How to Finish an Oil Painting

Art Lesson 32, Part 5

Discover How to Finish an Oil Painting

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How to Finish an Oil Painting

This is how our Color Underpainting looks. Now, we are going to finish it in more detail.

For now, the portrait looks too flat, so we are going to pay more attention to the shades, to make them more visible – that makes the portrait more volumetric. We need to add Yellow and a tiny-tiny bit of Black to the White Color; we also add Stand Linseed Oil diluted in Turpentine, so we have a quite flexible and flowy consistency of paint. We create a colorful shade.

We add even more of the Glazing Medium and paint over the Red Underpainting in the shadow area. We can add more Red to make the Velaturas warmer and a bit darker.

At this stage, the lower lip looks darker then we need it to. Let’s modify it. We mix White, Red and Yellow and apply them opaquely over a dark Underpainting.

We can apply another opaque layer of skin color over a dry Underpainting to increase the volume of the paint surface. And at the end, we highlight all lightened places of the face – on the nose and lips, with separate brush strokes; but we spread our highlight on the cheeks and forehead.

That is it. We have finished our exercise. This short, two-session method can be continued by adding more Glazing and Velatura layers. In that case, it would be a bit different of a method, another variation.