The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

Walk with Me

A Step by Step Oil Painting Demonstration

Walk with Me     12 x 12"     Oil     © John Hulsey

   For many situations, the glaring white of the canvas benefits by some initial toning with an oil color wash. For oil painting, I generally use oil primed surfaces which do not stain easily and allow for wiping any lights back out after this toning. If you should need a drier surface to begin on, add a quick-drying medium such as Gamblin’s Alkyd to this wash. I chose a blue tone for my wash in this case because my overall mass-tone needed to be cool, and this helps to get the temperature of my initial color mixes off on the right foot.

Step One

   My first concerns are to establish a sample of my darkest darks and lightest lights. The whites here are wiped out of the color wash, followed by the black verticals. Once I have those two value extremes in, all other values must fit between them. This makes the job of mixing the middle grays, both cool and warm, easier to judge. You can also see here that the loose, graphic verticals create an important scaffolding for distributing the smaller masses throughout my design. I always work large masses first.

Step Two

   Keeping it loose, using large hog bristles loaded with color, I create an impressionistic series of color strokes laid right over the still-damp color wash. No attempt to blend edges or refine shapes is made yet.

Step Three

   Still keeping my strokes very loose and working thin to thick, I worked on building more structure, background to foreground, in this somewhat chaotic forest scene. As I mixed colors, I was mindful that I wanted some tones to remain through the finish, while others were lost or obscured in layers of overpainting, just as Nature does in the landscape. Depth of space is created through temperature changes, more than through values.

Step Four

   Working very thickly now with small bristle brights and filberts and using various painting knives as well, I concentrated on adding the “jewelry” all over the picture.You may notice that, even in the small suggestions of leaf shapes, I have not resorted to my fine pointed sable brushes yet. It is too early for that.

Step Five

   Below is the final painting, Walk with Me, 12 x 12”. I have learned to wait until the very end of the painting before getting the small brushes out to create the fine details. The best reasons for this are that the eye will always seek out details right away, literally missing the forest for the trees (or leaves), and I only want to paint them once, over the top of everything else. This means that the painter must do some advanced planning when building a complicated, layered vision like this, even working outdoors. Speed is important, but not at the sacrifice of knowing where we want to end up! This study was soon used as the basis for a 36 x 36” studio work, In the Forest.

Walk with Me     12 x 12"     Oil     © John Hulsey