An Oil Painting Class Still Life - Portraits of Animals

An oil painting class still life, 14 x 18.

Of the most common media available to me as an artist, I have never created an oil painting. So this was my first! A member of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators invited other members to an oil painting instruction class, a room full of experienced professional creative people who all had varied experience in oil painting taught by a lifelong professional painter. I haven’t been in an art instruction class for decades and I seriously looked forward to it.

I didn’t actually study art though I started out as an art major but just couldn’t connect with my own creative self for the images I wanted to create. I changed my major to English, my other favorite subject, and studied language and writing to develop and use my professional and creative writing skills, going back to my art about a decade later and messing around with the art materials I had on hand with no time for actual classes, so I missed the basic instruction on a lot of things. When I had tried oil paints at home it was all about turpentine it seemed and the smells were too much for me. I changed over to acrylic, which I don’t really like, so I’ve never painted much but wanted to.

This class was perfect! Not beginner because we all knew about composition and colors and such though we had a review, and the instructor provided a palette of six oil colors that we would use to create all the colors in our painting: Lemon Yellow (Primary), Alizarin Crimson Hue, Sap Green, Payne’s Grey, Titanium White, Yellow Ochre, and Ultramarine. And no turpentine, but only linseed oil to thin and apply our paint, wiping off our brushes and washing them in soap and water. And we had two 3″ bristle brushes and three small sable brushes.

We had our choice of this still life the instructor had set up or a selection of landscape photos from a book. I paint landscapes all the time so I wanted the challenge of the still life, because I love painting still lifes but rarely give myself the opportunity to, and I wanted to paint from life, not from a photo.

What a lesson! I had no doubt it was going to work but I thought adapting to it would be much more difficult since I primarily work in pastel. I was glad for the big brush from the beginning, and the limited palette, which I can adapt to other works too. And working without the turpentine in the room is going to be a pleasure. Waiting for the painting to dry is going to be a challenge! But working into wet paint instead of acrylic that dries so fast is so much like working in pastel, which is dry from the beginning and just sits there and waits.

Three hours of painting, everyone painted a different image aside from two of us who painted the still life, and we all wandered around and looked at each others’ paintings and discussed them and the oil paints and how we felt about using this medium as opposed to the media we were accustomed to.

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