Knowledge List of Oil Painting

Oil Painting on Copper Sheets is Art of Brilliance

from:oilpaintingtechniquesonline

Artists have created paintings for centuries and centuries that display exquisite pieces of workmanship. While many of these painting are done on canvas, you would be surprised to find out that some of the most brilliant masterpieces were done on other pieces of material. One of these which happen to be copper sheets a combination of science meeting art. Today, there are thousands of pieces of spectacular art work done on copper in hundreds of museums and private collections today.
Examples of work done on copper done by more than 70 artists such as El Greco, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Wtewael, Reni, and Chardin, displaying work in mythology and allegory, landscapes, portraiture, still life, scared themes and devotional, are all on display in an art exhibit called, “Copper of Canvas”, this exhibit is the first exhibit put together in over 80 years that will display the most outstanding and best-preserved works of art on copper from both private and public collections today. The “Copper of Canvas” art exhibit will be on display in Europe, the United States, Australia, and South America. For some of the paintings, this will be the first time that they have ever traveled.
The exhibit also displays the individual artist’s area of subject, and includes raw ores and demonstrates material on metallurgy and the development of copper mining.
It amazes some that copper would be a choice for any artist to paint on. Most of the paintings that are done on copper are considered small in size. But what they lack in size, they make up for in their magnificent brilliance and detail, for the reflection of the copper piercing the paint.
Here’s a little bit of history on Copper. Copper was the first metal to be put into use and was discovered sometime in the Stone Age. This lead to a number of uses for copper and gave birth to metallurgy. In the 15th Century A.D., copper was used for engraving plates and enamels. During the 16th Century, the Italians discovered that copper sheets could be used for making smooth surfaces, such as marble or slate. Because of this copper began to spread throughout the world.
Because copper does not absorb and is virtually unaffected by temperature or humidity, artists found that they could paint on it without losing any originality of their picture.
Over the years painting on copper became more popular, starting in the 17th century. Artistic convention, changes in taste, increase in the mining of copper, economics, and domestic architecture made the small paintings on copper more appealing and popular.
The most astonishing thing about paintings on copper is the discovery of the eye-popping visual effect that was achieved by artists painting on copper, no matter what the subject matter was, the results were stunning and often breathtaking.
Many artists today the use copper plates to apply their oil painting onto. No matter what shape you use, the result of oil painting on copper can leave you speechless.

An Ideal Landscape

from:buddingartist

Landscape Cityscape Dreamscape Image
The landscape has for centuries been a gauge not only of how man perceives the natural world around him visually but also of mankind’s impact upon that environment. Ideally a landscape painting communicates not only the visual attributes of the environment chosen by the artist, but something of the artist within that environment.
In choosing a landscape it is often best to stick with the familiar, choosing a landscaper that has some meaning for you. Whilst it may be tempting to paint a fantastic holiday scene, seeing the fantastic in even the mundane that you find to hand will more likely ring true in the finished product.
Landscape throughout the ages has been a great communicator both of the respect and of the disregard that humanity has held for the natural environment. Paintings often reflect either mans subservience to nature, or (as in the case of early 20th Century Futurist Paintings) mankind’s seeming dominance of nature through technology. The latter can be held in either a positive or negative light. It is important to be aware of the commentary that landscape painting reflects upon society, even when there is no, or very little, trace of humanity held within.
These days it is liable that any landscape painting undertaken will evoke issues related to nature and Climate Change. The ‘Climate of Change’ exhibition held in London in late 2007 strongly alludes to this and to the concern that artists have for environmental issues.
Landscape Composition
However you choose your landscape you will need to take into consideration its composition and this may effect precisely what scene you choose. Whatever landscape you choose to paint from any real life scene, to be readable a painting needs to be composed with equal amounts of activity all over and a central focal point in the middle. This can be seen in any good landscape and will affect exactly what angle you choose to approach your chosen subject from.
A good scene can be selected with the help of photographs (taking them can aid composition due to their rectangular format). From this, the photograph areas can be mapped out, by sectioning off the photo with a ruler and pen. These areas can then be drawn to scale on your canvas. This process is called ‘scaling up’.
Cityscape
A cityscape is essentially the same as a landscape but set in the city. Cityscapes are often as visually alluring as a landscape, yet the message is more people centred and often more politicised than a landscape, just due to the very nature of the city. Cityscapes may also be favoured by painters attempting to signify the speed of change, or to convey a message that is very ‘now’. These have been favoured in times of intense change, in the beginning of the industrial revolution, and at the start of the 20th Century.
Dreamscape
A dreamscape is a landscape concocted from the workings of the subconscious mind, often drawn from dream experience. As in a dream normal rules concerning space and time may be suspended. Famous artists who painted in this way include Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and Marc Chagall (1887-1985).

