Mastering Colour and Light in Oil Painting

Learn to see beyond the bewildering details of your subject and identify the colour in-formation needed to get your painting off to a strong start. Develop the skills to mix the exact colour you want confidently and directly.

Through a structured series of tutorials and still life painting exercises, students will gain a detailed understanding of oil painting principles and the current understanding of colour and its attributes. Topics include paint mixing, oil paints and mediums, and light and colour perception. Suitable for all levels, the course has helped students from be-ginners to advanced painters to develop their skills.

By the end of the course, students will have built a solid foundation in colour mixing, ex-panded their technical understanding of oil painting materials, and produced a collec-tion of studies or sustained paintings that reflect their progress.

Former students of this course, or David's online lecture course Beyond “Colour Theory”: Understanding and Applying Colour, may skip the introductory exercises and focus on areas where they would like individual guidance.

Course Schedule:

The following is an indicative course schedule only. The content and pace of the ses-sions may vary in response to the students in the program.

Day 1 – Orientation and foundations
Introduction to oil painting materials and colour for painters, beginning with the crucial colour attribute of greyscale value or tone. Students will match a Munsell value scale in paints and use these to transcribe a painting in greyscale.

Day 2 – Still life painting in greyscale
Students will devise a plan of the greyscale values to be used in a still life painting before trying out and adjusting these values to complete the painting.

Day 3– Controlling hue, value and chroma
Exercises explore the colour attributes of hue, value and chroma and then apply this framework to systematically matching colour swatches in paint. Students will then transcribe a painting to practice this colour matching procedure.

Days 4 & 5 – Still life painting in full colour
Development of a resolved still life painting beginning with a value plan and a small-scale “thumbnail” colour study. The workshop concludes with a group discussion of works, progress and insights from the week.

* Short courses are open to students of ages 16 years and over. The NAS Art Club is open to students between 15 - 17 years of age.

* Drawing and painting short courses may be held in upstairs studios. If access to stairs is not suitable, please contact us at short.courses@nas.edu.au 

* What to bring? Please refer to the list of required materials in the Art Materials field below. 

Students must supply their own art materials, please refer to the list below.

Brushes: An assortment of flat and round, bristle and/or synthetic sable brushes of various sizes from fine to large, in good condition. If in any doubt, just bring a couple of flat bristle/synthetic bristle brushes and ask for advice on the first day.

Paints

Artist grade oil paints preferred, including:

• Titanium White or Zinc White
• Permanent Rose
• Bright Opaque Red (like Cadmium Red)
• Bright Yellow
• Yellow Ochre
• Phthalocyanine Blue (e.g. “Winsor” OR “Spectrum” Blue)
• Raw Umber
• Ivory Black or Winsor and Newton Charcoal Grey

Optional additional colours:

• Bright orange (like Cadmium Orange)
• Phthalocyanine Green (e.g. “Winsor” OR “Spectrum” Green)
• Ultramarine

Student grade paints (e.g. Gamblin 1980, Winsor & Newton Winton) have lower pigment content but are okay if you're not yet committed to continuing with oil painting. Please don't buy boxed sets of tiny tubes. Substitutes for expensive paints such as the Cadmium colours similarly have drawbacks but are okay. If in any doubt, just buy your basic materials and black and white oil paints for the first day.

Supports

For new students: pieces of acrylic-primed canvas, a bit bigger than A4 (most offcuts sold at Parkers are suitable). (These are far better than most canvas pads).

For continuing students: two stretched canvases, at least 12″ x 16″

Other materials

• Pencil and notebook
• Ruler
• Tube of Matisse Carbon Grey acrylic paint for toning canvas
• Palette, either wooden (not white) or a small glass clip frame
• Stainless steel palette/mixing knife (not plastic)
• Screw cap container (“dipper”) for painting medium
• Masking tape
• Optional: plastic pill container for storing paint mixtures overnight
• Linseed Oil (small bottle)
• Odourless solvent
• Old rags and paper towels

Enclosed footwear is essential in all studios on campus.

Dr David Briggs is a classically trained painter, art educator and researcher who has taught colour, painting and drawing classes since 1996 and has created online resources on colour for painters since the launch of his website The Dimensions of Colour in 2007. His many publications and presentations, which include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour (2020), can be found here. David is Past President, Vice President, and NSW Division Chair of the Colour Society of Australia, Co-Chair of the International Colour Association (AIC) Study Group on Arts and Design and a committee member of the AIC/ISCC Colour Literacy Project and CIE Technical Committee 1-99. David has been teaching NAS Short Courses continuously since 2011 and has previously written and presented a NAS Art History and Theory elective on the history of colour theory and practice.