Video: How to Finish an Oil Painting

Learn how to finish an oil painting in this free instructional video art lesson on oil painting.

Video Transcript

At some point it's good to, toward the end of the process, step away from your painting, go have a cup of coffee, do something else because you are going to come back to it and you're going to look at it with fresh eyes. If you can, it is best to forget about it. Read something, do something that distracts you. And then come back to it and that first glimpse tells you everything you need to know. A famous artist once said "Content is in a glimpse" and no matter how long you work on a painting that's true. So, what I did is I came back and I looked at the edges of this figure, looked at the values and colors around that figure and used all those shapes around the figure to isolate the figure in terms of the silhouette. And then went into the figure with the values and tones. The bench got lowered, the bag was put in, some little highlights of stuff she had sitting on the bench. That makes kind of a nice color note out there. Kind of bringing some of the light blue from the sky back in down here. This became very, a rich green color. And, again I brought out the things that initially attracted me to the image and that's really the point. The painting took on a little more life when I added these bright pinks into the, not pink really, but bright colors, beige kind of color to create the ground. And so I have what I started out with in my initial thumbnail sketch. I have a passage of light moving through the image, from background to foreground in that way. And the figure is an intermediate event in that passage of light. This painting will be posted on my blog where I will be, I'm showing small scale paintings that I do as studies and paintings that are just done on a small scale. Generally 6 X 8 inches is what this is. Some are 6 X 6, some are 5 X 7. And I have a blog at blogspot.com, vincefazio@blogspot.com. The paintings are for sale there. They're just priced as marked. Go have a look.

How to Finish an Oil Painting

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