Oil Painting - Adding Body Color and Shadow

Martha Spak: Hi, I am Martha Spak with MLSGallery and I am showing you how to paint a still life oil painting. Right now, I am going to show you, how to lay in your body shadow and body tone. We've continue to sketch our scene and pulling the shapes and the shadowing of our still life setup.

Now we are going to pull some more colors and place cadmium yellow medium, with a little of my Liquin medium that I use, as well as a little yellow ocher and a little vermilion and I am mixing on my palette in order to -- and I am adding a little gray to put in some soft edges, notice I am moving from pair to pair because I know that these two edges are in similar tone.

Now I am going to add a little more yellow ocher, I find that it's easy if you think in terms of a third of your subject matter of a typical pair, if you slice it in thirds vertically and horizontally and look at the color in those areas, that helps to determine what color you should put on your canvas.

So I know that on the lower side of -- the right side of each of the pairs, it tends to go darker. So I am going to add a little of that yellow ocher, a little of my cobalt blue and a little gray. Again we are just filling in, so that we have a sense of where the colors change on our canvas and where the shadows hit.

So that's how we add in our body shadow and body tone. As you will see, I haven't put in the stems yet, I am planning on putting them in when we add in our background choice in the next clip. It's a little tip I have 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 when oil painting.