THREE IMPORTANT LESSONS IN OIL PAINTING

More than ever before, there is a diverse range of painting materials, and in the wake of countless methods that aim to be as original and creative as possible, what was incompatible, redundant or unacceptable in traditional painting is now very much combined. However, despite all these endless possibilities, it still survives, the queen of all painting methods, since its widespread use in the 15th century until today, and that is oil painting. Anyone who has painted with quality and professional oil paints has been enchanted by their creamy and shiny texture, fullness and vibrancy of color, a painting without even a final layer or glaze of oil paints has simply, in my humble opinion, never been truly finished and reached its full beauty.

However, although painting is a completely free arena where there are no limiting rules, which is precisely its charm, there are some rules that are important and can significantly facilitate, speed up and improve your painting, which I learned through the Mastery Program, at the Milan Art Institute. Although one could talk endlessly about this topic, these are three, in my opinion, important lessons or characteristics of painting with oil colors that you should pay attention to, and which I hope to those who may not be familiar with the following and who are just preparing their palette, can help.

·       COLOR TEMPERATURE

Although we are taught from a young age that yellow is a warm color, instinctively like the sun we feel its warmth, or that black is a cold color due to its association with that which is shrouded in nothingness and darkness, still oil paints bring an extremely rich world, where every color imaginable has its cool and warm variant. The molecular properties of colors are such that electrons move around the nucleus differently, warm colors move exocentrically, and cool colors endocentrically, in other words, warm colors seem to move closer to the observer, and cool colors move away, for example lemon yellow is a cool color while ocher yellow is warm, mars black is cool while ivory black is a warm color, or Prussian blue is always cool while ultramarine blue is a warm color, etc. Why does this matter? It is important simply for the reason that if you want the painting to give impression as if it is moving and being alive, it is important that you paint that what you want to give the impression of coming out of the canvas, as close to the viewer's eye as possible with warm colors while everything in the background, far away, or what recedes, usually it's contours, everything that doesn't come to the fore but helps and rests on what needs to be emphasized, you paint with cool colors. The distant sun should therefore be of a cool color, while the yellow shades of the flowers lying on the table in front of you will be of a warm tone, also the red of the cheeks will be warm, while the one in the distance in the grass will be crimson red. In essence, this color setting gives depth to the image and you will avoid color neutralization, that is mixing warm and cool which will result in dead colors unless you intentionally want to create that effect. Of course, the human eye can often deceive, and even though it seems that we logically know what is a warm and what is a cool color, we don't have to learn it by heart, today this list of cold and warm colors is available everywhere, and there is line of oils by mentioned Milan Art Institute with marked colors tubes so the painters would have this information immediately.

·       PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE PALLET

For the purpose of practical and methodical mixing of colors, the following setting of colors on your palette is recommended, before starting to prepare the shades that you will apply on the canvas: yellow, orange, red, green, blue and violet plus white color. In relation to what has been stated above, it would be good to arrange the warm shades of these colors on one side and the cool shades on the other, opposite each other, such as Prussian blue versus ultramarine blue or cool viridian green versus warm emerald green. You can mark one side with a plus for warms and the other with a minus for cools to make it easier to navigate and to avoid confusion, over time your eye will be trained to recognize these shades. And why this order of colors? The colors are placed in such a way that they are paired complementary, in other words next to each other they come to the fore, they highlight each other such as red and green, blue and orange or yellow and purple (and also various shades of pink that especially bring life to the yellow tones) and when they are mixed they give various skin tones important for painting portraits, of course you can soften the various brown tones that you will get by mixing these complementary colors with small layers of yellow, white, orange, etc. in fact if you want to darken a color you don't add black to it but its complementary pair, green to red or blue to orange, which is also great for shadow effects. Of course, with experiments you will see which combinations suits you, but this arrangement can help, at least to find your way in the beginning.

·       USE OF TRANSPARENT AND NON-TRANSPARENT COLORS

In addition to cools and warms, there is another classification, transparent and opaque colors which when applied unable us to see the layers that are previously applied underneath it. This is important because sometimes you want to just glaze the surface so that the color underneath is visible, if you would like an effect of the sea depths you would use Prussian blue which is a cool transparent color, or if you want to create a special mystical red lighting over an already applied color that you want to keep visible, in that case you would use a Transparent Earth Red color, which in my opinion is one of the most beautiful. The rule of thumb is to use transparent colors by applying light transparent colors first, then dark ones, while opaque colors are applied in reverse, from dark to light, ending the image with the lightest places you want to emphasize, such as the shine in the eyes, the tip of the nose, parts of the face with highlights and etc. Every time you add an opaque or white color to a transparent one, the result is an opaque color, and you always apply the glaze with transparent colors on a dry canvas, usually with a soft, large brush, so that all the layers you previously built can be seen and so that the transparent colors remain clean. Also, you usually know how to recognize transparent colors by the fact that they look darker and more saturated from the tube than non-transparent ones.

Probably all this seems a bit complicated, but applied to the canvas it becomes easy and natural, especially when you see for yourself the effect of all this information. Of course, rules, especially in art, are there to be broken, but sometimes this kind of guideline can help to simply enter the world of oil paints with more confidence and ease, which undoubtedly offers a huge range of possibilities, liveliness, drama but also softness, that is a real dance of colors.