How to Oil Paint - Adding Body Color and Shadow

Hi, I’m Martha Speck with MLS Gallery, and I’m showing you how to paint a still life oil painting. Right now I’m going to show you how to lay-in your body shadow and body tone. We’ve continued to sketch our scene and pull in the shapes and the shadowing of our still life set up. Now we’re going to pull some more color and place cadmium yellow medium with a little of my liquid medium that I used as well as a little yellow oaker and a little vermillion. And I’m mixing on my palette in order to, and I’m adding a little grey, to put in some soft edges. Notice I’m moving from pear to pear because I know that the, these two edges are in similar tone. Now I’m going to add a little more yellow oaker. I find that it’s easy if you think in terms of a third of your subject matter. Of a typical pear, if you sliced it in thirds vertically and horizontally and look at the color in those areas, that helps to determine what color you're… you should put on your canvass. So I know that on the lower side of, say our right, the right side of each of the pears, it tends to go darker. So I’m going to add a little of that yellow oaker, a little of my cobalt blue, and a little gray. Then we’re just filling in so that we have a sense of where the colors change on our canvass, and where the shadows hit. So that’s how we add in our body shadow and body tone. As you’ll see, I haven’t put in the stems yet. I’m planning on putting them in when we add on our background choice in the next clip. It’s a little tip I’ve learned, and I think it might be useful for you. So let’s move on to setting up our background choice and our cast shadows.

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