Oil Painting Lessons - Several artists share step-by-step demonstrations for painting in oils. This is really a good book about oil painting but for someone who doesn't know the difference between brush types and sizes, I generally research what they look like to know what I'm buying. The great advantage of painting from life is the dynamic colour register, which can give the work a more life-like result.

Paul, If you're losing your lines, here's a great suggestion I discovered when learning to paint portraits and it has served me well in complicated landscapes, portraits and tall ships. Hi Jody, a siccative is a drying agent that speeds up the drying time of oil paint.

I see so many artists that mix white into their colors in an attempt to achieve the lighter values of a portrait, but the end result is muddy. Below I've collected a few possibilities of how an artist can handle their paints and pencils when creating a portrait painting.

The hair of our model is fairly loose, so brush some of the background colour into where the hair is help when you later refine it. Mandy prefers to paint her backgrounds as vignette, which means not all the way to edge of the paper and in some kind of interesting pattern.

The changes in direction will change value and color slightly so basically I took the large shapes and added the smaller shapes which represent the changes in direction. These drawing tutorials and tips are intended for artists newer to drawing the human face, as well as those who are looking to sharpen their skills.

I quickly saw some problems in the foreground I decided to place the same sort of bushes from the right side on Painting the left side as well, that way the right and left sides of the painting would look unified and I could use the repeating shapes and their relationships to create more depth in the painting.

1. Start by drawing in the basic contours of your subject with either charcoal or a neutral paint color. If you're not confident in your painting skills, don't worry, they'll grow with time. Then, once I´ve put most of the paint on the canvas, I use some softer brushes, for instance of mongoose but rarely sable.

I would compare it like this: Oil colors stay on the canvas, while acrylics get soaked up by it. Which is to be expected, of course. First, there are seven basic colors I use in painting Santa, or any other wildlife or human portrait. Because this is the first layer in the painting, eliminate all the hard edges between each value.

The magic brush works by cloning (copying) color from a source photo to a target canvas (document). Think of these small dark accents the way you would if painting a tree branch against a light sky. I use lots of different brushes, though I always start with a filbert brush as wide as possible for the large areas.

It is difficult to erase unwanted markings from a gessoed canvas, and while the paint will ultimately cover them up, sometimes it's nice to warm up on scrap paper so that you can figure out how you want to approach the final sketch. I wanted to establish my darkest dark and lightest lights early on, so I removed all pigment, getting back to the bare canvas to define the cheek area, which was bathed in light.

Just in general to get a feel for what I am saying about tinting strength or portions of color, lets talk about creating grays with black and white, to get a #6 on the value scale you can usually mix equal parts white and black, to mix a step# 7 you need to add 4 parts white to 1 part black, to mix a step #8 you may need to add 16 parts white to 1 part black, to mix a step #9 you may need to mix 40 parts white to 1 part black to get to step 10# you may need to add 100 parts white or more to 1 part black.