller value shapes to create form all right number seven is go extreme with your composition now composition is a big subject and but I think a great place to start is to make your composition extreme now what I mean by that is make very strong decisions especially with Landscapes I always say take the part of the landscape that you find the most interesting and make it take up as much space on the canvas as you can so if you're painting some mountains and you really like the mountains put the Horizon low and make those mountains take up as much of the canvas as possible if you like a big set of trees place them so they take up as much of the canvas as you can if it's a river or or you know body of water that you like put the horizon line up high so most of the painting is that stream or body of water last thing you want is to have everything in the painting taken up pretty much the same amount of space that's not very Dynamic and it gets very boring and it's hard because your initial instincts are to look at a landscape and be like oh like I really like the sky and I like that River and I like that tree and that mountain and you think oh like I want to incorporate all these as much as I can and when you do that you just end up dividing the attention to all of them and not one element has all the attention you always want one star of the painting all right number eight is tone your canvas now as I said before I like to do this a lot with burnt sand and ultramarine blue because if you started on plain white any value you put on it would look really dark because it's right next to white but with a neutral value you're gonna have a better gauge you're starting in the middle of the value scale and the thing you can do to help you with values that involves tone in your canvas is making a value map a lot of times I will draw out my subject and then block out the major values using the tone canvas as my mid-tone I was trying to block paintings out in three values a dark a mid-tone and a light so if I already have a mid-tone I can block out my darks and I can actually take some paper towel dip in a little bit of paint thinner and pull off some paint for the lights and this is just a great way to start a painting because you've mapped out the values and it's going to act as such a helpful guide once you start adding colors I also just found it helpful to start a painting the same way every time because you get familiar with it and you get comfortable with it and you need some sort of consistency to progress and get better it's similar to people that like to have a morning routine like it's how you start your day and it grounds you and I feel like that's the same way with toning my canvas like every time I start Towing my canvas block out my values and I'm on my way all right number nine is is Photoshop is totally worth it in my opinion now yeah it's not cheap I think you can get it for like 20 bucks a month but I just honestly use it so much I mean yeah I use it a lot for teaching but even not teaching like there's so many cool aspects to photoshop that can help you with painting one they have like the Color Picker so you can go through and kind of pick out colors and see what they are see how saturated they are how desaturated they are you can easily put a grid on your painting if you need uh help drawing you can crop your painting to certain Dimensions to fit a certain size canvas that you have you can rearrange compositions to get a better idea of what something will look like the thing I probably use the most are the filters these are really helpful just to get you to see things a lot more simply like you can put a blur filter on it that will just get rid of detail and that will help me a lot kind of see what is going on before I start painting it's also good for exercises I've done exercises where I will purposely use a blurred version of the photo at least for the beginning of the painting so I don't get caught up in details and I just see the big shapes there's also like the palette knife filter that helps simplify things in the big shapes or the cutout filter actually just use the cutout filter for a tutorial on patreon it was like a portrait tutorial it was the cutout filter and just broke up the face into big connected shapes to kind of help show you how simply you can paint a portrait and how much of it relies on these big shapes and getting the right value of these shapes I can also put photos in there and you know adjust the brightness that can just the contrast you know I can fix a photo as much as I can before I start painting So if you're on the fence about Photoshop I highly recommend it all right and number 10 is try to paint on linen if you can now I love painting on canvas I've painted a ton of great paintings on canvases but if you haven't tried linen it's definitely worth a try it's going to be a finer weave it's going to be smoother and I just personally like it a lot it's great because there actually are some more reasonably priced linen products out there like most of the time linen panels or canvases are just insanely expensive but there's companies like uh Centurion which makes oil primed linen and acrylic Prime linen I suggest the acrylic Prime the oil Prime can be a little slick which some painters like like I like using that sometimes but if you're just starting out you'll probably like the acrylic Prime more and I've so I've used those so much in the past like they're linen panels they just I think they just started selling them on Amazon but the ones I've been using lately are a little bit better it's the Frederick's oil primed linen panels I've been liking those a lot they are a little more expensive but for me in my circumstances I think it's worth it all right that's it for this video I hope you enjoyed if you did please hit that like button subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see what I'm painting on a daily basis you can follow me on Instagram forza43 I'm Chris fornatero here telling you to go get painting

Channel: Paint Coach

Views: 72,610

Keywords: portrait oil painting tips, portrait oil painting tips for beginners, how to get better at oil painting for beginners, oil painting lesson for beginners, what you are doing wrong with your oil paintings, the easiest way to use oil paints, what no one is telling you about oil painting, how to instantly improve you paintings, how to use oil paints the right way, how I start every oil painting, My 10 best oil painting shortcuts

Id: By5ryf3wbAw

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023