Oil Paint

from:buddingartist

Oil Paint Auerbach Rembrandt Jan Van Image
Oil paint is made by mixing pigment with an oil binder. Painters have employed it long before it became popularly available (it had previously proved too expensive to use). Generally Jan Van Eyck (1385-1441) is credited with inventing oil paint as we know it (circa. 1410). In fact it had been used in the form known to us before the 15th Century but Van Eyck was a pioneer of many of the techniques used today.
Oil has curiously evaded all of accusations of its obsolescence, despite it clearly being a medium less suitable practically and economically to its purpose than many mediums that have emerged since its development (such as photography, film and computer arts). The continuing success of oil paint seems in part to be due to a special status accorded to it by artists and collectors alike. Certainly, as a paint medium, it is very versatile and requires the sort of patience and skill that can lead a student to become embroiled in trying to master it!
Oil is well suited to conveying both luminescence and opacity and can also be applied in every imaginable thickness, from the very thin to the very thick. A painting built up over time will show the marks of having been worked on for a long period (see Rembrandt, 1606-1669, and Frank Auerbach, 1931), yet Oil can also convey a very fresh and ‘new’ look if applied thinly with clear distinction between colours (see, for example, Francis Bacon, 1909-1992 and Patrick Heron, 1920-1999).
Oil paint perhaps remains successful for the subtlety that it can convey in all disciplines of painting. From landscape to portrait to still life to abstract art oil can sensitively render the most minute detail, expression or atmosphere. No one can be sure quite why this is, and oil paints now legendary status bestows it with an almost mystical element far removed from its material make-up.
Choosing Oil Paints
Oil paints vary greatly in quality from budget to student to professional quality. Ideally, a good student quality oil should suffice to begin with, such as those made by Spectrum paints. Aside from the paint good quality brushes and palette knives are needed, as well as a good supply of linseed oil and turpentine. This, together with canvas, is the basic kit required. Remember to buy a large tube of white paint, as you will probably use it more than your other colours, along with one each of the primary colours. If you buy these in good quantities you need not buy ready mixed secondary and tertiary colours, which are expensive and unnecessary.
It is wisely normally said that a beginner painter should spend too much money on their first set of oils. It would be wrong to get wrapped up with issues surrounding equipment when there is so much else to consider. Start with a basic kit and work your way towards something more ambitious only if you first see yourself reaping the benefits of oil.
All paint is generally used in conjunction with mediums that are used to help thin, thicken paints, or to make them dry either more quickly or slowly. It is recommended that a few of these are purchased in order to gain the maximum benefit of oil painting.

