A Simple Beginners Guide To Oil Painting

All right, so if you're new to oil painting, this is the video for you. I'm gonna go over pretty much everything you need to know to start oil painting. I'm gonna go over all the materials I use. I'm gonna keep things super simple, easy, and not overcomplicated. Then I'm gonna go over some good practicing strategies. You know, things like what you should be painting and how you should be thinking about learning oil painting. If you don't know what to paint for your first painting, like what do I paint, what do I do? I got your first painting for you. All right, let's start with materials. I feel like this is always the first barrier to enter with people, or like the thing that keeps people from jumping in the oil paint. So like, oh, like, I don't know what to get, or, oh, I got an oil painting set, but I don't know how to use it. I don't know what I'm gonna do. We're gonna fix all that right now. All right, let's just first talk about brushes. There are many different kinds of brushes, many different kinds of shapes. There's filberts, flats, rounds, and a whole bunch of others. Now, I could sit here for an hour and just talk about different kinds of brushes and what you can use it for and the effects and this and that. But if you're just starting out, that would be a big waste of time. Don't overthink the brushes. Main things are, first off, you wanna make sure they're actual oil painting brushes. You don't wanna be using acrylic or watercolor brushes because the bristles aren't gonna be as sturdy enough to handle that thick oil paint. Also, you're going to need a lot less brushes than you think you need. It's not a case of, oh, the more brushes, the better. Actually, I kind of think it's the opposite. Like, I feel like the more you can utilize one brush, the better. Like, I'll paint a lot of my paintings only using three brushes. All right, maybe four. Now, if you're like me and you went to the art store to buy your first oil painting brushes and you saw like all these brushes and you're like, ah, like, what do I get? What do I do? I got the solution for that. And for me, it was using Rosemary & Co brushes. Back when I was first starting out, they had artist brush sets, which were great. So, like, I would see a painter who painted in the way that I wanted to paint and I'd check out their brush set. And it just helped me figure out, like, what I needed. And I've been recommending their brushes for so long and I actually have a brush set now for this exact purpose, for people just starting out. I kept it very simple. They are all flat brushes. I like flat brushes because you can get a straight edge if you want to. You can turn them on its side. You can get all sorts of different marks with them. And I purposely kept it to as few brushes as possible to, one, save you money, but also, two, to just keep things simple and also give you practice wielding a brush a bunch of different ways. So, if you want to check out my brush set, a link to that is in the description of this video. All right, now let's move on to paint. Let's first talk about colors. Now, I'm a big, gigantic believer in using just the primaries in white when you first start out. I feel like it gives you a strong understanding of color and color theory and how it works. More specifically, I like to use ultramarine blue, cadmium red, and cadmium yellow light, or lemon yellow, and titanium white. Understand how to use those and wield those and it will help you so much because you don't want to get in the habit of any time you need a color to just go and try and buy that color in the tube. And as you get better and fully understand how to use the primaries in white, you'll naturally figure out colors that you want to add to your palette as shortcut colors. Now, if you want to know what I mean when I say like shortcut colors and if you don't understand how to mix the primaries in white, I actually offer the color mixing video for my foundations of oil painting course for free. If you want to check that out, the link is in the description of this video. So, primaries in white. Now, I also get a lot of people asking like what brand of paint, this brand, that brand, good, bad, student grade, professional grade. I like the Winsor & Newton paint. I feel like that's the most common around, like pretty much find it at any arts and crafts store. Now, I personally like to use Gamblin oil paint. I did use Winsor & Newton like student grade for a very long time. And honestly, when I first started oil painting, I couldn't really tell the difference. And I feel like if you can't tell the difference, just keep using the student grade paint if that's what you like. You know, yes, it's not as good as professional grade paint, but if you're just starting out, I really don't think it's that important. There's much other bigger things you should be worrying about. All right, now let's move on to paint thinner. This is the liquid that you see in these little jars that you're washing your brush in while you're painting. There's sometimes mineral spirits or turpentine, brush cleaner, paint thinner. Now, I particularly like to use Gamsol. Apparently, it's the most studio friendly in terms of fumes. There still are toxic fumes with it. So, make sure you got decent ventilation in your studio wherever you're painting. If you don't wanna get that, there is a non-toxic paint thinner by Chelsea Studios that's really good. So, you can use that as another option. Or if you wanna use water mixable oil paints, that is a whole nother option as well. I get people asking me, are those okay? I think they're great. I've done a lot of paintings with water mixable oil paints. And when I used