oil painting has been around for Centuries with the earliest pieces found from 7th Century Afghanistan but the medium is more commonly linked to the works of the Old Masters who dedicated their whole lives to making works of art but how long does it really take to L hot oil paint well that's what you're going to find out in this video because I set myself a challenge I have never painted with oils before but I wanted to see how much I could achieve in just 30 days of learning so after hours of research I formulated a
plan all the steps I need to master to the medium so after 30 days and hundreds of hours of filming here's what I came up with okay just to start with I may be new to oils but I'm not a beginner artist so I think along the way when I was posting updates on this challenge some people were getting disheartened because they thought that I was going from beginner and learning how to oil paint no I have been acrylic painting for years now and it's a lot easier to S side step from one medium to
another instead of trying to learn it all as a I already have some knowledge of the fundamentals so this is just me figuring out how to use the medium but anyway on to day one I'm starting off by following a simple tutorial by paint coach where I'm just painting a still live scene for the first few days I plan to learn the basics follow tutorials and just basically mess around with the medium the simple shapes provided an easy way to practice and it was a great introduction and I don't usually paint still life so it
was really cute it felt like I was in primary school again but the Nostalgia was shortlived cuz by day two I was already sick of doing still life so I moved on to portraiture I had picked up this book a week before when I was buying paper for this Challenge and it actually had some really useful stuff in it I started with an underpainting to lay out my lights and shadows before starting to paint the skin at first I was thinking oh hey this doesn't look so bad but then I realiz it looks just like
an acrylic painting which is definitely not what I'm going for I want those buttery smooth brush Strokes are characteristic of oil paint I think the problem was I was being a bit too sensitive with my paint and my paint was too thin a lot of the paintings that I do in the first few days are all Alo Prima because I was basically doing a painting a day and if you look at alpra paintings they just look so juicy and full of finesse not at all like mine but it's only day two so I just let
go of this poetry and moved on for day three I was not about to waste a single drop of paint because oh my gosh oils are pricey I did a bit of a different approach today instead of doing an underpainting I sketched out the shapes of the face with pencil and then started filling in the darkest areas I knew my hair the day before was lacking so I chose a reference with a dude that is like 70% hair so I can't run for my responsibilities I was working on adding more paint to my brush and
I think this is definitely an improvement on day two for day four I worked on you guessed it more portraits I called on my boyfriend to sit and do nothing for 3 hours while I painted him which he was so thrilled about there's something in particular that I'm just not liking about these portraits and it's like I said before they look way too much like acrylic but at this point I still could not put my finger on what I was doing wrong that was making them look like that but anyway Jack liked the painting which
is cool and then we have day five I tried to do a sergeant study but it was way too small and just a struggle I hate you see when I started this challenge I was still at University and I had loads of assignments due and to be honest I was just getting a bit burnt out so I was really worried that I was not going to be able to finish this series but we kept cracking away and I did manage to get there I had such a lovely response from everyone when I posted the day
six and seven painting that it really gave me the energy just to keep going and with a new Lisa live I started day eight which was painting fur I actually found this trickier than the portraits because the way that I do fur with acrylics is very much based on layering but with this I was only painting in one layer and I was really just looking at large clumps of fur here I selected a section of fur from a tiger to paint this was so that I don't Focus too much on the form of the tiger
I just wanted to practice for day 10 was when I produced probably my favorite painting from the whole series which is this horse I always forget how fun it is to sketch with paint I mean my proportions are a little bit off but you can still tell it horse I will take that the shine on the fur is exactly what I wanted it to be but you can still see the brush Strokes of the paint I think this was the moment that I really started falling in love with oils day 11 and 12 I did
this ugly ass portrait which I'm not even going to include that much footage of it's it's just bad there is no excuse that's not the oil that is just me but no more studies now I decided to just get on with the final piece I wanted to do a big painting for the last 15 days to try and use everything that I've learned in those little studies I needed something challenging and in the end I came up with this and though the drawing is quite simple there's some cool elements that I think will push me
like the lighting and the full suit of armor it's completely different material to anything I've painted so far but first things first I needed tone the canvas because it's tinted Blue from a previous painting that I did but I used this crappy old brush which would not stop shedding so after spending like 20 minutes trying to wipe off all those little brush hairs I was finally able to do the underpainting and the first thing I noticed was how much smoother that oil paint was going on because I was on canvas and not paper I don't
like painting on paper anyway because it's kind of rough and I I just don't like it I just don't think things blend very very well but unfortunately I didn't want to have to ruin a load of canvases for this project but it was nice to finally have upgraded now at this point she was looking like a bit of an alien but it's nothing that a pair of eyebrows cannot fix I used the dry brush to create the eyebrow hairs so I didn't have to draw them in individually yeah unfortunately a lot of the next footage
is covered by my head sorry about that next moving on to the main attraction which is this huge should plate it's basically the main thing you see when you look at this painting is I really wanted to make my own sigil so I came up with this double winged Eagle looking thing I don't really know but something that I was really loving is how well oil paint holds its texture oh my gosh with acrylics I find it tough to retain texture once it's dried so this was really fun to work with [Music] I wanted this
metal to look pretty used pretty worn so I wasn't bothered about super smooth blending I was messing around with texturing the paint trying to show DSE and inconsistencies in the metal and I love how it turned out [Music] [Music] in some areas I also used palette knife to almost make scratches in the metal this had me cracking up when I was editing I had already done a few knife Strokes before this one and they had gone great but of course as soon as I switch on the camera that happens anyway this is how it's meant
to look it was also feeling a bit empty so I decided to add a cape cuz who doesn't love a cape net [Music] I also kept on leaning my hand in the paint because in my mind I'm still using acrylics and it's already dried but it actually [Music] hasn't after initially painting the hilt of the sword gold I really wasn't feeling it and I felt that the color the armor and the sword clashed so I decided to scrub it out and start again now I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing here I
have never corrected a mistake in oils it did make the area a bit messy but you know what this is a practice and this is the time to make mistakes this is my 30 days where I'm learning so after spending day 29 cleaning up the painting it was finally complete so may I present to you the reveal [Music] I just find it crazy to think that this was day one and now here we are so did I master oil paints in 30 days no and there's no surprise that it's going to take years but question
is what do I think about oil paints well coming from someone who used to use acrylics it feels like a betrayal to say but I prefer oils I still have a lot to learn with them but so far I absolutely love the way they feel when I paint and I just love the finish at the end thank you so much to everyone who's watched this far I'd love to know about your own painting Journey are you an oil painter do you want to get into painting like where are you at I just want to know
