Beginners Oil Painting Tips and Advice - Canvas Stretching

If you find that commercial pre-stretched canvas is too expensive or if you are just interested, you can make your own canvases. You can buy rolls of primed or raw canvas in various sizes and qualities. Once bought, the first thing to do is to stretch a canvas of a desired size using stretcher bars.

The stretching process is fairly straightforward. You will need to buy stretcher bars. You can find them in any serious art supply store or on the Internet. Stretcher bars have tongue-and-groove corners and are usually 1.25 or 2.5 inches wide.

To make one canvas you will need 2 sets of 2 equal bars. All four bars should fit together tightly and no nails are used. After you have assembled the stretcher, use a T-square to check if the four corners are square.

Now, stretching a piece of canvas involves the following steps:

1) Center the stretcher on top of a piece of canvas that is 1.5 inches larger that the stretcher on all sides.

2) Fold the canvas around a set of two opposing bars. Using a tack fasten one side of the canvas to the center of the bar.

Then stretch the canvas by hand or with canvas pliers and tack the other side in the middle of the other bar. A straight line in the form of a crease running from one tack to the other should now be visible.

3) Next, repeat the procedure of 2) with the two other opposing sides of the canvas. A diamond shaped pattern should now be visible.

4) From here on, you continue from the middle of one of the bars and add a tack every 3 inches or so until you reach the corners. At the corners, nicely fold one end of the canvas under the other end and fasten this corner piece onto the bar with another tack.

Do not trim excess canvas. Instead, fold it over the back of the stretcher and tack it down just in case you need to re-stretch the canvas in the future.

5) If you notice any wrinkles in the canvas, you can remove one or two tacks in the right places, pull the canvas taut, and replace the tacks. To remove small uneven areas in the canvas, moisten the back of the area and let the canvas dry.

6) Usually the stretcher bars come with a set of so-called keys, i.e., small wooden wedges. These keys fit into slots at the inner corners of the stretchers and if necessary will further tighten the canvas. However, it is best to wait and see if the canvas actually slackens over time. If so you can pound the keys into slots at that time.

Note that nowadays, most artists use staples and a staple gun to fix the canvas to the stretcher. This approach is quicker and more convenient. However, for the sake of permanence and stability, it is still a good idea to use a regular tack in the middle of each of the bars.

Finally, when a painting is finished you may want to loosely place a sheet of cardboard inside the back of the stretcher. This will protect the back of your canvas.

Once you are used to the procedure, stretching a canvas goes fairly quickly. It is quite a bit cheaper than buying pre-stretched canvas. However, there still remains the task of priming the canvas in case you bought a roll of raw canvas. But, as far as stretching a canvas in concerned, this is all there is to it.

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Beginners Oil Painting Info - Oil Painting Supports

A ground or support is any kind of surface you can paint on. The choice of ground is in quite important because it determines in part how your painting will be perceived by the viewer.

Your support must satisfy a minimum of conditions. It must accept the paint well (i.e., the paint must stick in one stroke) without absorbing too much of the pigment.

The least expensive oil painting ground is treated paper. It is very useful for practice and even for doing certain commercial work. You can also buy canvas pads. These pads usually contain 10 sheets of medium tooth 5-oz cotton canvas that has been triple-primed with acrylic gesso. The tooth of paper or canvas is the degree of roughness or smoothness of the canvas.

Next in line are the popular canvas boards or panels which are sheets of cardboard covered with inex-pensive white painted cloth. These panels are very popularity because they are inexpensive (particularly when bought in bulk), easy to store, and easy to carry outdoors. They are however not permanent, i.e., they will deteriorate over time.

Good results can also be obtained from un-tempered Masonite or 3-ply chipboard prepared with three coats of gesso on the front and one coat on the back to prevent warping.

You can also use so-called museum board which is on the order of good-quality mat board. This board is quit absorbent but is inexpensive to practice on.

The ultimate ground for oil painting is canvas stretched over a wooden frame. It has wonderful elasticity and resilience, and history has shown that it has very good permanence.

You can buy commercially pre-stretched canvas. In fact, there are plenty of brands, sizes, weights, and qualities to choose from. Only experience will teach you which type of canvas is best suited to your style and subject matter.

Canvas cloth is either cotton or linen. The finest canvas and most expensive is made of linen, which stretches better and has a better tooth. Cotton can be a bit difficult to prime.

