Blob-To-Reality Easy Still Life in Oil: 3 Ideas That Simplify Everything

On the left, you can see my final artwork, and on the right is how I began my painting. Hi everybody, Christine Lashley here. In this video, I'm going to share with you my three main ideas I use to stay on track and avoid detail when creating a still life painting. Let's break it down, keep it really simple, and hear about tip number one. In a painting filled with light and glitter, you might be surprised to know that tip number one is to maintain a strong dark group of objects, such as the bottles and the line of where the table meets the background. My strategy is to link these shapes together. Notice how the bottles on the left don't have a junction point, they just flow one right into the other. Of course, in addition to the darks, I do have a light area, because if the darks are grouped, the light will be left over, in essence, and I am thinking about that. Notice where the napkin and the label of the bottle join together, but mostly this painting is a collection of dark, which helps the light sparkle areas really shine when it's time to add those later. Tip two is to manipulate the paint. Thin to begin and thicker as you finish. In this 24 by 24 painting, you could see me working with light oil washes and kind of a sepia undertone. This paint was done with transparent oxide and a bit of cobalt blue. The thin washes are being applied with water as a solvent, and this is a and then wipe it off or restate. So you'll see me dissolving things, moving shapes together with a paper towel, and there's times when I wipe out to get back to the light substrate of the canvas, and then I'm free to paint dark paint on top of that. I do like to work in a gesture or blob type of shaggy shape, such as where the flowers are right now and some of the silverware, because I want to just have kind of a sketch or dash of line on the canvas just to move things around if I need to. Sometimes I'll shift things slightly to the right or left. Next up, I'm working on the junction of the elements on the table and how that fits with the window behind. That ended up being an important part of the objects fitting in the space being three-dimensional and the feel of the tablescape as I created the painting. A still life painting is one that I'll spend a lot of time in this kind of drawing and toning stage to work out the design. For landscapes, sometimes I go a little faster, so I'd say that probably half of the painting strategy was done at this time. Here, you can see how slowly I go. This is real-time footage, and in real time, I'm working on each brush stroke and maybe stepping back to take a look, so the speed version doesn't really show that as much. And I do let this stage dry before I go in with the full paint for the next stage. It's tempting to break out the full paint and get busy with creating the final image, but I stay in this kind of sepia range to work out some of the key elements. I decided to add a third wine glass. I felt like that would help the composition, and I'm looking out for the idea that all the bottles have lined up in accordance with the flowers, and I'm trying to introduce a bit of variety there. It's really tempting to move to the full paint stage or introducing color, and in the end, I decided to add a touch of red because I felt like that would help me to finish the design, so I did add that point to the wine glass in order to move forward. And next up, I'm going to be mixing some of the grays for the tablecloth and the window. Before I get too carried away with the full paint or working in color, I want to get some of the silverware, the trajectory of how it falls on the table. I really liked the scatter pattern of these forks and knives that were left out to dry from being hand washed. This was a great memory of a beautiful dinner, and then everything was hand washed and left out on the table, and I really liked that feeling of a fine meal and people had left the table, but it was a bit in disarray. It either looks like it's being set out for a feast or the feast happened, so I really liked that as part of the concept of the painting, and I felt like I really wanted to honor how the silverware was set out. That's another benefit of slowing down and taking the time to work out your painting in this black and white or sepia underpainting, is to uncover the key components that are going to make an impact for the emotional content of the painting and the design strategy of the kind of ghost image of where the painting is headed. So, definitely a good strategy to spend extra time at this stage. Well, now I'm starting the full paint layer, and I'm using a knife to get the paint applied. I work either in water mixable oil all the way through to the finish, or I switch to traditional oil and just make sure that the underpainting has no water left. I let that dry overnight or for about 12 hours. I used a different photo for the window. As I applied the paint, I kind of like the feeling of the window being open and not having the curtain. I feel like this choice was made from the underpainting stage. That showed me that I liked the grid marks that were left by the window, and it helped me to make that choice pretty easily. I set out to paint the