Oil Painting Materials

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. In this free painting video a professional artist, Cody Davis, will demonstrate how to oil paint the portrait of a young girl. Davis will begin by explaining the materials, paints and tools that he'll be using. He'll then begin explaining the process of tracing and paint mixing in order to begin creating this wonderful work of art. Davis will demonstrate several useful painting techniques for creating all aspects of the portrait. He'll demonstrate how to: paint the eyes, create skin tones, shade, add highlights, blend colors, define facial features as well as how to soften the edges. After creating the face, eyes, nose, hair and blouse, he'll then begin demonstrating how to fine tune the details of the painting in order to make it come alive. Watch these videos and learn to oil paint a portrait today.

Video Transcript

"Right now what we're going to do is paint an oil portrait of a young girl, and I'm going to use this as the source, I think it's a pretty good pose, the lighting's very good and the pose is excellent. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use transfer paper and an outline for tracing, to trace the outline onto my canvas. And what I'm going to need to paint with are oil brushes, these are synthetics, I like using synthetics, they cost less and if they're good synthetics, it works out quite well. I'm going to need like a little larger flat brush, a quarter of an inch, down to small number ones and zeros, "00's", those are the tiny brushes."