Look for cloth with an even weave. The canvas tex-ture can be tightly woven and smooth to fairly coarse with an open weave. That means the tooth of the canvas can be fine or coarse and anything in-between.

If you paint a lot, even commercially pre-stretched canvas can become expensive. If so, you can buy rolls of primed or unprimed (raw) canvas. Then with stretcher bars you can create a support of a certain size. If you bought unprimed canvas, you still have to prime the canvas with an oil-based primer.

To save money you may be tempted to work on small canvases. This is not recommended. Unless you are an experienced artist, working on a small ground can easily result in tight, overly controlled paintings. So use supports of at least 16″ x 20″.

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Beginners Oil Painting Info and Tips - Painting Values

It may come as a surprise to most people when I say that the colors in a painting are not the first thing the viewer’s brain takes in. In fact, the viewer’s brain will subconsciously go for the values (i.e., the darks and the lights) first.

The eye is very sensitive to variations in darks and lights. The colors themselves have each their own value. It is therefore just as important to reproduce the values in a painting as it is in a drawing. We must understand that if the value of the color is wrong then the actual color is wrong.

Every color has three facets to it: hue (red, yellow, etc.), value (dark, light, etc.), and intensity (bright, dull, etc.). And, in fact, boring as it may sound, value is the most important of the three. It is through value that we can reproduce the correct lighting of a scene. Hue by itself cannot do this.

In order to understand value better it is a good exercise to now and then paint a complete scene in black and white. This is far from a waste of time. Aside from being quite nice a black and white painting gives you the training in seeing values which you cannot do without if you are going to become a good painter.

The setup of a still-life, for example, proceeds as follows:

Objects - Choose a number of objects of varying values, i.e., from white all the way to black. Arrange these objects in a pleasing composition. You may actually make a few small sketches so you can see how your composition will look on a flat surface. Remember, the main purpose of this exercise is to learn how to visually separate the value from the hue.

Lighting - Use a bulb of at least 150 watt to light up your composition. Place the light slightly higher than the composition off to the right or left and at a 45 degree angle. You can move the light around a bit to see which situation gives you the most interesting lights and darks. Make sure there are also a few shadows present.

When painting you should stand as far away from your easel as is comfortably possible. For one, make sure to hold your long-handled brushes towards the end of the handles. The idea is to see the overall canvas so you can easily judge if a particular part of your painting fits correctly in the overall scene. Also adjust the easel so you can paint at about eye-level.

From here on we go through the four phases of the painting process:

(1) Drawing the scene - In this exercise I would suggest drawing directly on the canvas with a brush, say, a no. 4 filbert. You do this with a neutral mixture of black and white. The important thing in this phase is to get the geometry of the entire scene correct.

(2) Blocking in - In this phase we paint the large areas without paying attention to the details. Just make sure you keep the correct geometry and the correct value. Judging the values of the colored objects is the point of the exercise. So spend some quality time on this. Squinting may be helpful for most people. Start with the darkest values and then the lightest. After that you can fill all the in-between values of the remaining large areas that are part of the scene.

(3) Shaping - Then you look at every large shape you just filled in and refine the values within that shape. This will force you to look a little closer and harder to see these variations. At the same time you try to model all the shapes as best as you can. The purpose is to (1) create the correct geometry and (2) the correct value distribution. We are still not paying attention to the actual details. To add the illusion of three-dimensionality, blend the edges where dark and light areas meet. The small area in-between will then be the average of the two values. Also make ost edges soft but leave in a few hard ones. And also make use of the concept of lost edges.

(4) Details - Now is the time to put in the details. This includes the highlights. It is a good idea to reserve the whitest white for your highlights. For example, if your scene includes a white bowl, do not use your whitest paint but something a little darker. This way, there is still the opportunity for you to add visible highlights to the bowl.

But remember, learning to see the values on colored objects is the main point of the exercise. So spend a significant amount of time on observing, mixing, comparing, and finally applying these different values.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips - Know Your Oil Painting Brush Hairs

Today, oil painting brushes are made from many different types of materials. Each material has of course advantages and disadvantages. Beginning as well as advanced painters should have some familiarity with the properties of these hair-making materials.