them, I just used water and some Gamblin solvent-free gel as my medium, which I'll talk about in a little bit. Now, I've tried all different kinds of brands of oil paints, the Duo Aqua, the Cobra, Windsor Newton, they're all great. So, those are always an option as well. All right, now let's talk about palettes. Ton of great palettes. You know, there's glass palettes, there's wood palettes. But honestly, the best bang for your buck is a pad of palette paper. I like to get the gray palette paper. Got some neutral values, so it helps me gauge colors and values a lot better while it's on my palette. It's convenient and super easy to clean up. I really have nothing else to say about palettes. Pad of palette paper. All right, easels. This isn't watercolors where you're gonna be wanting to work on a flat surface. You actually want it up. So, I recommend getting an easel, even if it's like one of those small little easels that you can put on a table. I've had students that do that and it works good for them. If you can, highly suggest painting standing up because it allows you to step back. If you're sitting down while painting, it's very easy to get locked in and zeroed in and lose sight of the big picture. All right, let's move on to medium. This trips up people a lot. Now, yes, there's all different kinds of mediums, but I'm gonna keep things extremely simple for you. And suggest that you get some Gamblin' solvent-free gel. I feel like it's the easiest to get. They kind of have it everywhere. And I see it in like every art supply store I go to. Linseed oil is also great, but I've found myself using the Gamblin' solvent-free gel more often lately. The main problem I see that students have with medium is that they're trying to get oil paint to behave like watercolor acrylic. And they think, oh, if I can just get the oil paint to dry faster, that will solve all my problems and make oil painting a lot easier. Now, the solvent-free gel, I think it is still going to like speed up the dry time a little bit, but you should never be like counting on that. You're using oil paint. So use it like oil paint. Don't try and make it behave like acrylics. Like if you want it to behave like acrylics, then go do acrylics. And one of the biggest advantages of oil paint is that the paint stays wet longer and you can work paint that's already on the canvas. You can push it and pull it and alter the color, work in other color, scrape down paint if you want. It's very flexible. And I know at first that can seem like a thing that's gonna make oil painting more difficult, but I promise you, like once you get the hang of it, you're gonna think oil painting is way easier than watercolors and acrylics. You're gonna find it way more forgivable. Just gonna take a little bit of time. All right, now let me do a quick demonstration using medium to kind of show and explain to you its purpose in painting. All right, so I got some paint thinner right here. I have my medium right here, which is the solvent-free gel. And to keep this really simple, I like to think of using the paint and the medium in pretty much three different ways. First way is just paint with paint thinner. So I have right here and you can see how transparent it is, how fluid it is, almost looks like watercolors. Now it's not the only way that you can use it. You know, you can change the consistency, you know, by adding a little more paint, making it a little thicker. So the paint is still thin, but you know, it's gonna be more opaque than say that. So you're probably thinking like, okay, so it just works the same as acrylics and watercolors. Like, why do you have medium then? If you can make it thinner, thicker with how much paint thinner is in it, why have medium? The thing is like when you use paint thinner, it is going to dull the color a little bit. So sometimes, like if I make a green here with just straight paint, it's got some yellow and some blue, the paint is going to be very, very thick. And you can see when I do just straight paint, kind of how dry of a stroke you can get, which you might want sometimes. But if you want the paint to flow more and you don't want to knock the vibrancy of the color, I just add a little bit of my medium and now it flows a whole lot better. Now don't try to think like there's some formula of like when you're supposed to use paint thinner and when you're supposed to use medium. Like I'm constantly moving around and it's just whatever the painting is dictating because it helps to work thin to thick. And so this is the thinnest and you get a little thicker with the medium. And then the thickest is just straight paint. Like if I tried to just take some of this green, that's a medium, make it a little lighter so you can tell the difference. But I can go over the paint that has the paint thinner. I can work over top of that. Same thing goes with using straight paint over top of paint that has medium in it. You know, I can work thicker paint on top of that. And it's not just, you know, one, two, three. There's a ton of phases and varieties in between each one of these. These are just kind of like the big three consistencies that I have in my mind while I'm painting. And hopefully once you get used to it, you won't even be thinking about this. You'll just be painting and making the paint consistency, whatever it needs to be for that part. So if you still don't quite understand like medium, don't worry about it. Like I've had students where I tell them, just don't worry about using the medium. Just use paint and paint thinner. You can still get the paint pretty thick just using paint and paint thinner. And just do that. There's a lot of painters that don't use medium. So keep it simple