Oil Paintings And What To Put In And Leave Out

By Author: Anthony Keith Whitehead
Total Articles: 21
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Lessons From Photography
We can learn some useful lessons from first considering photography. Although a photographer may have a few technical “tricks of the trade” up his sleeve, he generally has to include what is before his camera when taking a shot.

Where painting in oil is concerned, or indeed in the use of other mediums, that certainly does not apply. Many artists leave things out of their paintings or alter their position or make changes to their appearance. For relative beginners in painting, their may be a tendency to behave like the photographer – but he does it from necessity while the artist has a choice. Things can be omitted, or you can focus on just a limited section, and so forth. The following seeks to give some helpful advise on this.
Leaving Things Out
For a complicated subject one can certainly choose to leave certain. Others can be simplified. Now, this does require some thought beforehand. There is a good deal of skill and judgment involved in selecting 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 only learn by doing things. That said, to apply the principle of “learning by doing”, it may be better to start with a simple composition and even exclude elements of that before trying to reduce complexity in an intricate subject.
Take a seascape oil painting for example, and how one might make exclusions there. An example might be my painting of a