My first oil painting!

I just did my first oil painting!

I was inspired by Leonid Afremov’s vibrant night landscapes, and I thought I would try my hand at doing something similarly dark and vivid.

I have canvases that my mum bought me some time ago (we are talking over 10 years ago) with outlines on them, and I wanted to do a bright painting on another one of them, but figured I would just use this café one as target practice so I don’t mess up the other one.

Here’s what the reference picture looked like. Since it’s a day scene I had to change it to a night one in my mind:

(Sorry it's blurry but the photo is pretty tiny)
I figured this painting would be better to do in oil, as they are more vibrant, slower to dry, easier to blend, and would just be a good change (I have only ever used acrylic and poster paint and whatnot).

My last painting was done just over five years ago, and seriously I now remember why I stopped painting after that, despite every intention to do so.

Painting is actually really tiring!

This painting took me approximately 8 – 8.5 hours, split into four sessions.

Blank canvas with outlines.

Session #1 – 2 hours
Colour blocking with yellow and adding brown for a bit of base shading.
I didn’t realise the café had so many windows, and then I thought of the streetlamps as well as reflections off the building, and the result is a lot of yellow.
This was also the day that I realised that no, you cannot wash oil paints with soap and water. You need turpentine. Which smells like death.

Session #2 – 2 hours
Realised it needed more red, not brown, to make it brighter. Added dark green for bushes and dark brown for upper storey.
I should have just put dark green everywhere but for some reason I was thinking of putting bright fluro green in parts where the dark green wasn’t.

Session #3 – 2.5 hours
Blue time. Added dark blue to the bushes, as well as light blue spots (for ‘flowers’, lol). Added blue to the door, signs and tarp cover thing on the right. Put yellow over the lights again because I did not like the red I added the last session.

Session #4 – 2 hours
Did not like the first storey so I decided to use a fine brush to do some outlining. With the black, I also added in the lamp and sign detailing. Added colour to the bushes and ground reflections. Added yellow light reflections to the bushes and painted in some door handles. Darkened the upper storey again.
So there it is, my first oil painting!

How did I fare?

Well here are my goals for this painting, and my thoughts on them:

Successfully do an oil painting: I guess it was successful. I made it in the end.

Make it as bright and vibrant as possible: Lol, this could definitely be a lot more vibrant

Let go of reality (I tend to be a perfectionist and try and make things as accurate as possible; now I'm trying to rid myself of that and be a bit more surreal like Afremov): This was really hard to do. I wanted to do like big blocks of colour for the greenery like in Afremov's paintings, but it was so hard because I kept thinking, "No one is going to realise that is meant to be a plant." I will just have to keep aiming for this on my next painting (if I do one, lol).

Minimal mixing; use original colours and if it needs mixing, do it on the canvas: The thing I found to love with oil painting is that it is great with mixing; it is so easy to blend colours together while looking natural. In my last painting, I struggled to do the treek trunks because I would have to constantly mix, then add super fine lines, to try and blend it and shade it correctly. Here, you can just put one dark colour on one side, one light colour on the other side, then paint alternatively and they will sort of end up blending into each other naturally.

Looking forward to my next oil painting, I just need time to recover.