Starting an oil painting in a classic way.

Hi Steemians!

I would like to tell you a little about how I start an oil painting.

There are many rules about how to apply oil paint but all the rules can be broken, nothing is set in stone.
How to start painting depends on what you want as a finished work: realistic, impressionist, fauvist, hyper-realistic, abstract, etc, etc.
I like to paint in a classic way. So, I am going to explain to you how I start an oil painting in this way.

You will see that the classical form is oriented in many cases to provide solutions to practical and technical problems.

At first, the support.
Here, the most used are canvases, wood panels, and primed paper.
The painting that I show you here was done on a fibreboard (fibreboard is used in our time, in the past, painters used real wood panels).
Before painting on the wood panel or canvas, it must be primed.
Why? To protect it, creating a layer that separates the oil paint from the support because otherwise, in the long run, the chemicals from the paint will rot the canvas or the panel used.
I use Gesso to priming my fiberboard.
(Gesso is a ready-made product consisting of white titanium mixed with an acrylic binder).
Two or three layers of gesso are enough.
Once the primer is dry (two to three days of waiting, depending on the weather), I start drawing with brown ink on the fiberboard.

Then, to give the first undercoat, I have painted the entire board with Raw Sienna very thinned with white spirit, on top of the drawing.
Next, I used a large, dry, paint-free brush to spread the color evenly throughout the support.
Immediately, I started cleaning up some areas of paint to get some lighter zones.

Like I said earlier, this is a classic way. Many painters begin by directly applying the paint on white support, others do not carry out the primer prior to their support.
It all depends on what you want to do or what painting technique you feel most comfortable with.

Hope you liked it.

Regards