I’m very excited because I signed up this spring for weekly oil painting classes at the Beaux Arts school in Paris, and I’m planning to blog about the classes.
To warm up and to revive my blogging tools, I want to share a few photos from the only time so far that I’ve used oil paints: it was during an excellent one-day life painting workshop in London, in January 2020. Four years ago already!
End results from all participants.
I have very fond memories of that workshop, because I went with a good friend and we had a great day, and because the workshop itself was very well structured, to ease us into “thinking with paint”, so to speak. It went like this:
- Line drawing with charcoal
- Tonal drawing with charcoal
- Tonal underpainting with acrylic
- Final painting with oil
The workshop
It was organized by London Drawing, with whom I did a few events while I lived in London, and they were great each time. See also the Klimt and Schiele workshop.
I recovered a screenshot of the event description, after some chat archeology.
Warm-up with charcoal lines
We started with charcoal, the model took a short dynamic pose, standing with legs crossed and an arm raised, we drew her with lines. That was a quick introduction to warm up our drawing skills, and to move us to the idea that when painting, what matters is not so much the lines between the inside and the outside of the model’s body, but rather the colour contrast between those two areas.
Tonal drawing with charcoal
To switch our minds to drawing with tones instead of lines, we used charcoal at first. The technique was to spread a medium-grey amount of charcoal over a whole page of paper, to create a neutral tone, and to carve out of that some lighter areas with an eraser (to recover the white of the paper), and darker areas with more charcoal. It was a very interesting way to start thinking about contrast.
Underpainting with acrylic
We painted on a sheet of relatively thick paper. The tutor helped us prepare on our palette a series of shades of blue using acrylic paint, by mixing white and blue paint. As with charcoal, we first painted a medium blue all over the sheet, then added on top areas of lighter blue or even pure white, and more saturated blue for darker areas.
The idea was to make a rough painting that would help us by providing guidelines for composition when applying oil paint on top, and also the tutor said that having the blue colour in particular behind the oil-based colours would make them more vibrant. Using acrylic for the underpainting means that it dries very quickly. I think that it also has technical advantages to have an underpainting compared to painting with oil directly on paper, but I don’t remember the explanations on that point.
Final painting
We first prepared a series of skin tone colours on our palette, then followed the well-laid plan to compose the oil paint layer. Painting with oil was tricky and quite different from the watercolours that I’m used to, but overall I was happy with the result. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to finish the red rug at the bottom during the workshop, so I left my painting like that.
I’m now looking forward to learning more techniques specific to oil during my classes, which start next Tuesday. Stay tuned 🙂