Monday, July 19, 2010

Herefords: Oil painting

Along with all the digital fun I've been having, I have been doing a little oil painting lately.

Here's the step-by-step process of my latest painting based on a digital painting I did a couple of weeks ago...

 (Herefords- digital painting. 700x500px . © 2010, Andy Dolphin)

This is the digital painting that served as a starting point. Since the computer is nowhere near my painting room, I used an earlier oil painting as a reference whilst painting and only occasionally looked back at the digital picture to see if I was heading in the right direction.


A quick layout of the major shapes and undertones (shadow tones). The paint was thinned a little with turps and whisked on with a pastry brush.


Starting with the sky and working down the painting and from background to foreground, I begin working over the painting with thicker paint. I'm still focussing mainly on shadow tones though I've added a subtle highlight to the distant hills.


After all the major shadow tones have been reworked, I apply heavier layers of local colours.

 (Herefords. 25x35cm oil on panel © 2010, Andy Dolphin)

Once I had the bulk of the painting "feeling" about right, I scraped out the areas where the cattle had to go using a small, dry filbert brush. Then the beasts were added using the same process - undertone, midtone, highlight. Once they were in place, I worked back over other areas, softening some detail and adjusting colours until I declared it finished.

In many ways the finished painting is quite conceptual compared to the near-literal interpretations of scenes that I usually paint. The primary focus throughout was to keep the majority of colours controlled in such a way that the "red" herefords almost glow in the evening sunlight.

Note: The photography on some of these is a bit sad. Sorry.

2 comments:

  1. Beautiful Andy, the herefords do indeed glow in the light. I was very interested to see you use a digital painting as the study for an oil painting as I am about to start doing the same thing.

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  2. Thanks Michelle. I love cattle and really should include them in a lot more paintings.

    Although I've been driving computers for about 20 years, I never really tried digital painting like this until earlier this year.

    I took a peek at your site too. Wonderful stuff.

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