Free eBooks : oil painting techniques

How to Paint a Portrait: 38 Portrait Painting Techniques from Artist Daily

Courtney Jordan — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:09:06 GMT

Learn the fundamentals of portraiture with our latest eBook, How to Paint a Portrait: 38 Portrait Painting Techniques from Artist Daily. In it, Janet Rogers explores how to capture a model's gesture in a watercolor portrait. I knew I liked her style when I read a few of her tips, one of which was "keep the painting simple and don't try to say too much." Rogers also gives a few great painting tips on how to test background colors while in the process of painting.

And for oil painting lessons, none other than famed artist John Howard Sanden's paintings are used to show how a professional portrait artist works. I was especially interested to learn that Sanden uses three values of neutral mixtures on his palette, made from combinations of Permalba white, ivory black, and yellow ochre. Plus there's a step-by-step demo that Sanden does that makes the whole portraiture process seem so accessible.

Get all of these tips and techniques to add to your art instruction library by downloading your free copy of How to Paint a Portrait: 38 Portrait Painting Techniques from Artist Daily. Enjoy!

Landscape Painting Techniques: Painting Light and Shadow in Your Landscape Art

Karyn — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:11:37 GMT

Work on perfecting your landscape painting techniques with Chris McHenry and Joseph Bohler. Each discusses how they approach painting landscapes within their chosen medium. Bohler is a watercolorist with an eye for simplified compositions and objects and places that are timeworn. McHenry has a background as a billboard sign painter and puts his experience to good use in his landscape art, focusing on how to evoke a place without a lot of detail and how to paint patterns of sunlight and shadow while sticking to big shapes.

New content was added to this eBook in May 2011.

Oil Painting Techniques from Artist Daily: 8 Expert Oil Painting Tips to Enhance Your Oil Painting Art

Karyn — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:57:20 GMT

Artist David A. Leffel strongly believes that the best oil-painting instruction lies in responding to the abstract qualities of a fine-art oil-painting composition—light, shadow, values, edges, color, texture, and space. In a way, this emphasis connects Leffel to a long line of artists such as Rembrandt and Van Dyck, all of whom shared a similar preoccupation with the fundamentals of painting.

But learning these time-honored oil-painting lessons is not a matter of reading through some dusty tome or secret scroll. Instead, it is a matter of doing and painting. To that end, Leffel shares the concepts he believes are behind every beautiful fine-art oil painting in our newest free eBook, Oil Painting Techniques From Artist Daily: Enhance Your Oil Painting Art With 8 Expert Oil Painting Tips. Among other subjects, the artist discusses the pitfalls of being overly concerned with detail and emotional content, how to hold a brush, the important of massing, and how to start an oil painting.