Setting up a still life can sometimes be a daunting experience. Sometimes it takes me a few days until I find an appealing setup. Although there are guidelines re composition, however, I do not like to adhere to any specific rules. I just try to find the right combination of shapes, a balance between neutral and more chromatic colours especially complementary colours. Also the combination of materials is another factor including organic and natural materials in combination with man made objects. Then the last aspect I consider is the direction and colour of the light organised in a way to create interest, form and continuity through the cast shadows. Reflective and transparent objects are my favourite challenges. 

For this painting, a person gave me this interested fruit which looks like an apple in colour but having the shape of a pear. So I decided to place it on a piece of fabric along a reflective object. On top a piece of bay leaves from our yard to complement the fruit. The light was from the left and warm in colour.

I chose a small linen board primed with a non absorbent acrylic primer, I prepared some time ago. As a palette I just use the same limited palette of three primaries, titanium white and burnt umber to adjust the chroma. I drew a quick sketch with diluted burnt umber followed by a block in of the basic colours (Images 1 and 2). On the second session, I developed the form and details of each area starting from the darkest colours moving on to the lighter sections.  The finished painting is in the 3rd photo above.

Painting a still life is much more than painting objects and similar to when painting other subjects it starts with the idea or inspiration. I usually start placing a number of objects into the shadow box, objects made up of different shapes and materials and of different sizes. I also keep in mind the choice of colour where usually I include neutrals, light and dark colours as well as some more vibrant ones. A painting is all about contrasts and light. It usually takes me a few days until I am happy with the setup and lighting. 

I also give importance to the narrative of the artwork since one of the most important aspects of true art is the message. This painting is about our life and existence on this planet represented by the globe. The books implies the importance of knowledge in our personal life and as well to humanity. The organic material of the feather also reminds us of the changes in our lives same as the bird changes feathers at different stages of its life. The blue book at the edge almost falling off the rest indicates the stress and our ups and downs while the hourglass symbolizes time. The candle in the symbolizes our life also reminding us of our mortality.

The painting was painted on oil primed linen using a limited palette consisting of ultramarine blue, pyrrole rubine, cadmium yellow light, burnt umber and titanium white. Additional colours used where cadmium red light, phthalo blue and Indian yellow.

The images above show the process, starting from the drawing, an imprimatura with raw umber followed by first underpainting and finished painting.

One of the fundamental principles to keep in mind when painting in oils is the "Fat over lean" approach, that basically means the top layer of paint should dry at a slower rate than the lower layer. This can be achieved by either adding extra oil to paints used in the upper layers, which slows down the process of drying or simply by starting painting from dark to light. Some manufacturers add dryers to the paint preparation to make them dry pretty much at the same rate, however, these chemicals can compromise the quality of the paint in the long term. 

Here is some info about various commonly used pigments and their drying times. Mixing a slow drying pigment with a fast-drying pigment might alter the drying time depending on their proportions. One should always try to start with fast drying and relatively transparent pigments moving on to slow drying and more opaque paints. In the table below I am also giving the pigment number eg: PW1  meaning Pigment white 1

Reading the label at the back of the tube is important as most of this information is given there. The table below is a guideline and there might be some differences between manufacturers as they might be using different pigments under the same colour name and also due to using different oils in the tube. Avoid buying paints that are in safflower oil. Linseed or walnut oil is the best. One also has to remember that oil paints do not dry by evaporation as watercolour and acrylics do. So the thickness of the paint affects the curing, with thick paint taking longer to dry. Ambient temperature might also affect, in hot weather drying happens much faster, however, never attempt to dry your paintings using heat. Do not forget that oil paint dries by reacting with oxygen in air and not by evaporation. If the paint is touch dry it does not mean that it is completely cured. So it is important to apply thin layers of paint at first moving on to thicker and more oily paint as you progress. 

