trying my hand at oil painting
Whenever I visit an art museum, I go straight to the oil paintings. For the past few years, I’ve been fantasizing about learning how to paint with oil paints, as one of those skills I’d love to do if I somehow had time. This semester I decided to finally indulge myself and take a class in it. I’m very glad I did --- even though oil painting is delicate work (since the paint takes so long to dry) it offers the ability to do so many more things that acrylic paint simply does not. Acrylic paint dries so fast that there’s no time to do shading, whereas oil painting allows for the kind of delicate shadows and highlights that you see in paintings by 17th-century Dutch masters. Oil paint is also more forgiving of mistakes, since the paint takes so long to harden.
My first painting, a still life. Nothing too exciting, but it did allow me to learn how to paint the shadows on a human face for the first time, as well as painting cloth wrinkles. Cloth wrinkles are surprisingly difficult because they’re so irregular. Triangular peaks, swooping valleys, smooth shines and shadowy crevices. We never pay attention to them in real life, but they’re actually one of the most complicated things to draw.
My second painting was small, only about 8 inches by 10 inches. For this assignment, we were constrained to only five colors of paint --- yellow ochre, cadmium red, mars black, burnt sienna, and titanium white. Mars black is a little bit blue-toned, so mixing it with white is how I got the color for the eyes. I also used a bit of it for the part of the face that’s in shadow.
I forgot about the eyebrows until I was done with the painting. A little embarrassing, but too late now.
This is my favorite painting I’ve made so far. I created this setup at my desk in my college dorm, and kept it that way for the remainder of the year. All of these items are special to me --- the doll in the upper-left corner was a present from a childhood friend of mine, the gray ceramic acorn is from my sister, the watch necklace is something I bought at the Renaissance Faire with my family as a teenager, and the box is something I made myself, including the metal decoration, in high school as a place to store keepsakes. Two of the postcards are historical photos of my hometown (the blurry one is a black-and-white photo of a creekbed surrounded by trees) and the kitten pictures are ones that I generated with DALL-E and became extremely fond of. The little gold figurine is of a Roman soldier, and it was also a present from a friend. To me, it represents strength.
Overall, I’m most satisfied with the shadows on the mug and the box, as well as the eyes of the little dog (bought at a crafts store in my hometown.) I’m not satisfied with the way the faces of the kittens turned out, but that’s okay. I spent 35 hours on this painting and it is finished.
My painting
The AI-generated original
This painting was intended as a copy of an AI-generated image that I made around April and really loved. I wanted to take the photo myself, so I kept checking the red tulips around campus, but never saw a single bee pollinating them. Later, after joining the beekeeping club, I learned that bees can’t see the colors red or pink, so they rarely visit those kind of flowers. No wonder I never saw one!
I’m really happy with the colors of the tulip in my painting, although the bee’s wings didn’t quite have the nice hazy effect I wanted. Almost. The bee itself looked too AI-generated (not the right number of legs, antennae too straight) and I made sure to fix those issues in my painting. I didn’t really shade the bee, though, which is why it looks a little flat in comparison to the AI-generated image. Something to remember for next time --- that very dark surfaces still need plenty of variation in terms of shading.
I’m really proud of what I’ve been able to make this year, and I’m glad I finally made the time to take this class. Art really is my truest passion, even though it’s not the focus of my career, and I’m glad to have invested in branching into a new skill.