sky area on the window first because I wanted to be able to mix exactly the right gray for the tablecloth. In general for gray, I mix a same color that I used for the underpainting, which is transparent oxide and some either cobalt or French ultramarine blue, plus a touch of titanium white. Well, here you can see as I've covered the tablecloth, everything optically looks a lot lighter. As the painting develops and the brown goes away, I do like the fact that it's kind of peeking out from underneath the gray that I have put on top. So again, the importance of the thinner layers and the thicker layers on top. The thin paint underneath and the thick paint on top does foster a sense of three-dimensionality, but it's nice to see the pop of that color just coming through in little spots of the canvas. As I progress with the painting, I want to add warm white and cool white. To learn more about warm and cool colors, check out this video. I'm working my way up towards the highlights. Those have not come in yet and I stay a little bit more in the medium range, so I'm saving the highlights for the shine on the crystal and the shine on the glasses until a much later stage of the painting. Before we get to tip number three, I want to finish talking about the paint application process as it relates to the painting at this stage, because we're going to address the issue of the background. The background needs to be a bit calmer in order for all of the texture and the objects that are towards the viewer to appear as if they're in front. So I am thinking at this stage about having a more three-dimensional image, and even in the photo you could see that some of the things in the background are somewhat collected or fuzzy. So that's what I want to do, is have the background recede and look like it's even further in the distance. Therefore, when I'm painting, I'm fuzzing some of the edges. I'm moving the brush back and forth and painting wet and wet so that I don't have as many sharp lines in the background. To further that soft effect even more, I scrape down with the knife and that acts as a unifier and moves the color around and breaks down the edges even more. Coming up next is going to be a final layer of some highlights. I still have a part of the painting that's a bit unfinished, but I tackle the window to the tablecloth relationship first in order to understand how the rest of the painting is going to come together. The highlights are a lot of fun to do, but it's really important to wait to the right stage of the painting to create those because if you jump into highlights too quickly, that value gets used up. The bright white can kind of take over and then there's no punch left or sparkle. I have some paintings that were on the wall that I created kind of as a last move of the artwork and I sometimes don't know which I'm going to paint first or which will be last. Sometimes it's create the center and move out. In this case, it was the window to the tablecloth relationship and the pictures were just after the fact, but maybe it's more about the foreground, middle ground, and background and setting everything up to have that candle in the middle kind of leading the viewer back through that path of light. Tip number three is to go beyond the photo. Don't fall into the trap of being locked into one photograph. Instead, it's great to work from multiple photographs or better yet, work from a still life in person. If one photograph is copied, it has a little bit more of a flattening effect, but by working either from life or multiple photos, it has a more three-dimensional feel to the still life and it shows up in the artwork. The centerpiece of the flower collection, those hydrangeas, that ended up being a critical part of the painting and I spent more time on that than I thought I would. I was kind of surprised that that was causing some issues with integration with the painting because I thought I had set it up pretty well. That is kind of a surprise that can happen towards the end that you're saving something that's kind of easy and it's like, oh boy, crystal and silverware and cloth is supposed to be hard and these flowers are just dots, but here I'm working on the different highlights and just using the knife to kind of unify things to break down some of the crystal bays so it's not too obvious. I also am having a wine glass in the studio just to see what that looks like in different light, holding it up to the painting if needed, and then working on the background as well. I want to make sure that I keep that soft and nothing is too dominant. I'm sure that if I was fixated on one photo this painting would not have come together, so I feel that in the end not working from one photo but working instead from multiple photos was really the key to make this painting work and think flexibly as I work towards the finish. Do like and subscribe, I sure appreciate you being here. We'll look at the final artwork next and you can see how all the details came together. The last piece of the painting was actually going out and buying some hydrangea flowers in order to finish this from reference in person, and then I was pretty happy with how everything came together. And here's the final artwork up close and the finish. Thanks everybody!