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Free Beginners Oil Painting – Canvas Priming

When you refuse to buy any of the pre-fabricated canvases you can always buy a roll of primed or raw canvas cloth. The first step in the process towards constructing a finished canvas is the stretching of the canvas. Once the stretching is done it is time to prime the canvas cloth if you bought a roll of raw canvas.

The reason it is necessary to prime a raw canvas is that both linen and cotton cloth will eventually rot when saturated with oil paint.

Here are the steps to be executed in the priming process:

1) After stretching the raw canvas, evenly brush the weak glue or gelatin solution onto the raw canvas using a wide nylon or bristle brush. Note, do not stretch raw canvas too tight, because the priming will shrink the canvas cloth and therefore tighten it automatically.

2) When the fabric dries, coat it with a mixture of white lead in oil and turpentine, again using a wide brush.

3) Once the canvas is dry, sand it lightly.

4) Then, apply a second coat of the white lead in oil and turpentine solution, and sand the canvas again.

All these materials and the accompanying instructions can be bought in a serious art supply store or on the Internet.

Many artists also enjoy working on wood panels, which is a proving support for oil painting. The old masters worked on oak, poplar, and mahogany, but today “wood panel” can mean anything from a piece of poplar to plywood to Masonite.

Wood panels are perfect for rendering intricate, detailed subjects where the weave of the canvas might be too uneven. You can buy prepared boards or you can make your own. You must prime the panel with gesso before you begin painting. Dilute the gesso with water; apply it with a wide housepainter’s brush, let it dry, and then sand it smooth.

You can also oil paint on watercolor paper or vellum. You can size the paper with an acrylic medium first so that the oil paint does not eventually rot the paper. If you want to make your painting last longer (permanence) you need to choose heavy paper of at least 200 lbs.

This is the end of short primer on priming different grounds for the purpose of oil painting. There is much more to learn but this will give you enough information to go to a reputable art supply store and be able to converse intelligently on the subject of priming and priming methods. This will certainly start the conversation and you will learn right there about the latest techniques and inventions regarding priming and while you’re at it also about stretching canvases.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips and Advice – Canvas Stretching

If you find that commercial pre-stretched canvas is too expensive or if you are just interested, you can make your own canvases. You can buy rolls of primed or raw canvas in various sizes and qualities.

The stretching process is fairly straightforward. You will need to buy stretcher bars. You can find them in any serious art supply store or on the Internet. Stretcher bars have tongue-and-groove corners and are usually 1.25 or 2.5 inches wide.

To make one canvas you will need 2 sets of 2 equal bars. All four bars should fit together tightly and no nails are used. After you have assembled the stretcher, use a T-square to check if the four corners are square.

Now, stretching a piece of canvas involves the following steps:

1) Center the stretcher on top of a piece of canvas that is 1.5 inches larger that the stretcher on all sides.

2) Fold the canvas around a set of two opposing bars. Using a tack (usually included with each set of bars) fasten one side of the canvas to the center of the bar.

Then stretch the canvas by hand or with canvas pliers and tack the other side in the middle of the other bar. A straight line in the form of a crease running from one tack to the other should now be visible.

3) Next, repeat the procedure of 2) with the two other opposing sides of the canvas. A diamond shaped pattern should now be visible.

4) From here on, you continue from the middle of one of the bars and add a tack every 3 inches or so until you reach the corners. At the corners, nicely fold one end of the canvas under the other end and fasten this corner piece onto the bar with another tack.

Do not trim excess canvas. Instead, fold it over the back of the stretcher and tack it down just in case you need to re-stretch the canvas in the future.

5) If you notice any wrinkles in the canvas, you can remove one or two tacks in the right places, pull the canvas taut, and replace the tacks.

6) Usually the stretcher bars come with a set of so-called keys, i.e., small wooden wedges. These keys fit into slots at the inner corners of the stretchers and if necessary will further tighten the canvas. However, it is best to wait and see if the canvas actually slackens over time. If so you can pound the keys into slots at that time.

Note that nowadays, most artists use staples and a staple gun to fix the canvas to the stretcher. This approach is quicker and more convenient. However, for the sake of permanence and stability, it is still a good idea to use a regular tack in the middle of each of the bars.

Finally, when a painting is finished you may want to loosely place a sheet of cardboard inside the back of the stretcher. This will protect the back of your canvas.

Once you are used to the procedure, stretching a canvas goes fairly quickly. It is quite a bit cheaper than buying pre-stretched canvas. However, there still remains the task of priming the canvas in case you bought a roll of raw canvas. But, as far as stretching a canvas in concerned, this is all there is to it.

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Beginners Oil Painting Info – Oil Painting Supports

A ground or support is any kind of surface you can paint on. The choice of ground is in quite important because it determines in part how your painting will be perceived by the viewer.

Your support must satisfy a minimum of conditions. It must accept the paint well without absorbing too much of the pigment.

The least expensive oil painting ground is treated paper. It is very useful for practice and even for doing certain commercial work. You can also buy canvas pads. These pads usually contain 10 sheets of medium tooth 5-oz cotton canvas that has been triple-primed with acrylic gesso. The tooth of paper or canvas is the degree of roughness or smoothness of the canvas.

