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Beginners Oil Painting Tips and Advice – Thinking While Painting

Oil painting is a mainly right brain activity but the left brain is by no means idle. What sort of brain activity goes not the act of painting?

Here are some answers:

The Drawing Phase – In this phase you create a drawing on your canvas. During this effort you should be preoccupied with all the technical issues that make a good drawing.

Is this shape right? Is this angle too shallow? Is this object in the right place? Is this line too short or too long? Is this what I intend to convey to my audience? In other words, be preoccupied with concepts such as accuracy, seeing, comparing, judging, etc.

You must learn to draw well so you don’t get constantly distracted by your lack of skill.

The Block-in Phase – This is the phase where you color the large shapes in your drawing. Here you must keep in mind not to deform, enlarge, or crimp these shapes which were already correctly established in the Drawing Phase.

Be busy judging colors in terms of hue, value, and intensity. At the same time, think about how you will mix these colors on your palette. Which tube colors will you use? To do this well, you need to learn a few things about color mixing. During this phase, I recommend using fairly thin paint.

In all this, squinting is a great help, particularly for discerning values. To identify hues, avoid staring at them for too long. It’s better to have a quick look, preferably with your peripheral vision. Also, restrain yourself from painting details.

The Shaping Phase – This phase involves the modeling of the shapes so they look like the real objects. Here you should revert back to the drawing mode. That is, think angles, lengths, curves, and position.

Also, refine the values, hues, and intensities. Force yourself to observe and to compare. Stand back regularly and judge your work from a distance. Also, in this phase we use thicker paint.

Keep in mind that at the end of this phase your painting should be more or less finished.

The Detail Phase – This is the final phase where you add in the details. This is the icing on the cake phase where you can dream and let your individual talent come to the fore.

Be in a delicate and soft mood. Think of hints, lost edges, accents, etc. Use thin paint for delicate lines or thick paint for highlights. Be discrete and measured. Don’t overdo it.

The purpose of this article was to give you an idea of the sort of thinking patterns that go into the painting process. Painting is a mentally demanding activity and requires very much a multi-tasking approach. For many people, this takes some getting used to. At first, you may want to write lists of the various things to keep in mind while creating your masterpiece. Later on, all this will become second nature. As always, practice makes perfect.No shortcuts here.

Oh yes, and above all, don’t forget to sign your painting!

For the tips about how to draw with pencil and upper back tattoos please read the quoted publications.

It is not surprising that coming up with tattoo ideas can be hard. After all, a tattoo is permanently etched on your skin, so it is something that you will have to live with and look at for the rest of your life. This is why it is so imperative that you decide on a design that you are going to be completely happy with, and why you should never rush into getting a tattoo.

When it comes to the matter of coming up with your own tattoo ideas, you may be overwhelmed by the multitude of designs and options out there, but you should know that by taking a few simple steps you will be able to make the entire process a great deal easier on yourself.

Getting Started

The first thing that you should do if you are trying to come up with tattoo ideas is brainstorm. Get out a piece of paper and a pencil like you did in school and write down some jot notes, draw some pictures, whatever comes to mind and whatever you want to do.

Basically you just want to scribble out your thoughts as they come to you, and remember that you do not have to make anything look too good or finalize anything at this point, now is just the time to get the creative juices flowing.

Elaborating

Once you have finished a quick brainstorming session, then you want to take the tattoo ideas that you already have and elaborate on them. This means adding on to pictures you drew, or using the Internet or tattoo books to look up design ideas about tattoo ideas that you wrote down on your list.

This is one of the most important steps, and it is at this point that you could basically go one of two ways: create your own unique tattoo or use one that has already been drawn. Of course there is always the in between option of starting with a drawn tattoo and then adding your own designs into it, and this is a great idea because then it will be a design that you love but with your own creative and personal flair wrapped into it.

If you are not that great of drawer it is okay, because any good tattoo shop will make sure that the artist sits down with you for a consultation before you get the tattoo, so that the artist can work with you and decide on the perfect tattoo design.

Beginners Oil Painting Tips – The Detail Phase

The fourth and final phase of the basic oil painting process is the detail phase. This is the time to incorporate all the details like small decorations, fine textures, and highlights.

At the end of the first phase we are left with a complete drawing of the scene we wish to paint. The purpose of the second phase is to take the drawing and transform it into a series of large colored shapes. These large shapes must have the correct geometry and color. The third phase, i.e., the shaping phase, consists of modeling and refining the large colored shapes we produced in the second phase.

By the end of the shaping phase we should have more or less a finished painting. There are is no white canvas left and all objects and subjects should be drawn and colored correctly.

