Tips on Oil Painting - The Detail Phase

The fourth and final phase of the basic oil painting process is the detail phase. This is the time to incorporate all the details like small decorations, fine textures, and highlights.

The first phase is the drawing phase which basically aims at making a map of your subject matter which contains enough information to guide you through the actual creation of your painting. Accuracy of lengths, directions, positions, etc. is the name of the game in this phase. No attention should be paid to artistic expression.

The second phase of the painting process is the so-called block-in phase. This phase requires you to color in all the larger areas without paying attention to detail. The idea is to be accurate (i.e., do not destroy the accuracy you created in the drawing phase) not only in dimensions but also in color (i.e., hue, value, and intensity). The end product is a canvas that is completely covered with accurate color in the right places.

The third phase or shaping phase, can be seen as a modeling phase. We revisit every large shape and put in the necessary smaller shapes so that the result begins to look like the actual objects you are trying to paint. In this phase you must use thicker paint than in the Block-in Phase and also a somewhat smaller brush. Part of the reason to use thicker paint is so that we do not break the "fat over lean" rule of oil painting.

So, at the end of the third phase we are basically presented with an almost finished painting. The subject matter should be clearly recognizable and all that is missing are the small details.

These details include things like small twigs, pupils, eye lashes, small lines and curves, and highlights on a cheek or piece of clothing. In short, anything that cannot be done with a large brush.

Some details will require the use of thinned-out paint. For example, when adding thin lines or curves for hair or grass, we can get good results by using thing paint. However, in these situations you should always be aware of the so-called fat over lean rule of oil painting.

The fat-over-lean rule of oil painting states that you should always paint fat over lean. The words fat and lean refer to the amount of oil contained in the paint. So, in principal, when applying layers of oil paint on top of each other on your canvas, you should always apply a fatter layer on top of a leaner layer. If you put a lean layer on top of a wet fat layer changes are that, after some time, the lean layer will start to show cracks.

Other details may require the use of thick paint often right out of the tube. This is the case with heavy highlights and very intense accents such as red reflection on a roof of a house.

The reason details are better added at the very end as a fourth phase is that they are usually quite small and need to be placed very precisely. Therefore, it is better to start with painting large general shapes and then to progressively add refinements until the entire scene is correctly reproduced on your canvas. It then becomes much easier to place the details in their correct locations.

Also, details are often meant to be accents of intense color which requires thick paint and therefore, according to the fat-over-lean rule, are best put on last.

Finally, with the benefit of an almost finished painting it becomes much easier to judge if the added details are artistically well-distributed. For example, it is almost always the case that a focal point area will have more detail than other areas. For comparison purposes it is a good thing to have at your disposal a general overview of the entire painting.

Seed Newsvine

Bookmark this article in your preferred program

Comments

Add Comment

Popular Articles in this cathegory

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.