Process Post: Oil Painting

The first step to the oil painting process was to make my canvas and prep it with gesso. I had never manually set up my canvas prior, so I was nervous that I would mess the entire process up during the very beginning. Despite my nerves, it ended up going rather smoothly, although the staple gun was difficult at times to staple the canvas. I had never worked with gesso on an unprepared canvas so I was quite surprised when I found out we had to do so many coats over the span of multiple days. My gesso layers were not the best and my canvas could have been tighter and more taut, but I think it will suffice for the rest of the process. The second step was to decide what I was going to use in my still life. This step was difficult in the sense that I didn't have a lot of objects that were to fit within a small cardboard box. The objects that I did find, I was worried that they wouldn't fit or look aesthetically pleasing together. However, the process of building the still life went easier and I think the objects ended up looking quite nicely together. Although, there were moments that I worried the still life was too symmetrical. The third step was to draw the sketch of the still life from my perspective on the canvas. The charcoal was hard to work with because I couldn't manipulate it to what I wanted exactly to draw due to its awkward shape and size. The initial sketch did not take me that long as I didn't incorporate detailed aspects of the drawing, however I had to redo part of my sketch because it wasn't the composition I originally had in my photo. The final step that I have done was to begin the oil painting with only black and white oil paints. I began with a dark grey color and started to fill in the darkest values I could see in the actual still life. I felt like the process got easier as it went on and the painting wasn't as scary as it would have been if I were to have began earlier and without the right prep.