Oil Painting

This workbook turns the course into studio practice. Each section pairs hands-on painting exercises with planning worksheets and check-off lists so you move deliberately from a bare palette to a varnished, finished painting. Use the templates to log colour mixtures, plan your layers fat-over-lean, and record each painting — the habits that turn scattered experiments into a sound, repeatable practice.

Assemble an archival kit, set up a healthy studio, and lay out a palette you can mix from confidently.

List what you own and what you still need before your first painting, with a rough cost for each gap. Aim for a limited palette plus the right surfaces and a clean-up setup.

Mix a stepped value scale of 5 to 9 even steps from your darkest dark (try Ultramarine + Burnt Umber) to pure white, painting each step as a swatch. Photograph the row in greyscale to test whether the steps are evenly spaced.

Train your eye to read value first, then mix neutrals, greens, and skin tones from a small palette.

Set up a simple still life (a few objects in directional light) or use a strong photo. Squint to find the big value masses, then mix and paint a swatch to match each major value, ignoring hue at first. Convert a photo of your swatches and the subject to greyscale and compare.

Take three pairs of complements (red/green, blue/orange, yellow/violet). For each pair, mix a row that runs from the pure colour, through several greyed steps, to the pure complement, passing through a near-neutral in the middle. Keep the chart for reference.

Before a painting, work out the key mixtures you will need and record a rough recipe for each so you can re-mix mid-session.

Using only Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red, Ivory Black, and White (the Zorn palette), mix a base flesh tone, then paint a simple sphere or a small head study modelling warm light and cool shadow across the three warmth zones.

Paint a finished study wet-into-wet: block in the masses, control edges, model form, and stop in time.

Tone a canvas with a thin neutral wash, then paint a 60-to-90-minute alla prima study. Cover the whole canvas in the fewest big value masses before refining anything, keeping the paint thin and lean at this stage.

Paint the same simple subject twice. In the first, deliberately make every edge hard. In the second, make only the focal point hard and soften or lose all other edges. Compare which reads with more depth and air.

For one rounded object in your study, plan the five light-on-form notes in order before you paint them, recording the value you intend for each.

Build a painting in dried layers fat-over-lean, glaze and scumble for luminosity, then dry, varnish, and present it.

Cover a panel in a thin layer of Burnt Umber thinned lean with a little solvent, then wipe out the lights with a rag and lift the brightest areas to bare ground. Resolve the entire drawing and value structure in this one monochrome layer and let it dry (an alkyd medium speeds it overnight).

Plan the layers of an indirect painting in order, recording the medium and relative oil content of each so every upper layer is fatter (or no leaner) than the one below.

On a dry light-valued passage, lay a thin transparent glaze (small amount of a transparent pigment in plenty of glazing medium) and observe how it glows. Separately, drag a thin broken scumble of a lighter, semi-opaque colour over a dry darker passage with a dry brush. Compare the two effects.