Fast drying   (1 - 2 days)
Lead whites       PW1      Transparent 
Raw and Burnt Umber  PBr6      semi-transparent   (Very fast drying)
Raw and Burnt Sienna  PBr7      semi-transparent
Phthalo Blue    PB15.3    Transparent
Phthalo Green  PG7         Transparent   (Very Fast)
Viridian    PG18  semi-opaque (very fast)
Cobalt Blue  PB28     semi-opaque    (Very fast)

Average drying time (2 - 5 days)
Yellow ochre  PY43 and Yellow oxide (sometimes sold as yellow ochre) PY42    semi transparent
Cerulean Blue  PB35     semi-opaque
Ultramarine blue  PB29   Transparent
Cobalt teal  PG50  Semi-transparent
Quinacridone magenta  PR122   Transparent
Cadmium red light  PR108   Opaque
Ivory black (Bone black) PBk9   Opaque

Slow drying (5 - 7 days)
Alizarin Crimson  PR83   Transparent
Titanium white  PW6    Opaque
Cadmium Yellow  PY35  Opaque to semi-transparent

A full oil painting demonstration, showing how to paint a typical Blue Mountains landscape, focusing on establishing the light effect on cliff walls. 

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and A painting is much more than a picture depicting a particular subject matter. For that matter there is nothing special about painting a particular scenery that was painted by so many people over and over again. Each painting should be telling a story, a story that the artist would like to present in a pleasing and artistic way. It does not mean that the subject matter needs to be always nice or pleasing. Caravaggio and many others painted quite gory and macabre subjects, but still they are beautiful works of art admired in museums hundreds of years after being painted. 

So what does composition means? Composition has to do with the placement of shapes in a way that are pleasing to the eye and brain. The concept of composition knows its origins from the time of the Greeks and has a mathematical foundation related to the musical scale and tones. These concepts were further developed during the Renaissance, where it was discovered that the same harmonic ratios that creates sounds and vibrations that are pleasing to the ears have a similar effect on our eyes. Hence the same concepts were applied as the underlying framework of a painting composition. 

This concept can be applied to any kind of painting, whether its a landscape, still life or even figurative. For my latest painting "First light on Cradle Mountain, Tasmania" I used the armature of the rectangle to position some important features within the painting including the direction of light (shown in first picture above). The third picture shows the basic sketch of a still life I was working on recently. On it I drew the same basic lines and its interesting to see that objects were instinctively placed in the right places without any prior construction of lines. It will become second nature and automatically one starts creating appealing compositions instinctively following these guidlines of composition without even trying to do so.  It is a good exercise to find some pictures of masterpieces done by historic or even contemporary artists, print them out and draw on them the lines that make up this armature. Its is amazing what you can learn from such an exercise.

The painting process is executed in steps, during each step one will be isolating and focusing on only one aspect of it. The first step is drawing, focusing on the arrangement of shapes making up a picture. One will need to start from the bigger shapes moving on to smaller shapes including the shapes that make up light and shadow. The next step after drawing is to focus on value, or light and dark. Value is the most important aspect of the three dimensions of colour, if your intention is to create the illusion of form on a flat surface. It is more important than colour itself. However it is the most difficult simply because our brains are not that developed to see it and hence we need to focus on an extensive amount of deliberate practice to train your eyes and brain to see value transitions that sometimes are too subtle for the untrained eye to see. Value is also what gives depth in a painting especially when it comes to landscape painting. This can be complicated by highlights on different objects located at different positions in space within a painting, so initially one needs to focus more on shadow rather than on highlights. These effects are more controlled within a still life, for the simple reason that there is a stationary light source and only a small space to focus on. Once a person understands the concept of how light bends and turns on a few basic shapes then it will be easier for that person to paint complex objects made up of different combinations of these shapes. Understanding these basic concepts is important and useful to paint anything that you want including things from your own imagination, or simply wanting to change lighting conditions in a scenery. In order to check your values in a painting there are different things that you can do. One is to look at the painting from a distance. The wrong value at the wrongs spot can be easily spotted by moving back. Alternatively you can look at the painting through a mirror. Something which really works well for me is to take a photo of the painting and convert it to black and white (as shown in second image above). The painting has to look OK in black and white, if not then one will need to evaluate what's wrong and which values are not in the right place. 

In this video I demonstrate how to paint the ocean and waves in oils. This painting was painted in two stages and here I show the second stage where I developed the detail of form and light.
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