and don't overcomplicate it. All right, now let's move on to painting surfaces. Lots of painting surfaces out there. I recommend canvas. Canvas has a weave to it, which helps with gripping the oil paint and having a good texture. You know, I always recommend that students get a pad of just regular Fredericks canvas paper to have for practice. You know, you don't wanna be getting like super expensive stretch canvas just to practice on. So then you're gonna feel obligated to have a successful painting every single time you sit down and paint, which is not a good way to go about learning to oil paint. Now, pretty much any canvas that you buy already stretched or in a canvas pad or on a panel is already gonna be gessoed or primed. I know some people get that confused, like primed gesso. It's like, yeah, it's primed with gesso. And the gesso makes the canvas not as absorbent. If you didn't have that gesso on there and you tried to put the paint straight on the canvas, that paint would get sucked right into that canvas and be very difficult to paint. All right, next is paper towels. I go through a lot of paper towels. The thing, like when you're cleaning your brush while you're painting, yeah, you're swishing it around in your paint thinner, but you should also have paper towels. Like I always have a bunch of paper towels in my left hand and I'm using those to clean the brush and like pinch the paint out of the bristles. Paint thinner pretty much just like loosens up the paint and you get most of it off with the paper towel. I always say paper towels are the unsung hero of oil painting. All right, now let's talk about cleanup. You got a pad of pallet paper, just fold it up and throw it away. Now, if you wanna save your colors, you can get a glass pallet or just a piece of like tempered glass and put the paint from your pallet to the glass and save it for the next day. With cleaning your brushes, I actually kind of never clean my brushes because I use this brush dip from Geneva. It's great. It's a very slow drying oil. You know, when I'm done painting, I clean the brushes as best I can just in the paint thinner and the paper towel and I dip them in this brush dip and then just set them down. And this dip is so slow drying that it would take like over a week for any paint in the bristles to dry and ruin the bristles. And again, I'm painting pretty much every day so I really don't have to wash my brushes. Now, if you get to the point where you do, there's a ton of brush cleaners out there you can get like soap meant for cleaning your brushes or the simple, easier way is just use dish soap. You know, put a little dab of it in the palm of your hand, some warm water and wipe the brush and the soap until you don't see paint come out anymore. Now, the cool thing with paint thinner is that you can actually reuse paint thinner. So I recommend getting a few jars and the thing is with paint thinner, if you let it sit for a day or two, all the sludge in it will settle at the bottom and you can pour off the clean paint thinner on top and reuse it. All right, so you got your material squared away. Now what do you do? Like what should you be focusing on? What should you be painting? What strategy should you have to learn oil painting? Well, the first thing I recommend is try and choose one person or method to study and stick with for a good period of time because a big problem people run into, which I ran into when I first started oil painting, is that I would bounce around from instructor to instructor and I would never gain any traction because my method and my materials and my approach kept changing. So I could never make steps forward. I just kept making lateral steps. And it's difficult, especially with social media now, like you have access to so many amazing, really good painters and you get to see their methods and their techniques and how they work. And the bad thing is is that they all work and they're all good. But if you're going from one to the other and back to another and this and that, it's gonna make it very difficult to make progress. But what I've come to discover is that any instructor or method or technique with oil painting that is good really is based about the painting fundamentals. The difference between them is just how they go about using those and teaching those. And the painting fundamentals are things like drawing, color, value, composition, edges, form. If you're having trouble with your paintings, I guarantee you the answer lies in one of the painting fundamentals. So when you're practicing, don't be afraid to do exercises or just anything that's not a full polished painting that you're gonna display as like a showcase piece, which I find is very hard for people starting out. It was definitely hard for me. Like every time you sit down and paint, you wanna have a good painting at the end that you can show people. Like there's nothing wrong with that. Everybody wants to do that. But looking back, I feel like I made the most progress and actually got better when I stopped to actually study, to do paintings solely just to figure things out and to test things out. You know, some exercises I've talked about on my channel are things like painting the plain fruit. It'll help you understand planes and light and shadow, values, you know, doing very small landscape studies for composition, doing paintings in black and white to better understand values, you know, doing paintings that are purposely just simple flat shapes. The cool thing about exercises is that a lot of them get rid of other elements of painting so you don't have to deal with them and you are just focusing on the one element you're trying to get better at. And when you do do paintings, not