Oil Painting Professional Series

This level is for anyone starting in oil, and it begins with the materials because oil is the one common medium where handling them incorrectly has consequences beyond the picture. Solvents require ventilation, rags require safe disposal, and a painting built in the wrong order will crack within a few years regardless of how good it looked when wet. The level establishes safe, sound practice from the first session.

By the end of this level you can prepare a surface, lay out a workable palette, and complete a small study in one sitting while handling the materials safely and correctly. You will understand why paintings fail structurally and how to avoid it, which matters more the longer you work in the medium. The technical groundwork is deliberately thorough, because errors made at this stage surface years later.

This level is for painters who want to use oil's drying time as an advantage instead of treating it as an obstacle. Slow drying is the medium's defining property: it allows a painting to be adjusted for days and built in transparent stages that no fast medium can reproduce. Painters who fight this and try to finish everything in one sitting are using oil paint to do an acrylic's job.

By the end of this level you can build a painting in planned stages across several sittings, using transparent layers to achieve a depth that direct painting simply cannot reach. You can decide in advance which passages will be resolved wet and which will be glazed later, and you can keep a limited palette working across a whole picture. The drying time becomes a tool you are using deliberately.

This level is for painters taking on portraits, figures and still life at a high standard of finish. The difficulty at this level is rarely a lack of technique: it is knowing when to stop. Oil rewards patience up to a point and then punishes it, and a painting can be refined until every passage is correct and the whole thing is lifeless. Resolution without deadening is the central concern.

By the end of this level you can carry a demanding subject through to a high finish without the surface becoming laboured, and you can recognise the point at which further refinement will cost more than it gains. You can paint convincing flesh, fabric and metal, and you can work from life over extended periods. The judgement of when a painting is finished becomes reliable, which is the hardest thing to teach.

This level is for painters working toward a considered body of work rather than a succession of individual pictures. Technique is assumed at this point, and the questions become which technique a particular painting calls for, why historical painters solved problems the way they did, and what holds a group of paintings together as a single statement. It also covers the unglamorous matter of looking after work once it exists.

By the end of this level you can choose technique according to intention rather than habit, and produce a coherent body of work that holds together as a whole rather than as a portfolio of separate efforts. You understand why the methods you use exist, which allows you to depart from them knowingly. You can also look after your own work, which is the difference between paintings that last and paintings that do not.