Hello! Hello my fellow creative spirits. So today's tutorial is going to be on how to layer with oil paint. So in the last tutorial I kind of did something called alaprema, which is where you put all of the colors in in one layer and that's it. Now there's a lot of reasons why this might not be a good idea for everyone. When you paint in layers you are able to avoid the mudding up the color. So when you're painting sometimes, and this happens to me all the time, sometimes you might paint and then find out that you can't get the right color. So for example your highlights start looking too grey or start looking too blue and you really want it to be like a yellow. And you already have so much paint that you can't really do anything to offset it. So the best way to go about fixing it is to layer it up and just let it dry and then come back in and add those highlights in the color that you really want. It also allows you to add dimension to your paintings. There are a few rules that you do want to take into consideration. For example, there's the Fat Over Lean rule. So Fat Over Lean is not as hard as it sounds. Basically you just want to make sure that the layers that have more oils and more fat and are more slow drying are the last layers that you put in. Oiling up is basically when you add a very thin layer of oil. I use linseed oil and you want to wipe it away so that there's just a tiny bit of oil so it doesn't mess with the Fat Over Lean rule. That will basically bring all of the colors from the dry paint back to life and allow you to paint a layer over top. More smoothly you'll have less visible scumbling. Right here I've just laid down my thinned out mix of Gamsol and Brent Sienna to create an under painting. This under painting is known as Tonal Ground and we're going to let that completely dry just as the last tutorial and then we're going to start building up our colors just paying attention to the big areas of color and pay attention to the values more than anything. We're just blocking in the colors as we see the highlights and the shadows and we just kind of work with those and then build the medium colors to blend the dark shadows and the highlights together. As you see here I'm kind of painting a background. It's a good idea to get a background in before you continue your painting just so that the edges look a little smoother. Keep in mind that these layers are very thin and they're also very heavy and paint thinner and galked. This allows it to dry fairly quickly. Usually it'll be completely dry within the next day or two. So we're just continuing the first layer as you can see. In this painting I actually did end up doing an aloe prema for her face but for the most part where I did do layering was with the background and with the owl. So here we're taking a little clean cloth and I took a little square and we're going to cover it in linseed oil. Now just a light amount of linseed oil will suffice for this and then you apply it to a fully dry piece of your painting. So I'm applying it over this fully dry owl because I'm going to start adding in all of the details. Now after you've applied the linseed oil, keep in mind that you're not going to be using galked nor gamsol anymore. Now you're going to switch to your more oil heavy mediums or fatter mediums which is linseed oil. So I'm just dipping my brush in another jar of linseed oil while I'm adding in the little details. So as you can tell it gives it a lot more depth and a lot more detail once you've got in those values and then you start working in your details. Something like this would be extremely hard to get in one go. Some people can do it but personally for me, if I know that I'm going to work on something that requires a lot of detail, I usually prefer to do layers. So here I'm doing the same with the background. So first I laid in some linseed oil and then I lay in the color. So as you can see these little fine brush strokes are only possible because of the linseed oil that I've laid down when I oiled up the canvas. It allows my brush to glide a lot easier than if I was to just paint over a dry canvas. And also not only will I be able to paint better and have more glide but it also won't, I wouldn't have to worry about it mixing with darker paint and mudding up the color so I can get those white highlights that I need on the twigs. Also I wanted to give a huge shout out a big thank you to swirls with three S's for allowing me to use her picture. Okay so that concludes this layering tutorial where I taught you how to oil up a canvas. I hope that it helped keep in mind that there are tons of techniques. So just one more thing before I end the video. I also just released a few new illustrations on my Etsy. Thank you guys so much in the last video. I did ask for some suggestions for future videos and I am definitely working on those. So thank you guys so much for your input. Please feel free to leave another comment if you think of another tutorial that you guys would be interested in and I will get to work on that as well. So be sure to follow my Instagram or my Facebook page if you haven't already. And also if you have any questions feel free to leave that in the comments below. Thank you guys for being patient and I will see you guys next time. Music