How I make a painting: Step by Step

Buoy by Kenney Mencher oil on canvas 48"x36"x1.5" inches

 

 

 

 

This is post relates to an earlier post I put up a while ago on how I paint a glass of water.  Here is a painting I did a year or two ago that is part of my series of "glass of water paintings."

First step for me was to lay out the drawing of the image with a charcoal pencil on this large canvas.

 I then painted everything in roughly in acrylic paint with white acrylic gesso as the white paint.  I always paint background to foreground if I can.  Sometimes I need to paint the whole thing at a time but I find I get nicer edges if I think back to front.

 After painting the background and the table and glass in acrylic, I switched to oil paint.  I use the same palette of colors in acrylic that I use in oil paint.  With oil paint I also make sure that I premix large batches of colors so that they are more or less consistent in terms of hue and value structure (shading.)  Go to this link to see detailed  step by step of how  I painted a clear vessel of water.  It's the glass in this painting.

With the glass of water done I move on to paint the shirts in oil too.   I can see how it might look a little paint by numbers here but in this case, I premixed and painted each section individually so that the shirt parts would remain consistent. 

 Letting the wet paint dry before I move on to the faces.

 I do not underpaint the faces in acrylic.  For faces I paint directly in oil.  I have a really in depth article on color mixing and portrait painting on my site if you want to know my method for painting portraits and my color scheme for portrait painting.

Buoy oil on canvas 36"x48" 

More "How to" Articles and Tutorials

• Demonstration Drawing the Sphere
• Demonstration Drawing the Cube
• Demonstration Video: How to Paint the Shapes Monochromatically 

The Human Figure

• Demonstration: Drawing the Skeleton Front View preparation for Life Drawing 

How to draw a portrait

• Demonstration Video: How to draw the head in pencil
•  Demonstration Video: Sketching the Head and Face in wash media
• Demonstration Single Portrait (Joy Anne Delight))
• Demo Portraits (Two Figures)
• Demonstration: How I make a painting (In Martini Vertas)
• Demonstration: How I make a painting (Hat in Hand) 
• Demonstration: How I revise and work out problems in my paintings.
• Demonstration: How I make a painting "Buoy"