There are two ways of approaching your painting. The first is known as ‘alla prima’ or direct painting, when the canvas is completed in one session. The second technique is slower because each layer must be dry before the next coat is applied. This means a drying time of several days or more. Famous impressionist artist, Claude Monet, was essentially an ‘alla prima’ painter, but if the composition was not satisfactory he would bring the canvas back to the studio and continue working.
Familiarize yourself with the palette by mixing the colors together. Begin by making up as many greens as you can from the two blues and two yellows. Then dull down each mixed green by adding small amounts of the two reds, and watch the results carefully.
There are a number of important factors to observe when using oils, which are outlined below alongside some handy hints.
1. When squeezed from the tube, oil colors are too thick for the first layer of painting (the ‘lay-in’), so it is necessary to this them with turpentine. It is a good idea to buy a double dipper to attach to your palette.
2. The rule of painting in oil is ‘fat over lean’. The first layers of your pictures should be thinned with a little turpentine, this w ill allow the color to dry more quickly.
3. As you build up your layers the paint film can be thicker, and the medium can be added to help manipulate the colors.
4. Thin colors dry quicker that ‘fat’ colors, which contain more oil. It is important that the paint films gradually thicken towards the upper layer.
5. whether you choose the ‘alla prima’ method or wait for each layer to dry, it is important not to cover a tacky surface with new paint – the surface must either be completely fresh or completely dry. Painting over a tacky surface will result in cracking.
What is a double dipper for oil painting accessories? It is two small containers jointed together, that is able to clip on to the edge of color palette. One is to contain pure turpentine to dilute the first layers whilst the other has an equal quality of linseed oil and turpentine, linseed oil by itself makes the paint too greasy; too much turpentine creates a matt effect.
Tags: Alla Prima, Claude Monet, How-to
One of the most popular oil paintings by Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”; greatest works during Vincent was taken to the asylum at Saint-Remy. Since 1941, this artwork has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Dimension 73 x 92 cm (28¾ x 36¼ Inches). The painting depicts the view outside his sanitarium room window at night, although it was painted from memory during the day.
Below described how he define his painting technique derive by his expressive thoughts, with details of repeating lines, feelings, speed and with details of the blue sky, glittering stars, and circling of lights round the moon.
His painting achieved its final maturity as he himself was being subjected to frequent and increasingly nervous attacks. He reached a stage of expressive desperation that made him shout out in line and color all his feelings of bitterness and reject any sort of restraint that might impose more order, more reflection, more patience. It seems as though he sensed the end was near, and he painted at speed, throwing himself furiously into his work, producing an amazing number of paintings, particularly when one considers how often he was incapacitated by illness. This detail from his best known work of the period reminds us of “the cry of anguish” that Vincent himself described: the clouds, the stars and the moon cut through the dense and deep blue sky, accompanied by the rotating haloes, like meteors bearing threateningly down on the earth. Color is associated with obsessively repeated lines that transform reality into an apocalyptic vision. Van Gogh’s soul explodes in a scream and it seems as though his entire life experience has been poured into the painting: the bitterness that he felt about all the things he would have liked to have done, but was not allowed to do, the admission of his solitude and the certainty that only art could recompense him for all his disappointments. Yet again, it is Vincent himself who best summed it up: “When all sound is still one hears the voice of God beneath the stars.”
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