Painting: Expert Guides and Resources

Chalk paint is all the rage. It’s a great product for all you motivated, do-it-yourselfers out there who want a new project. Dry brushing is a technique you can use with chalk paint to achieve a trendy distressed look that catches the eye.This technique uses a small amount of paint on a brush to achieve a unique depth on any surface area.

Keep this wheel handy when you’re working on your oil painting to remind you which colors mix to make other colors and which hues are complementary. Mix the two colors on either side of the color you want to make that color. To make tints, you make pure versions of basic hues and then add white to them. You make shades by adding black or complementary hues to the pure hues.

When you're ready to start your oil painting project, be sure to gather and organize all of the necessary supplies. If you're trying to decide on colors or want to mix your own colors, refer to the color wheel for help. Making and using a viewfinder will help you stay focused when painting a still life. And as with most things, a little maintenance love goes a long way: Your brushes will last longer if you clean and maintain them properly.

Watercolor painting lets you explore the world of color from a uniquely wet perspective, but, in the end, it’s mostly about the color. You have to become familiar with the color wheel and its primary and complementary colors. You need to be able to judge color values (light to dark, not cheap to expensive), and to need to choose water color paints and pigments according to their biases.

Typically, you paint on white watercolor paper. And ideally, you save the white of the paper to serve as the white in the painting. That is, you paint around the white areas, leaving the white paper to show.Although you can buy white watercolor paint, it looks a little chalky, and unless you're going for the unnatural look, you should avoid using it.

There are many characteristics of watercolor paper to consider when you're shopping for paper for your watercolor painting. Two important characteristics are weight and texture. Paper weight One characteristic of all paper, including paper meant for watercolor paintings, is its weight. The manufacturer weighs a ream of 500 sheets of paper in its uncut state and gives it a number to indicate the paper's weight.

Because human flesh runs the color gamut from light to dark and pale to brilliant, recreating flesh tones for your oil paintings can be one of the most difficult things to do. Many recipes for flesh tones exist, but here are the basics you need to know.Human skin is made up of reds, yellows, and blues — the primary colors.

Oil paint developed in the early 15th century in northern Europe. Until that time, artists primarily used tempera, an egg-yolk-based paint. Artists "discovered" oil paints when they began adding linseed oil to the egg tempera to make the colors transparent.This discovery was a great leap forward for artists. The linseed oil allowed for a buildup of transparent layers of paint to create subtle and glowing colors.

One of the advantages of painting in oil is that you can work in layers of color. The big overall term for this technique is glazing, in which you can see two distinct colors at the same time.In the following sections, you can explore some interesting properties of oil paint. Because oil painting owes a lot of its knowledge to the Renaissance artists, you get to discover some fancy Italian painting terms as well.