Oil Painting
Tons of lessons on oil painting for beginners. I been teaching students how to use oil paints for 2 decades now! It’s recommended that you have some prior drawing experience before attempting to learn how to oil paint. Oil painting has been one of my lifelong passions and areas of expertise so some of the lessons can really go deeply into detail. Enjoy!
Oiling Out
Why oiling out can improve the colors in your oil painting and why artists might need to use this technique in your oil painting layers.
Oil Painting Surfaces
With plentiful options, picking an oil painting surface to create that next masterpiece can be tricky. Today we figure out the best surface for oil painting depending on your own artistic needs and capabilities.
Why I Don’t Paint From Photos
There’s some important reasons I don’t copy photographs when I make paintings.
Best Easel for Oil Painting
Here’s my take on some of the best easels for oil painting. I’ve reviewed some of the popular artist’s easels that are available on the market today.
Balancing a Handheld Palette
If you make a wooden palette or buy one available from your art supply store you might find that it is not quite balanced on your forearm and wrist. Today I’ll show you how you can make a counterbalance for your handheld palette to make holding the palette way more comfortable!
How to Make a Glass Palette for Paint Mixing
Here’s a guide on how to make a paint palette out of glass. As a perfect glass palette for oil painting (and acrylics) this palette is customizable to any color you can imagine.
Oil Painting for Beginners
Looking for some beginner oil painting tips? The following is a comprehensive oil painting tutorial which will help novices make sense of the various oil painting materials and techniques. Which thinner to use? What are mediums for? How to clean my brushes? It’s all here!
Finding The Perfect Yellow Ochre
This is the story of yellow ochre, how important to it is in my paintings, and just how far I’ll go to get the perfect color I want!
Mastering Oil Painting: 10 Ways I Became A Better Painter
There was a time when I felt I had mastered painting values, compositions and had developed a fairly routine painting process. Actually I had hit a painting plateau and wasn’t really getting better at oil painting. I was good but not good enough. Mastering painting required me to work through some problems, many I was…
Wooden Palette for Oil Painting: Preparing & Maintaining
What kind of painter’s palette are you using? Find out everything you need to know about how to prepare, clean and preserve a wooden palette for oil painting.
Comparing Oil Grounds
I took about a year to compare two major brands of oil painting primer. Find out which oil ground I now like the best.
Why I Stopped Painting With Liquin
I found a painting medium I like much better and I’ll be laying out all my reasons for the recent shift in my painting. It Was Love At First Stroke For those of you not familiar with Liquin, it is a paint additive for oil paints made by the Windsor & Newton paint company. Liquin…
Preparing a Wooden Painter’s Palette
Want to use a wooden, handheld painting palette like a pro but not sure where to start?
The Best Way to Store Thinner While Oil Painting
In this free online painting lesson I’ll introduce you to my favorite way of storing and using a thinner for your oil paints. You need a solvent (thinner) for oil painting but most containers you might think to use are not a good choice for use with your painting as they promote waste of the…
Choosing an Oil Painting Thinner
Choosing and oil painting thinner can be confusing. With so many options how is a beginner artist to know which materials to thin oil paint with? In today’s free video I’ll review four different thinner solvents you can use to thin out your oil paints and clean your oil painting brushes.
How To Tell if a Paint is Translucent or Opaque
There are some neat tricks you can use to predict how your paint is going to react when you use it. Will it have covering power? Will it be transparent?
Direct Painting vs. Indirect Painting
If you had to break down all of the painting approaches out there you could group these techniques into two categories: Direct painting and Indirect painting. The two separate approaches are found throughout all the different painting media; watercolor, oils, acrylics, water-soluble oils, tempera, latex, gouache, inks, you name it.