Oil Painting Lesson 3: The Painting Begins

For yesterday's class I began painting my image. At first I was rather overzealous and painted the entire background in one go. However, the colour was too dark so I started over. I was advised to take a slower approach, by observing individual areas and to mix colours for that specific region. It's a slow process, but once you get the right colours it's quite rewarding.

Above: The sky last night, taken outside Frank Joubert.

The pictures below show me trying to mix the correct colours. The left image shows colour swatches which I hold up next to the reference image to give me an idea if I am getting the right colour.

Oil Painting Lesson 2: Mixing colours.

This week's painting class at Frank Joubert was rather challenging. It mainly involved mixing primary colours to form a neutral grey. 

It takes a lot of backwards and forwardsing of adding a bit of this colour, a bit of that colour, and so on and so forth. I managed to get a grey, but it kept either tending towards a yellow/grey or a blue/grey. 

The image I found to paint as my first picture was this one. It's going to be a bit of a challenge but it could look really cool when finished. As  you can see from the second image, I didn't get very far with my underpainting as I spent most of the time struggling with getting a grey.