Painting Techniques: Watts,PreRaphaelites,Sargent,Whistler

From: paulseaton
Arhtor:unknown

Painting Techniques: GF Watts
"Before beginning a picture he would often paint over his canvases with some colour which would be opposed to the tone he intended the picture to have . . Watts dried the oil out of his colours by putting them on blotting-paper, reducing them to a texture like putty by keeping them under water. His colours, when he used them, were nearly as dry as pastel, but without, of course, the crumbling quality.
Quite new brushes were, he said, almost useless to him. He would wear the outside bristles down on a background, or by merely rubbing them on a hard surface till they became a stiff little pyramid the shape of a stump used for chalk drawings, and then they became great treasures. He said he believed the worst thing to paint with was a paint-brush except the wrong end!' He would use a paper or leather stump or the handle of an old tooth-brush filed down to a point, but the best of all, he thought, was the finger.
When the putty-like pigment which he put on the canvas in distinct touches was nearly dry, he would sometimes take a paper- knife, and, using the flat part, would rub it over the touches, smearing them together.
He would not touch the painting again till the smeared surface was quite dry. Then he would work parti ally over it. In this way he contrived to get a bloom of atmosphere into his painting, a quality which he invariably aimed at . ." (From 'England's Michelangelo',Wilfred Blunt,London 1975)
Painting Techniques: John Singer Sargent
The studio was ready for sittings at the beginning of October, and was opened for a series of entertainments the following month. On Friday, 5 November he unveiled his home to Broadway - "(by invitation) and it was a great treat", Lucia Millet wrote to her parents four days later. "The rooms are large and beautifully arranged and decorated. Then too he has many wonderfully pretty things." (The American sculptor Daniel Chester French was also invited.) And less than a fortnight later he gave a lunch-party for eight, and more people came in after: "a great success", Lucia remarked.'The move from Paris was complete. For many years a long portiere hung over the door at 33 Tite Street and for many years John managed to get entangled in it. He had arranged the contents of the studio to line the walls, leaving the room uncluttered, which, to the unobservant, made the studio appear bare. It had to be: John's energetic approach to painting was closer to fencing. With a brush in one hand, palette gripped by the other, a cigarette or cigar smouldering in his mouth, he backed away from the sitter and canvas with slow but deliberate steps, further and further. His eyes were fixed on the sitter and canvas throughout this withdrawal. He stopped, then lunged at the canvas. Over and over again he performed this ritual dance.
He once calculated he walked about four miles a day in the studio. By retreating he was able to make the model and the canvas equal before his eye,
and was thus able to estimate the construction and values of this representation. He drew with his brush, beginning with the shadows, and gradually evolving his figure from the background by means of large, loose volumes of shadow, half-tones and light, regardless of features or refinements of form, finally bringing the masses of light and shade closer together, and thus assembling the figure. He painted with large brushes and a full palette, using oil and turpentine freely as a medium.'
"Always use a full brush and a larger one than necessary," John told Frederick Sumner Platt, the collector and amateur painter in August 1890. "Paint with long sweeps, avoiding spots and dots ('little dabs'). Never think of other painters' pictures ... but follow your own choice of colors with exact fidelity to nature."
He painted briskly, covering a lot of ground. When the subject was more or less transferred, he stayed close to the canvas, humming or whistling, but he rarely sat down. Or sometimes he would ask the subject to supply the entertainment: Sir George Henschel sang passages from Tristan und Isolde. john's studio routine intrigued his sitters, who liked this show of eccentricity. Sir George Sitwell, for example, enjoyed the spectacle of John "rushing bull-like ... and shouting"." For him such behaviour was appropriate in an artist, and he felt that he was getting his money's worth. To John, however, it was simply a matter of technique, a way of not getting bogged down by detail. Details, he was convinced, would take care of themselves. He once advised a student: "Do not concentrate so much on the features. Paint the head. The features are only like spots on an apple."
John never relied on any gimmicks or short cuts or unusual equipment. His materials were, if anything, extraordinarily usual. "The arrange- ments for painting", Julie Heyneman (a Californian art student who was introduced to John by Charles Deering in June 1892) observed at Tite Street, " - Mr. Sargent would probably have called them the'instruments of torture' - were of the simplest, the most practical kind. The palettes were weighted, and a zinc fence prevented the wet paint from slipping down to the sleeve....>
He used colours of the most ordinary variety and quality. He had no favourite paintbox - in the country he used a fruit- basket - or palette or brushes, no special tools or sacred procedures.
He could paint anywhere, in almost any conditions.(From 'John Singer Sargent' by Stanley Olsen,B&J,London,1989)
Painting Techniques: The PreRaphaelites "Wet White" Method...
"his fellow Brotherhood artist, Millais, had separately devised a technique for producing a particularly notable brilliance of colour. Hunt explains this technique as follows: ",. . . on the morning for the painting, with fresh white (from which all superfluous oil has been extracted by means of absorbent paper, and to which a small drop of varnish has been added) spread a further coat very evenly with a palette knife over the part for the day's work, of such density that the drawing should faintly show through. Over this wet ground, the colour (transparent and semi-transparent) should be laid with light sable brushes, and the touches must be made so tenderly that the ground below shall not be worked up, yet so far enticed to blend with the superimposed tints... " This method only works well ,in my experience, for those parts of the picture which are >very high in tone.And it's troublesome if the lead white dries faster than you can complete the part in question...You lose your work,or have to leave it half finished.
Painting Techniques: Whistler
" As to Whistler's technical methods, I have been given some very interesting notes of his practice by a person who worked for some years in his studio. "He put the picture side by side with the sitter. He objected to figures actually life-sized; by as much floor as was in front of the feet, by so much did he suppose his sitter retired from the frame, and to that amount he made him smaller. The canvas had a grey preparation made with black and white mixed with turpentine. He did not use a palette,but had a table near him on which he mixed the tones he was going to use. This was a very important part of his practice; before actually painting his picture he mixed with great care a quantity of the tones he would- require such as background colour, floor colour, coat-colour in the light, ditto-in the half-tone, ditto in the shadow; flesh-colour in the light, in the half-tone, and in the shadow; hair-colour in the same way, etc.
He had a mixture of oil and turpentine in a saucer standing on the table. Using this as a medium, he covered thinly the whole canvas with these prepared tones, using house-painters' brushes for the surfaces, and drawing lines with round hogshair brushes nearly a yard long (he said that Carlyle was much struck by these big brushes, and laughingly approved of them as well fitted for their purpose). His object was to cover the whole canvas at one painting- either the first or the hundredth.
I remember his pulling up Lady Archibald Campbell for saying that, at the last sitting, he would 'touch up' her portrait. Not 'touch it up,' he said, 'give it another beautiful skin.' This contains a complete statement of the quality that he aimed at.
When a thing was incomplete he did not try to patch it; he did it all over again and again and again-till it was finished-or wrecked, as often happened, from the sitter getting tired, or growing up or growing old.
"It was certainly not a recipe for one-down-t'other-come-on portrait painting, to be delivered in time and depended on.
He would put the mixtures in little gallipots of water round the table that served as a palette, so that he could depend upon taking up the same tone another day."
From "The Art of Portrait Painting" by John Collier,Cassel & Co,London,about 1910