Badger Hair - Badger hair brushes are used for blending and have a long tradition. The hair can be found in many parts of the world but varies greatly in quality. It is thickest at the point and quite thin at the root and has therefore a distinctive “bushy” appearance.

Synthetic Hair - Synthetic hair is of course man-made from nylon or polyester. The hairs can be tipped, tapered, flagged, abraded or etched to increase its paint carrying ability. The filaments are often dyed and baked to make them softer and more absorbent.

Some of the advantages of synthetic brushes are: 1) They are durable in the face of paints and solvents; 2) They are easier to clean than animal hair brushes because they are less likely to trap paint.

Raphael Kevrin Mongoose Hair - Raphael Kevrin Mongoose hair is strong and resilient. It combines the strength of a bristle with the control of sableand makes a long-wearing, medium-to-high quality brush.

Kolinsky Sable Hair - Kolinsky sable does not come from a sable but from the tail of a mink species found in Siberia and North-East China. In these regions, hair from the winter tails of males grows long and strong because of the extreme weather conditions. It is the best material for oil brushes because of its unusual strength, spring and snap (i.e., its ability to retain its shape). A Kolinsky sable brush can hold a very fine point or edge and a professional grade of hair. If properly taken care of, Kolinsky sablebrushes will last for many years.

Hog Bristle Hair - Hog bristle hair comes from hogs with the most sought after coming from China. Bristle hair forms a unique V-shaped split or flag at the tip and tends to have a natural curve. A brush with “interlocked” bristles, with the curves formed inward to the ferrule, has a natural resistance to fraying and spreads medium to thick paints smoothly and evenly. It is also a less expensive alternative to other good-quality hairs.

Red Sable Hair - Red sable hair is obtained from a red haired weasel and not from sable. Quality and characteristics can vary greatly. A good quality pure red sable brush is a good alternative to the more expensive Kolinsky sable brush, with similar performance and durability. Note that weasel hair is often blended with ox hair to make a more economical brush, but, in the process, the fine point is sacrificed.

Ox Hair - The best quality ox hair comes from the ears of oxen or cattle. It has a very strong body with silken texture. It is also very resilient and has good snap. However, it does lack a fine tip. The hair is most useful in flat shaped or medium-grade wash brushes. Ox hair is often blended with different natural hair to increase its resiliency.

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How to Draw with Pencil Fundamentals - Drawing Bricks

Any scene can initially be seen as a composition of a series of forms that are all related to four basic geometric solids: the brick, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone. In this article we concentrate on the brick, i.e., we will detail its properties and its place in the overall scheme of a drawing.

An exact brick is a six-sided geometric solid such that two opposing sides are parallel to each other and intersecting sides are perpendicular to each other. A brick has 12 ribs of which, in a typical scene, there are usually only 9 visible.

A brick-like object can of course have any kind of orientation within your scene. The keys to drawing such arbitrarily oriented brick correctly are:

Observation - Although it is absolutely necessary to learn the basics of perspective, in the end, the best guide to drawing realistically, is to develop your powers of observation, i.e., practice “seeing reality as it is and not as you think it is”. Leave the built-in prejudices behind.

In the case of the brick this involves mostly judging angles and lengths of lines as they really appear in the scene.

Perspective - To greatly help you with seeing correctly you can make use of the rules of simple perspective.

A brick has three sets of four parallel ribs, each set having a different direction. Each set of parallel lines can be drawn in the same manner.

First choose two ribs out of a set and judge the angle they make. In reality the two ribs are parallel but due to perspective they will usually not look parallel (unless they are verticals).

You can now see where the two ribs will intersect. This gives you their vanishing point. The two other ribs in the set will also intersect in that same vanishing point.

You can now repeat the same procedure for the remaining two sets of four parallel ribs. This will give you two more vanishing points.

With a bit of practice you will soon be able to draw any kind of brick with sufficient accuracy and the right perspective. Train yourself to draw each rib free-hand and in one relatively quick stroke. Note that the vanishing points usually reside outside the borders of your drawing paper and can therefore not always actually be drawn. But, after a while, you get a good feel for the location of these vanishing points and even a good feel for how a brick looks like in the correct perspective.

Finally, brick-like objects very often are not perfect bricks. However, the first cut at it can be drawn as a regular brick as discussed above. After that, you can add corrections with pencil and eraser until the object looks on your paper as it does in the real scene.

