Palette Knife Oil Painting Techniques

Palette knife painting exercises can be so helpful in understanding how to move the paint around. It is a safe place to explore new ideas, try out new knives, or play with color palettes. For the exercises I like to use Canvas paper because it is inexpensive and no one has to see it, I treat it like a sketch book. As an added bonus for you I have also included a pdf that I wrote for the Amazon Kindle that explores different ways to get painting.

Analogous color blends are fun to practice and very useful because you may use them in your paintings. This exercise helps you to explore the different types of final knife marks that you leave as well.

This exercise helps to build accuracy and understanding of how to use the knives to be accurate when you need to be. This exercise is also a great opportunity to explore new styles, knives, and color palettes.

In this section we will discuss where to find royalty free photos. Next we will use toned paper and charcoal to create a value sketch for our painting.

Using gesso is a quick process and it dries rather quickly. You can put 2 or 3 different coats on. After the gesso is dry we will use a burnt umber mix to tone the artist board.

And now for the best part - painting!

We will discuss what color palette we will use and how to think about color.

We will learn how to use the palette knives and how to capitalize on what the palette knife is doing.

We continue our painting by placing trees in the distance using colors from out chosen color pallette. Next we work through the dock and parts of the grass around the windmill, the windmill, and water.

We continue to work on the water, being very careful of the reflection on the water. All the while we need to keep our mind aware of the bigger themes of the painting as a whole.

We start to decide what finishing touches we will include and begin to look over the darks, highlights, and colors.

Now we will finish our painting and adjust any highlights, shadows, or tones that we are not quite happy with.

After our painting is completed we will let it set for a few days before applying a varnish.

It is VERY important that your painting is dry before applying varnish.

After our paintings are dry we will use a varnish to protect our paintings.

There are many ways to frame a painting, and I am going to show you how I like to do it, and you may want to try it or maybe you'd prefer another method...either way - let's frame our work!