Preparing for Oil Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Stevie Moore. Welcome to my studio here at the Artists' Attic in Lexington, Kentucky. Now I'm going to explain to you how to prepare your art surface where we can get started to--go ahead and get started to paint. I'm a right-handed person, so I like to position my canvas to the right and my subject material, my reference material, to the left. If you're left-handed, you may want to do it the other way. Just do whatever feels comfortable for you. I'm using two easels here. It's always best to use an easel when painting, but you don't absolutely have to. You can use a desk, you could also tape this to the wall if you need to, or tape it to some other object, but I believe that it's good to have both objects in the same plane--in the same angle--and work with those in that position simultaneously. What I've got here is a pre-gesso'd canvas. You can also use Masonite board, you can use wood. It's always best to have a layer of gesso or a primer coat on the bottom, that way you can go ahead and move to your initial blocking in of colors fairly rapidly, without having to layer up too much paint. The third important factor is going to be lighting, in which you're going to want to use ample, but diffused light. Reason being is oil paint is very reflective and very lustrous, especially when it's wet. If you have too much direct light on wet oil paint, you're going to get a lot of reflection off of that, and a lot of shininess will come off the paint, and it's not going to allow you to see the true color of the paint, or more close proximity of what that color is going to be once it dries. You can use tissue paper over lighting to diffuse that light, Mylar works well and fluorescent lighting--high-power fluorescent lighting tends to be your best type of bulb to use, rather than incandescent or spot lights. And also good to use a different mixture of color tints, blues as well as reds, in order to enrich all your colors on an equal scale while you're working on your painting."