What we outlined above should be enough to get you started in the right direction. In a day or two you should be able to draw just about any brick-like object in a very convincing manner.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips - The Ideal Color Wheel

The simplest color wheel consists of a circle divided into six equal wedges. You color the top wedge, say, in yellow (the first primary color). Then going clockwise, you skip a wedge and color the next one in, say, blue (the second primary color). Finally, you skip another wedge and color the next one in red. The respective uncolored wedges will be filled in with the secondary color produced by the mixture of the two neighboring primary colors.

None of the tube colors you can buy in the art stores are pure. For example, both Lemon Yellow and Cadmium Yellow obviously look yellow. However, if you mix these two yellows with another color, say, Cadmium Red you will get two different oranges.

In general, tube color mixtures will yield secondary colors that do not always answer your expectations. Sometimes they will be really off. You may, for example, expect green but get a dirty brown instead.

This reason for this is that tube colors invariably have one or more undertones, i.e., colors that are different from the dominant hue and are present in small amounts. It is these undertones that can change the expected character of a mixture in often drastic ways. So, it is true that red and yellow, for example, generally make an orange but certainly not always a clean orange and sometimes even a color that cannot be called orange.

However, the palette consisting of the following three tube colors will always give you very decent secondary colors:

1. Lemon Yellow

2. Permanent Rose

3. Phthalo Blue (Red Shade)

Here are the properties of these three tube colors:

Note that White and Black are generally not classified as colors.

Lemmon Yellow - Lemmon Yellow is a cool, greenish leaning, and opaque yellow. This yellow is a medium-to-slow drier with medium to low tinting strength.

Permanent Rose - Permanent Rose is a cool, violet leaning, and transparent red. This red is a medium-to-slow drier and has a medium tinting strength.

Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) - Phthalo Blue is a cool, green leaning, and transparent blue. This blue is a medium-to-slow drier and has a very high tinting strength.

These three primary colors are made from synthetic organic pigments and produce very agreeable and clean secondary colors. Lemon Yellow and Permanent Rose despite their respective leanings still make a clean orange mixture. Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) and Lemon Yellow yield an excellent green. Finally, Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) and Permanent Rose result in a first rate violet.

It is possible to improve on this three-color palette if we use two versions of each primary color. We choose them in such a manner that, for example, one version of yellow has an orange bias and the other version of yellow has a green bias. Similarly, one blue will lean towards green and the other towards violet. Finally, one red will lean towards violet and the other towards orange.

Here then, is the ideal six-color palette:

1. Lemon Yellow (green bias)

2. Cadmium Yellow (orange bias)

3. Cadmium Red (orange bias)

4. Permanent Rose (violet bias)

5. French Ultramarine (violet bias)

6. Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) (green bias)

Now, Lemon Yellow and Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) will give a superb green because both colors have a green bias. Similarly, Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Red will give a brilliant orange because both have an orange undertone. And Permanent Rose together with French Ultramarine will produce an outstanding violet because they both have a violet bias.

Together with Titanium White and Ivory Black the above six colors form an excellent beginning palette that can produce an amazing number of excellent secondary and tertiary (i.e., a mixture of three or more colors) colors.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips and Advice - One Basic Approach to Creating an Oil Painting

In this article I will give you an overview of my personal approach to the creation of an oil painting. There are of course many valid approaches to painting and with experience you will develop your own specific approach. But if you are a beginning painter you may want to try and practice the following approach.

The Drawing Phase - Usually I first execute a regular drawing on the canvas. This drawing can be anything from a few lines to a completely detailed map of all the forms. This may even include indications of where the lights and the darks are and what colors need to be used.

A good drawing tool for an oil painting is charcoal. Of course, the best tool is some neutral mixture of thinned paint and a brush. However, this takes some getting used to. Often, I actually use a graphite pencil and when the drawing is finished I spray the drawing with workable fixative.

The advantage of starting with a drawing is that many important decisions can be made up-front and that everything is in place by the time you finish the drawing. After that, all that is left is painting.

The Block-in Phase - This is the first painting phase. I use fairly thinned-out paint and a brush that feels a little large than it should be. Here you focus on the big shapes that you see in your drawing. Don’t pay attention to detail. What is important here is that you observe the colors of the shapes correctly and that you maintain the integrity of the drawing.

