Tht Steps to Paint a Landscape Oil Painting

1.Find a photograph that you would like to paint. 2.Tape the photo to your easel and get yourself set up to paint. 3.Lay out your colors onto your palette. Make a habit of laying them out in the same order every time. Eventually, you will instinctively know where each color is.This is especially handy if you're painting on location. 4.In the jar, mix 1 part of the poppy seed oil with 2 parts of the sunflower oil. For example: use 1/8 cup of poppy seed oil and 1/4 cup of sunflower oil. 5.Choose a medium sized brush to begin. 6.Mix raw sienna with a little turpentine on your palette. Mixing it with turpentine, rather than the oil, will allow it to dry faster. For the first sketch, you will need the thinned paint to dry quickly. Raw Sienna is a great neutral color to start with and will cover easily. Don't mix it too thin, but thin enough so that the paint flows smoothly and is transparent. 7.Using the thinned raw sienna, make a quick sketch on your canvas of the main bodies of land. Make sure your horizon line is correctly indicated at 1/3 or 2/3 of the way down on the canvas, depending on how much sky is in your photo. 8.While your sketch lines are drying some, start mixing your paints. Use the oil mixture to mix your paints with. To begin with, your paints are going to be fairly thin and transparent. With each subsequent layer, the paint should be thicker and the oil mixture less. In this way you will be painting fat over lean. This is very important as the first layers of paint will absorb the oil from the layers on top of them. If the top layers dry faster than the lower layers, the painting will crack. 9.Paint the sky first. If there is a lot of color in your sky, just block in the main color. 10.Block in your shadows and the dominant colors of the landscape. 11.Allow to dry completely before continuing (about 48 hours). When taking a break, make sure youclean your brushes properly and take care of your paints by covering your palette and capping the oil tightly. 12.With each successive layer there are a few things to remember. When anything recedes into the distance, there is atmosphere between you and that object. Therefore, there will be less detail and less color saturation in the your distant objects (such as mountain and trees). The darkest shadows will be in the foreground. Many people tend to think that the darkest shadows are in the distance. However, if you gaze carefully at any landscape you will see that because of the atmosphere, the shadows are muted compared to the shadows in the foreground. Remember the rule of thirds. It is a compositional rule that not only helps you place your scene correctly on the canvas, but it also helps you develop a nicely balanced painting.Common among photographers, but also an essential for artists. 13.Make sure your paint is a little thicker than last time and begin painting in more detail. Continue each time with thicker paint and more detail until your painting is finished. More Tips for Oil Paintings