[shinji69]

1. Which brush is better for oil painting, Sable or bristle? Personally I think bristle sucks ass.

2. Suggested color pallete? My pallete is: Titanium White, Cerulean Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Prussian Blue, Viridian Green, Sap Green, Yellow ochre, Cadmium yellow medium, Cadmium orange, Cadmium red medium, Alizarin crimson, Diox... Purple, burnt sienna, raw sienna and burnt umber for oil. For acrylic I use pthalo blue instead of viridian green.

3. flesh tone: how?

4. Which artist do you recommend for inspiration, in terms of painting? I'd choose Gil Elvgren, John Singer Sargent and Tom Browning....how about you guys?

[balistic]

1. Depends on your technique. I get pretty agressive with brushes, so I tend to buy cheapie bristle things that I can throw away after a painting or two.

2. I use red, blue, yellow, titanium white, and sometimes orange. I'm pretty good at mixing colors, so anything else just wastes space on my palette.


3. Just look There is utterly no such thing as a color that you can always use as the basis for skin . . . it varies by lighting, ethnicity, age, and viewing angle.

Here's a self portrait I did a couple years ago . . . the proportions are awful, but it kind of shows how I approach skin tones:



(Again, this is a shitty painting and not anything I'm particularly proud of. Its not a very good scan either.)

4. I really like the work of the Bay Area Figurativists, but I can't recall any of their names at the moment.




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Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions
http://www.bprince.com

[marc_taro]

I would not want to use good sable brushed with oils. I like to push the paint around and get scrubby - I'd destroy my expensive sables in about two min. painting in oils. So I prefer a good bristle brush. Ask for hogs hair.

[Fred Flick Stone]

shinji69-hey howz it going? GOt a few tips for you.

Sables are great for finesse work, and for working in small detailed areas. The fibers are more flexible. But, not a lot of paint goes down all at once.

Bristles are rigid brushes and can move paint around. YOu can load up the brushes pretty heavily with paint.

I prefer flats myself, with details left to rounds, and outlining, or roughing in my linear layout. Flats turn into filberts eventually from the repetitive grinding into the canvas. Also flats put down more paint quicker, filling the canvas faster.

As far as palettes go, that is totally subjective, as are the brushes and favorite artists. But whatt you want to try for with your palette is getting a warm and a cool of all the colors on your palette. So, for example, the palette I use is something like this: Titanium white, Ivory black, Lemon yellow or yellow ochre, depending upon the intensity and mood of the painting, and cadmium yellow pale or light. The cad yellow is the warm yellow and the lemon and yellow ochre are both cools of the yellow family. For reds, in gouache it is called flame red, in oils it is closer to a cad red light. This is my warm red, my cool red is alizeron Crimson. For my green family, I use sap green for the cool, and thalo green or perm green light for my warm green. For the blues, I use curelean blue, or ultramarine blue for the cool side, and thalo blue or sky blue for the warms. Prussian blue can be made by mixing ultramarine with alizeron crimson. THen I throw out orange lake light or cad orange, and violet purple or dioxithine(sp?) purple as additional oddity colors. THis is a traditional palette.

I also use crazy colors like geranium red, or primrose red, turquoise blue, etc for brighter images.

Just make sure that your palette is limited when working into your image. The more colors you arbitrarily throw into your painting, the more work you are going to have to do to keep them all harmonious, this is not an easy chore...