Usually I start out with the dark shapes. Then I proceed with the brightest colored shapes, always making sure the colors stay harmonized. Finally, I put in the more subtle colors many of which will be duller and more difficult to judge.

Again, in this phase hold back on painting details. Maintaining the correct geometry of the large shapes, their exact color (hue, intensity, and value), and their correct position within the composition is the task at hand. And don’t forget to include the background.

At the end of this phase my canvas is usually completely covered with paint, i.e., no white areas are left unpainted. This gives you a good idea of how all the colors look like relative to each other and if they harmonize without the influence of bright white areas.

The Shaping Phase - Now you can begin to model the large shapes and refine them so they start to resemble the actual objects you are trying to paint. In this phase I use a thicker paint than in the Block-in Phase and also a somewhat smaller brush. Also, I refine the color relationships in terms of hue, intensity, and value as best as I can.

This phase usually requires the most time and effort. Still, do not be tempted to put in fine detail. At the end of this phase you should already have a very good idea of how the end product will look like.

The Detail Phase - This is the last phase. This is the time to indulge in the details. Details include things like small twigs, pupils and irises for the eyes, small lines and curves, and highlight, in other words, anything that cannot be done with a large brush. Some details require thin paint and others, such as highlights, often require lots of thick paint right out of the tube.

The above guidelines are admittedly not complete in detail but are a good starting point for any beginning oil painter.

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Fundamentals of How to Draw with Pencil - The Form of Objects

Ultimately, it is the drawing of form that is most responsible for the reproduction on your drawing paper of the actual scene.

It is important to possess a simple but complete mental image or memory of the property of form. This mental image is very useful to you as a pencil artist because it will lead you to a simple and systematic way of approaching the drawing of any object under the sun. It will give you the essential tools of the first phase of a drawing.

The idea of dealing with the numerous forms that constitute any real scene involves a visual decomposition of the scene’s forms into a set of basic geometric forms followed by a reconstitution of those forms into a likeness of the original real object. With some practice, you will find that this analysis and reconstitution becomes very quickly second nature.

After analyzing the form of numerous objects, artists of the past came to the following conclusions.

All object forms can be seen as a composition of four basic geometric solids: the brick, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone.

Of course, the actual forms will almost always deviate somewhat from these perfect geometric forms so that part of the drawing process will consist of adding the variations. But all that is done in a later phase of the drawing process.

Concentrating on those four large geometric forms allows you to much better see the overall structure or composition of the global scene you wish to draw.

The extent of these large forms is fairly easy to discern and the dimensions easily estimated. Therefore, the large forms can be drawn first without paying any attention to the myriad of details.

Drawing a real scene while constantly thinking of bricks, spheres, cylinders, and cones will automatically give your drawing three-dimensionality and a certain amount of gravitas.

This approach to viewing a scene, i.e., seeing the scene as a composition of basic solid geometric shapes, naturally separates the big picture from the details and gives you an excellent starting-point for tackling any drawing.

Once the large geometric shapes are in place you should already see a good likeness of the scene as a whole. You can then concentrate on the details without having to worry about whether or not all the objects are in the right overall position.

In this article we developed a method which initially views an arbitrary pictorial scene as a composition of four basic geometric shapes: the brick, the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder.

The task then is to render each basic geometric shape while at the same time reconstituting the overall scene, i.e., putting each geometric form in its correct position.

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Tips for Beginners Oil Painting - Supplies

Of course, before you can start a painting you have to have a number of art supplies. Here, we will list the most essential tools you need to create an oil painting, that is, at least the way I create such a painting. Here we go.

Brushes - Again, there are hundreds of kinds of brushes and many different brands. But to start, you really only need a few filbert brushes of fairly good quality.

1. One large no. 10 or 12

2. One or two no. 8’s

3. One or two no. 6’s

4. One small no. 2

The reason I suggest filbert brushes is that they more or less combine the capabilities of a round and a flat brush. Also, the main reason we need two brushes of the same size is that we can then use two colors at the same time. That means, less brush rinsing.

Canvas - A bunch of canvases. At this time I suggest you buy pre-stretched canvases so you can start to paint immediately. Good standard starting sizes are 16″ x 12″ or 18″x24″. You can also use canvas panels which might sometimes be cheaper depending on where you buy them.

Easel - You need an easel to put your canvas on. Try to buy a sturdy easel. In fact, you could even make your own easel out of wood if you are a bit handy.

