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5 Oil Painting Tips For Beginners
5 Oil Painting Tips For Beginners
5 Oil Painting Tips For Beginners
Beginners
Eli Hill
Aug 2, 2018 8:00am
Joe Fig
Inka's Floor, 2008
Lower East Side Printshop
$1,350
1. Paint Safely
Photo by Heather Moore, via Flickr.
David Shrigley
Untitled (Fire in my studio), 2014
Galleri Nicolai Wallner
When you go to buy paint, you’ll most likely be met with a wall-
sized rainbow of colors. Instead of purchasing every color you’d
like to include in your painting, start with just a few—carefully
choose the tubes. “The most productive method for starting out is
to limit your palette,” noted
Sedrick Chisom
, an artist who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“Usually, a cadmium orange or ultramarine blue combo is a
favored choice when first beginning,” he added. When you work
with two opposite colors, like blue and orange, it forces you to
focus on value––how light or dark your color is––instead of
intensity or chroma.
If you add one more tube to your palette, such as cadmium yellow
light (a pale yellow), or alizarin crimson (a magenta color), you’ll
see how few colors you need to create every other hue. “In the
store, they sell all types of greens that you can actually make with
yellows and blues,” said Valengin. “It's good practice to try to
make your own colors.”
If you’re not attuned to color theory, try making a chart to see how
your colors mix: start by drawing a grid, then place each of your
colors along the top and bottom. For each square, mix equal
amounts of the colors until you have filled in the chart with all of
the possible color combinations.