Oil Painting Progression, Part 2 – “Identifying Features”

Today’s installment of our step-by-step oil painting tutorial demonstrates the placement of identifying features within the somewhat ghostly likenesses of the two dogs which resulted from last week’s initial steps.  It should first be mentioned that the earliest layer of paint or “underpainting” applied in last week’s article needs a good few days to begin drying (usually at least three in my opinion) before being painted over.  Oil paint dries very slowly and trying to paint too soon over an older layer (especially when it’s the first layer) can very easily lead to frustration, as your old paint gets picked up by the new paint and takes you right back to the raw surface again!  Not good.  So give it a few days to dry out a bit.

Like in the underpainting or “rough-in” stage, I still paint quite rapidly at this second stage, which is really just a more refined level of the “roughing-in” process.  Speedy brushwork helps create a more spontaneous and lively painting, but admittedly I also like getting into the “meat” of the latter parts of the painting process – such as rounding out forms, texturizing surfaces, and detailing the expressions on the dogs’ faces.  So that probably plays into my desire to establish the basics as quickly as possible.  It’s good to remember that speed in painting is fine but, by painting quickly, the goal is not to rush through any stage of the work.

“Larka & Dylan” (phase 2) by Dean Vigyikan

Indeed, if an artist wants all of the fun details and nuances of the finished painting to really mean anything, it’s critical that the underlying structure of shapes and relationships of darks and lights (values) be carefully established.  Yes, there’s almost always room for correction of certain elements later on, but the more these things can be established from the get-go, the better.  Just like at the initial rough-in stage, putting in the dogs’  identifying features is a matter of looking for visual relationships between each particular shape of color and its neighbors.  This system of looking and directly recording shapes of color is time-honored in the tradition of alla prima or “direct” painting employed by such greats as John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, Anders Zorn, and others.  It’s true that, while this seemingly slap-dash style of painting using loose brush strokes is often associated with painting from real life, it’s also very applicable in painting from photographs as I’m doing here.  In fact, I find that pretending to be painting from life, even when my reference is a photo, makes the finished product appear far more lifelike than when the static nature of a photo is allowed to encourage overindulgence in hard edges and minute details, frequently leading to a sense of “stiffness” or artificiality in the finished product.  I far prefer my work to have a sense of life and motion, so I feel it’s very helpful to build up a painting in this manner, from generalized shapes to greater and greater detail in select areas.  Still, I do like the feeling of moving quickly through these early stages and on to the greater richness of the finished surface.  But in doing so, I really try to avoid jumping the gun and moving forward until I’m satisfied with the overall structure of the painting at each stage of development.