What Is One Session Painting?

Series Summary

The art of painting with oils has it's roots in the Middle Ages, as oil paint was used as a more functional and durable replacement for tempera paints. While oil-based painting is mentioned as far back as 1125 BCE, the medium gained popularity with 15th century painters in northern Europe, and the glossy finish of the paintings helped to define the style. Italian Renaissance painters soon began working with oils, and oils have been the preferred medium of painters for centuries since.

The process of oil painting is somewhat more involved than using quick-drying acrylic paints. Traditionally, each layer of the painting, from the underpainting on, is someone oilier than the previous layer, allowing for the paint to dry properly without cracking or peeling. The artist can choose to add varnishes, resins or waxes to change the translucency of the paint. Some oil paintings can be dry enough to be varnished in six months to a year, but many art conservators say it can take as many as 60 to 80 years before a painting is completely dry.

In this series of free video art lessons you'll learn the basic techniques of painting with oils. Expert artist Vince Fazi shows you what art supplies you'll need to get started, how to set up a still life subject for your painting, and how to choose the colors for your painting. He'll also show you how to make oil paintings from a photograph, including how to get started, how to place color and shapes on your canvas, and how to emphasize the focal point of your piece. Watch these free videos to learn the basics, and then follow your imagination using these basic guidelines, and start your masterpiece today!

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village.com, I'm Vince Fazio at the Sedona art center and I'm here to tell you about oil painting, one session paintings. There are a number of reasons to do one session paintings, and one reason is to do them as studies for larger paintings. Doing a one session small painting forces you to generalize and forces the painting down to its basic compositional elements and that is what you need to know when you go into a larger painting. So in a way, a one session painting can be a sketch for a larger painting. It's also a great exercise for a painter to learn these basics of composition. There is a market for one session paintings. There's miniature shows all over the country and there are in fact on the web, a number of places where people sell one session paintings as daily paintings. They do a painting a day. There's a lot of different venues, subject matter and so on that you can use in one session paintings. I'm going to introduce three of them and then we're going to do one. This is one version of a one session painting. You go outdoors and you set up your materials and you paint directly from life as quickly as possible. The light's going to change quickly, and so you have to work quickly. That is, in itself, is a good way to work, a good way to learn about painting, paint quickly."