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Now about temperature, you should be thinking about keeping a theme for oil painting that runs either in the cool or warm temperature range of colors. This will help keep your painting balanced.

Color Mixing Guide Shades and tints

It’s a general practice to tint a color with white, thus making it lighter. And shading a color with black to darken it. But this doesn’t work all of the time. See more details below.

The Masters usually used a very limited palette. This was due to many factors, cost, time in grinding their own, or having apprentices doing this, and availability of the raw compounds or their own previous training or preferences.

In today’s world, access to different oil painting is mind boggling. So where do you start?

Well, if you’ve been following some of my lessons here, and you’ve started a work, you’ll know I begin with an imprimatura, (a coated pre-colored canvas) of a yellow ochre/olive toned canvas. Then the first and second Umber underlayer using burnt umber as the only paint. From here we go into the dead or gray layer which uses a prepared black, white, and 3 to 5 midtones.

Here is your color mixing guide list of paints so far:


•My prepared black will have 2 parts Ivory or Mars Black,
•1 part Burnt Umber, and
•1/8 part Prussian Blue.
You can experiment with making a very deep rich black using just Prussian blue and burnt umber.

For my Imprimatura I use

•Prepared Black,
•Yellow Ochre,
•Titanium White, and a touch of
•Prussian Blue
to create an olive hue. The lightness or darkness is depending on the average tonality of the entire piece. This is found by squinting your eyes and getting the average brightness of the largest lit area in the set up.

I have found Flake White, and Zinc White will not cover (not enough opacity) during the dead layer. I have also found that Permalba is a very good blend of Titanium and Zinc white that does cover well in the dead layer