exercises, really try and do paintings that you feel you can get done in one to three sittings. Because you're going to learn best by going through the whole process of painting from beginning to end. So if you're doing nothing but really big paintings that take you weeks, you're limiting the amount of reps that you can get at painting, which is going to limit the rate at which you're gonna get better. You know, you're gonna get better if you do 10 small paintings in a month than doing one big painting that month. Because you're only gonna get experience solving the problems that that one big painting has to offer instead of the variety of problems that doing 10 paintings will have to offer. Now let's move on to a possible first assignment. You don't know what to paint, I highly suggest this. Even if you do know what you want to paint and you have been painting for a while, try this out. I think you'll find it very valuable. Because what we're gonna do here is we're going to paint this simple still life. But we're going to paint it and think about it in terms of just shapes of flat color. So when we start, this is all we're focused on. We're trying to just make our painting look like this at first. If you want, you can take a screenshot of this to try on your own. So I'm working on a small panel, it's six by eight inches. I definitely recommend doing this painting small. And I'm toning it with just a brown that I mixed from all the primaries. You know, using a lot of paint thinner, putting it on and then wiping it with a paper towel. This is making it so we're not starting on a plain white canvas. It's gonna make it easier for us to gauge values. Values are how light or dark a color is. You know, if I just started on straight white, every single color I put on it would seem dark because it's next to white. And this tone is helping us start more in the middle of the value scale. And actually draw in the subject just using thin paint. And in this drawing stage, I block out the light and shadow parts of each object. I'm breaking the subject down into just two values, light and dark, keeping it simple. All right, when it comes time to adding color, I start with my darkest value. I like to work dark to light. So I get this background in. I know you're thinking like, oh, like it's black. How am I gonna get black? We don't have black on our palette. If you use ultramarine blue and cad red, you're gonna get a very deep purple. If you add just a touch of yellow to that purple, it's gonna de-saturate a little bit. You're gonna get a color that looks a lot like black. Now I get a lot of people asking like, oh, can you use black? Is black good? Is black bad? Like black's fine. I use ivory black a lot in portraits. There's nothing bad about it. It's just the only thing I've seen is that when students have it on their palette and they don't fully understand the primaries yet, they tend to constantly go to black to darken any color that they have. And that's not a good habit to get into. And it's just gonna dull your colors and you're not gonna fully understand colors, which is why I recommend students at first not start out with black. At this point, the paint is relatively thin. You know, it's not transparent, but it's not, you know, being caked on there. I like to work dark to light and also thin to thick with my paint. You know, I'm just going through now, blocking everything out with black color. I'm trying to pay very close attention to value relationships. That's how light or dark a color is. And since I know my background is the darkest color, I can relate everything back to that. I can say, all right, I got this color. It's lighter than the background, but how much lighter? Is it just a little bit lighter? Or is it a lot lighter? Helpful thing you can do a lot of times is take a picture of your painting while you're working on your phone and put it in black and white. Then put your reference in black and white and compare the values. Or you can, you know, buy some red clear film, just hold it up and you can compare the values that way. It's the same, value does all the work, but color gets all the credit. Getting your values right is a lot more important than getting your colors right. All right, that's stage one. Time to move on to stage two, which is adding more smaller shapes on top of these big shapes. Here you're gonna start to see form happening. The main thing I want you to take from this exercise is how to think about the process of painting and to think in terms of working big shapes to small shapes. All right, now, even though we are working in these defined stages, don't feel like you can't jump back a step. Like here in this lemon, I realized I wanted to adjust this color before putting a smaller shape on top of it, so I did. All right, and now we are going onto the last level of shapes. This is the last level, last level of paint. So a lot of times this is going to be the thickest paint you're gonna be using, also probably the lightest colors you're gonna be using. And once you're done with that, it's just a matter of touch-ups. If you want to smooth these harsh, crisp edges of the shapes, you can. You can just take a clean brush, just kind of run it, run it along these harsh edges to soften them up. And that's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed. If you did, please hit the like button, subscribe to the channel. If you have any questions about oil painting, leave those questions in the comments section. If you decide to do this still life painting exercise, please tag me on Instagram at forza43 and use the hashtag paint coach. I would love to see that. All right, I'm Chris Fornitero, here telling you to go get painting.