Oil Painting The Simpler Way

By Author: Anthony Keith Whitehead
Total Articles: 21
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A major problem for those beginning to paint in oils is that one may find an appealing subject or scene, but the complexity of it is off-putting. The problem seems most severe when, perhaps subconsciously, one imagines trying to include everything in the picture.

Getting To Grips With The Difficult
Even if you like to take a realistic approach to painting, it is not possible to include everything you see. Indeed, any artist has to decide what to exclude from a picture. But making this decision is one of the most important an artist has to make because it will determine to a large extent how attractive or unattractive a painting is.

When you are starting out, it is advisable to leave out parts of the As an example, a collection of flowers may look very great, but the detail of separate flowers, their stalks and leaves, the way in which they partly cover one another, can be unexpectedly complicated. So, at least to start with, simplify the picture. For example, look at my painting called Ducks In Mist where there is very little detail so that ...
... one can concentrate entirely on the actual painting itself. This is a great advantage for a beginner because one of the first essentials is learning how to handle the actual paints and manage the colours.

Leaving Things Out
With a complicated subject, at least, one must learn to choose to leave certain things out and simplify others. Much skill and judgment is required here: skill and judgment is involved in choosing what to include and exclude. Make the wrong choices and the painting may look unbalanced or unconvincing. Do not be worried if you make mistakes in this respect — we probable learn as much from paintings we throw away as those we keep! So again, it is better to start with a simple composition and even exclude elements of that before trying to reduce complexity in an intricate subject. For instance, if you were considering a landscape with, say a river and bridge, try to focus on the bridge as the main element in the picture. “Zoom in” on that, as it were and forget about the (possibly) large amount of other detail such as people, trees, house, etc.

Progressing A Painting
Continuing to use landscape oil as an example, try to invent your own scene. Begin with the horizon. Do not divide the picture exactly in two. Putting the horizon at the halfway level is rarely advantageous: draw the horizon about a third of the way up or a third down. Don’t be afraid to enlarge the area taken up by the sky: some excellent oil paintings have been made where the sky almost fills all the canvass! Try then to represent a cloudy sky: include some quite light blue but then clouds of varying degrees of darkness. When that looks something like, try to produce an area of land, which is no more than grass or heath; perhaps introduce a broken fence coming in from, say, the right and in the foreground. Try to make it look old by painting the stoops or horizontals with cracks in them. Try to make things look as realistic as possible. Such attempts as this are generally useful for developing your painting and layout skills.

Simplicity A Key To Initial Progress
Background is one of the easier was to attain simplicity. Photographers often do this by selecting speeds and aperture values for their cameras, at which to shoot that will sharpen the focal area of a picture while blurring the background — sometimes to a degree where it is impossible to see what the background consists of. In a painting, the same is accomplished by selecting colours and tones for a particular background, which enhance the subject matter we are really interested in. An example is given by my painting Mountain Sunsetwhere the background is very simplified. Indeed, the whole picture is a simplification.

You might even try producing your own version of this scene. If so, vary the hills and the overall colour. This painting is obviously done in silhouette and you could transfer this technique to some other kind of scene. Consider what you see from your own window in the late dusk when there is very little detail to be seen. You could even apply it to the objects in a room.

In Conclusion
The background consists of, nothing actual, mainly colour and. Try a simple, single flower. A blue one, for example, may be placed against a relatively dark background of colour, according to ones choice. Complexity in itself is not a necessary condition for a quality painting, so start by keeping everything as simple as possible. When you feel some mastery over the use of brushes, mixing colours, etc., then is the time to begin introducing a larger number of elements into your painting.

AUTHOR: A K Whitehead
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