Jun 21, 20232 min read

The process of oil painting. A visual guide of how an oil painting is built layer after layer.

Oil painting is a beautiful high-pigmented buttery medium that stays wet for longer.

Oil paint is great for beginners who take a longer time mixing their palettes as the paint will stay wet for a few days (in the right conditions). Oil paint can also cover up any mistake (unlike watercolours) - you can repaint over any layer and cancel out anything that was there before - making it the perfect medium for beginners as accidents happen and your development will show week after week.

The only downside is that if you need to layer on top of your painting - you will need to wait for it to dry - this can take a few days (sometimes you can get away with using stiffer brushes to apply paint wet-on-wet). This blog post is to show beginners how a painting progresses in the classes every week.

It is great showcasing our students finished beautiful oil paintings but there are many stages behind every painting. Sometimes this feels daunting to start painting at Cheshire Art Classes as the calibre of painting seems far beyond a beginner. We teach a fantastic growing group of students who benefit from being guided by a professional tutor - getting support individually and learning techniques specific to your painting.

Your first oil painting is always the hardest as you have to learn the step-by-step process of completing an oil painting. Once you've completed your first painting - the second has less doubt as you know that it starts off with a lack of texture and refinement. We teach the stages split into 5 sections - drawing, colour palette, blocking in, layering and refinement.

After a few paintings, I really start to notice the confidence that my students have in making bolder marks, selecting a more refined colour palette and experimenting with underpainting, glazes and textures.

Examples below show a week-by-week progression of our student's oil paintings.