Details include things like small twigs, pupils, eye lashes, small lines and curves, and highlights on a cheek or piece of clothing. In short, anything that cannot be done with a large brush.

Some details will require the use of thinned-out paint. For example, when adding thin lines or curves for hair or grass, we can get good results by using thing paint. However, in these situations you should always be aware of the so-called fat-over-lean rule of oil painting.

The fat-over-lean rule of oil painting states that you should always paint fat over lean. The words fat and lean refer to the amount of oil contained in the paint. When applying layers of oil paint on top of each other on your canvas, you should always apply a fatter layer on top of a leaner layer. If you put a lean layer on top of a wet fat layer changes are that, after some time, the lean layer will start to show cracks.

Other details may require the use of thick paint often right out of the tube. This is the case with heavy highlights and very intense accents such as red reflection on a roof of a house.

The reason details are better added at the very end as a fourth phase is that they are usually quite small and need to be placed very precisely. Therefore, it is better to start with painting large general shapes and then to progressively add refinements until the entire scene is correctly reproduced on your canvas.

Also, details are often meant to be accents of intense color which requires thick paint and therefore, according to the fat-over-lean rule, are best put on last.

Finally, with the benefit of an almost finished painting it becomes much easier to judge if the added details are artistically well-distributed. For example, it is almost always the case that a focal point area will have more detail than other areas. For comparison purposes it is a good thing to have at your disposal a general overview of the entire painting.

Learn more about how to draw with pencil.

For the tips about upper back tattoos, read this post.

You do have to be British to appreciate Jack Dee’s take on tattoos.

Funny stuff, all the same!

Jack Dee Tattoos

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How to Draw with Pencil Fundamentals – The Line

The line is one of the most basic entities used in drawing. The straight line has two fundamental properties:

Length – Naturally, the length of a straight line is the distance between its beginning point and its end point.

Direction – A straight line also has a direction. Its direction is determined by the angle it makes with a horizontal or vertical line.

So, when you want to draw a straight line you need to think about two things: length and direction.

Then, you also have to develop a technique to actually draw that line. A pencil artist seldom uses a ruler to draw a straight line. Lines are drawn free-hand. And this takes quite a bit of practice. In the end you should be able to draw straight lines and parallel lines fairly quickly and in one stroke.

The idea here is to swing your arm from the elbow as opposed to from the wrist. You can use your wrist for tiny lines or other small details. But generally you keep your wrist and lower arm fixed as one unit and you rotate your elbow as you draw the line. This movement happens quite fast. Also, hold your pencil any way you want, i.e., the way you are used to it.

To measure the length of a line you can use the following procedure:

First, you choose a Basic Length Unit. It is the length of a line segment that is not too long and not too short relative to a scene.

We will choose two such basic units:

1. Life Unit – First, we choose a basic length unit for the real scene you want to draw. For a large life scene you can do this by holding a pencil at arm’s length with locked elbow. Then, with one eye closed, you can measure a basic unit with your pencil using your thumb as a marker. Draw this line segment on a separate piece of paper.

2. Paper Unit – Now, you also need a basic length for your actual drawing. This is because the size of the real scene will usually be different from the one you will render on your paper. Again, use your pencil to choose a basic length unit suitable for the size of your paper and call it the “Paper Unit”. Draw it next to the Life Unit.

Now we are ready to use these two basic units. We use the Life Unit to measure any length on the real composition. We express these lengths in terms of the number of Life Units. For example, you will speak of this table leg being about half a Life Unit or this hat sits 1.5 Life Units to the left of that umbrella. Don’t forget to make the measurements always in the same manner, i.e., at arm’s length, with locked elbow, and with one eye closed.

Next, you take your Paper Unit and multiply it by the ratio you just obtained with your Life Unit. For example, on your paper the table leg will measure 0.5 times the Paper Unit or the hat will sit 1.5 Paper Units to the left of the umbrella.

Then there remains the technique to measure angles:

Angles are measured relative to the horizontal and the vertical. If you work on rectangular paper you can use its vertical and horizontal edges as a reference. The angle you observe in your life composition will be the same on your paper. No ratio involved here.

Again, you can use your pencil but this time align it horizontally (or vertically) and estimate the angle a particular line makes with your horizontal or vertical. This technique requires some practice but after awhile you’ll get a feel for angles. After you’ve drawn the line you can check of the length as well as the angle seem right to you. It is remarkable how quickly the eye gets trained to detect incorrect proportions and angles. But it does take some time and practice.

Note that curved lines can be considered as a linkage of small straight lines so that the same techniques can also be applied in an approximate manner to these curved lines.

Feel interested to learn the skill of oil painting? Read beginners oil painting here.

For the upper back tattoos read these tips as well.