As for flesh tones, it is really difficult to say what is right and what is not. Any colors can be mixed to create fleshes, if you are looking at reproducing images that resemble Rockwell, or Cornwell, then you might be leaning more toward yellow ochre, cad red cad yellow, white, alizeron, tehn greensd and blues to cool the respectively with your over all color scheme. Also keep in mind, if you want a Rockwellian look you will want to get familiar with venetian red and mars violet. He used these colors in his under paintings. If you are going for more of a sargent or sorolla look, then definitely ochre, cads, aliz. etc. And rarely if ever do you want to use straight black. You can make beautiful blacks with mixing colors like aliz crimson with thalo blue, or ultramarine blue. Or burnt sienna with ultra marine blue, or thalo green and alizeron, etc. Know thy palette well. And once you decide upon a palette, learn it well, mix all the colors together on a throw away canvas just to figure out how to mix.
A good idea of controlling a palette, and mixing the colors well to get a variety is Andres Zorn. Many of his paintings were merely done in four tubes of paint, venetian red, yellow ochre, white and black. Every color can be mised with these four tubes, if you know what you are doing. They aren't going to be out of the tube colors, but they will be harmonious colors to your color scheme.

As far as picking inspiration, lean toward the artists that really thrill you personally. I enjoy all artists to a degree, but the ones I always fall back to are Rockwell, Cornwell, Mcginnis, Elvgren, Sargent, Zorn, Duveneck, Fechin, Bougereau, Alma Tadema, Valesquez, Ingres, Repin.

Hope this has helped a bit.

[subliminal]

fred said it all...
if you are new at this, i would suggest to use limited pallete. more colors, more confuse you will get. good luck and have fun!

[pierre]

The choice of brushes are pretty much a matter of taste and technique.

The color palette is pretty much also a matter of taste and technique, and style too ofcourse. Unfortunately we live in a non idealistic world, which in this sense means that we do not have ideal colors. If you want your palette to be able to simulate most colors that you think you can see and think of, then you need to look carefully at the colors, their persistency, their behaviour when blended with other colors and/or mediums, their consistency etc...

My palette has a foundation of black (ivory black - I prefer this black because of its neutral behaviour in fusion with other colors. It can however tend to the cool side when blended with white. White tend to cool down colors, however ivory black tend to go toward the cool area more than other common blacks.) and white (zink white - I prefer the zink white because of its smooth flow).
I use two colors for each of the primary colors. For the yellows I use light cadmium, which is a cool yellow, and kadmium yellow, which is a warm yellow. For the reds I use cadmium orange, warm, and Alizarin, cool. For the blues, Cobolt blue, cool, and Ultramarine, warm. This is pretty much all you need inorder to blend most colors, however these colors are quite expensive and it would be a waste to use them say for an underpainting or e.g. for browns, which can be obtained by using a much cheaper earth colors like umbers, siennas, ochres etc... brown color. Hence I have burnt umber, raw umber, burnt sienna and golden ochre added to my palette. Another color that I am very fond of is Naples yellow. I save the most expensive colors on my palette for the actual rendering, not the underpainting, even though I sometimes cheat with that too, since my underpainting, in some cases, need a color that I feel only my main palette can provide for.

Now all these colors aren't necessary, but I have tried out so many combinations through the years and this is the scheme that has developed out of the mistakes and success. My advice to those that are not sure about what colors to use is to use as few as possible. That way, I believe, any color added to the palette will be of a true need for it, and you will come to understand better why it has to be there.

But again, it is all a matter of taste in the end and that is how it should be. Wouldn't be so interesting if all of us walked around with the same palette, and the same brushes for that matter.

If I had to point out one painter that have had the greatest influence on my own work, that would be a hard deal because I have so many jewels from so many times and places. There is however one artist that my eyes has enjoyed and learned from alot, Anders Zorn, a swedish 19th century artist, mainly a portrait painter. He was very much influenced by the works of John Singer Sargent. Other favorites are Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, Lord Leighton, Waterhouse, Alphonse Mucha, Solomon Joseph Solomon, Paul Delaroche, Jules Bastien Lepage, Jean Leon Gerome, William Adolphe Bougerau, Ilya Repin, Kramskoi, Frederick Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Garin, Peder Severin Kr�yer, Velasquez, Gustav Klimt, Stanhope Forbes, Haddon Sundblom and many many more.

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http://www.crosswinds.net/~pierrehannah