Palette - I prefer to a paper palette of at least 16″x20″. I actually use an 18″x24″ which gives me even more room (that is, of course, when I paint at home). These palette sheets come in pads of 50 sheets and are not very expensive. You use them to mix your paints on.

Paints - Yes, you do need paints! Try to buy tubes containing at least 37 ml of paint. Some brands have tubes of 200 ml and for certain colors (such as white) they may even offer larger containers. The totality of tube colors you use is also called a palette. As a starting palette I suggest the following colors.

1. Lemon Yellow

2. Cadmium Yellow

3. Cadmium Red

4. Permanent Rose

5. French Ultramarine

6. Phthalo Blue (Red Shade)

7. Titanium White

8. Ivory Black

Of course, as you get more experience, you can add some tube colors. However, when you start out it is probably best to use as few colors aspossible. The above colors let you produce very clean secondary colors and all sorts of tertiary ones as well. Secondary colors are colors that are made with two colors and tertiary ones are colors that are made with three colors.

Turpentine - If you use real oil paints then you need at least a quart of turpentine or a substitute. If you use water soluble oil paints then all you need is regular water.

Odds and Ends - If you use real oil paints you need a small container of linseed oil. You could also get a can of retouch varnish spray. And finally, also a few rolls of paper towel.

This is about the minimum you need to start oil painting. As stated before, there are many more tools to be had. I suggest going to a few art stores and see what they have. You can even check out some of the Internet stores and maybe purchase some of the tools that particularly useful to you.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips - Advanced Palette

In this article I will discuss the tube colors belonging to an advanced palette based on a basic 6-color palette.

The 6-color basic palette consists of the following colors:

1. Lemon Yellow

2. Cadmium Yellow

3. Cadmium Red

4. Permanent Rose

5. French Ultramarine

6. Phthalo Blue

To these 6 colors we, of course, add

7. Titanium White

8. Ivory Black

For various reasons, artists tend to add a variety of other colors to their palette. One reason is that tube colors are, by and large, always brighter than mixed colors. Other reasons have to do with the tinting strength or the undertone of certain tube colors. Or, maybe just because a certain tube color looks particular good to the artist and can not easily be mixed.

Here are a number of tube colors I like to work with beyond the ones already mentioned:

Burnt Sienna - Burnt Sienna is a warm, orange-red, and transparent brown. This brown is a medium-to-fast drier and has a medium tinting strength.

Cerulean Blue - Cerulean Blue is a cool, green leaning, and opaque blue. This blue is a medium-to-fast drier and has a medium-to-low tinting strength. Mixed with Lemon Yellow it yields a spring green.

Cadmium Orange - Cadmium Orange is a warm, red or yellow leaning, and opaque orange. This orange is a slow drier and has a high tinting strength. Mixed with Permanent Rose it yields a sharp hot orange.

Cadmium Yellow Light - Cadmium Yellow Light is a warm/cool, somewhat green leaning, and opaque Mixed with Cadmium Red Light it yields a bright orange.

Cadmium Red Light - Cadmium Red Light is a warm, orange leaning, and opaque red. This red is a slow drier and has a high tinting strength. Mixed with Cadmium Yellow Light it yields a bright orange.

Yellow Ochre - Yellow Ochre is a warm, brown leaning, and opaque yellow. This yellow is a medium-to-fast drier and has a medium tinting strength. Mixed with Cadmium Yellow it yields a glowing sandy color.

Burnt Umber - Burnt Umber is a warm, red leaning, and fairly transparent brown. Mixed with Cerulean Blue it yields a series of colors from green-gray to green-brown.

Viridian - Viridian is a cool, blue leaning, and transparent green. This green is a medium drier and has a medium tinting strength. Mixed with Burnt Sienna it yields a nice fall green.

Cobalt Blue - Cobalt Blue is a cool, violet leaning, and semi-transparent blue. This blue is a fast drier and has a low-to-medium tinting strength. Mixed with Permanent Rose it yields a glowing violet.

There are few more colors I use occasionally, such as Dioxazine Purple, Permanent Sap Green, Raw Sienna, and Raw Umber. But the palette here described has more than enough colors in it to paint just about anything as long as you also use mixtures of these colors.

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Posted in: Drawing Tips | Comments(0) | October 2008