Next in line are the popular canvas boards or panels which are sheets of cardboard covered with inex-pensive white painted cloth. These panels are very popularity because they are inexpensive (particularly when bought in bulk), easy to store, and easy to carry outdoors. They are however not permanent, i.e., they will deteriorate over time.

Good results can also be obtained from un-tempered Masonite or 3-ply chipboard prepared with three coats of gesso on the front and one coat on the back to prevent warping.

You can also use so-called museum board which is on the order of good-quality mat board. This board is quit absorbent but is inexpensive to practice on.

The ultimate ground for oil painting is canvas stretched over a wooden frame. It has wonderful elasticity and resilience, and history has shown that it has very good permanence. Canvas is of course more expensive but when you’re ready this will be your ground of choice and you’ll never want to go back to anything else.

You can buy commercially pre-stretched canvas. In fact, there are plenty of brands, sizes, weights, and qualities to choose from. Only experience will teach you which type of canvas is best suited to your style and subject matter.

Canvas cloth is either cotton or linen. The finest canvas and most expensive is made of linen, which stretches better and has a better tooth. Cotton can be a bit difficult to prime.

Look for cloth with an even weave. The canvas tex-ture can be tightly woven and smooth to fairly coarse with an open weave. That means the tooth of the canvas can be fine or coarse and anything in-between.

If you paint a lot, even commercially pre-stretched canvas can become expensive. If so, you can buy rolls of primed or unprimed (raw) canvas. Then with stretcher bars you can create a support of a certain size. If you bought unprimed canvas, you still have to prime the canvas with an oil-based primer.

To save money you may be tempted to work on small canvases. This is not recommended. Unless you are an experienced artist, working on a small ground can easily result in tight, overly controlled paintings.

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Beginners Oil Painting Info and Tips – Painting Values

It may come as a surprise to most people when I say that the colors in a painting are not the first thing the viewer’s brain takes in. In fact, the viewer’s brain will subconsciously go for the values first.

The eye is very sensitive to variations in darks and lights. The colors themselves have each their own value. It is therefore just as important to reproduce the values in a painting as it is in a drawing. We must understand that if the value of the color is wrong then the actual color is wrong.

Every color has three facets to it: hue (red, yellow, etc.), value (dark, light, etc.), and intensity (bright, dull, etc.). And, in fact, boring as it may sound, value is the most important of the three. It is through value that we can reproduce the correct lighting of a scene. Hue by itself cannot do this.

In order to understand value better it is a good exercise to now and then paint a complete scene in black and white. This is far from a waste of time. Aside from being quite nice a black and white painting gives you the training in seeing values which you cannot do without if you are going to become a good painter.

The setup of a still-life, for example, proceeds as follows:

Objects – Choose a number of objects of varying values, i.e., from white all the way to black. Arrange these objects in a pleasing composition. You may actually make a few small sketches so you can see how your composition will look on a flat surface. Remember, the main purpose of this exercise is to learn how to visually separate the value from the hue.

Lighting – Use a bulb of at least 150 watt to light up your composition. Place the light slightly higher than the composition off to the right or left and at a 45 degree angle. You can move the light around a bit to see which situation gives you the most interesting lights and darks. Make sure there are also a few shadows present.

When painting you should stand as far away from your easel as is comfortably possible. For one, make sure to hold your long-handled brushes towards the end of the handles. The idea is to see the overall canvas so you can easily judge if a particular part of your painting fits correctly in the overall scene. Also adjust the easel so you can paint at about eye-level. This prevents distortion of the objects you observe and paint.

From here on we go through the four phases of the painting process:

(1) Drawing the scene – In this exercise I would suggest drawing directly on the canvas with a brush, say, a no. 4 filbert. You do this with a neutral mixture of black and white. The important thing in this phase is to get the geometry of the entire scene correct.

(2) Blocking in – In this phase we paint the large areas without paying attention to the details. Just make sure you keep the correct geometry and the correct value. Judging the values of the colored objects is the point of the exercise. So spend some quality time on this. Squinting may be helpful for most people. Start with the darkest values and then the lightest. After that you can fill all the in-between values of the remaining large areas that are part of the scene.

(3) Shaping – Then you look at every large shape you just filled in and refine the values within that shape. This will force you to look a little closer and harder to see these variations. At the same time you try to model all the shapes as best as you can. The purpose is to (1) create the correct geometry and (2) the correct value distribution. We are still not paying attention to the actual details. To add the illusion of three-dimensionality, blend the edges where dark and light areas meet. The small area in-between will then be the average of the two values.

(4) Details – Now is the time to put in the details. This includes the highlights. It is a good idea to reserve the whitest white for your highlights. For example, if your scene includes a white bowl, do not use your whitest paint but something a little darker.

But remember, learning to see the values on colored objects is the main point of the exercise. So spend a significant amount of time on observing, mixing, comparing, and finally applying these different values.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips – The Ideal Color Wheel

The simplest color wheel consists of a circle divided into six equal wedges. You color the top wedge, say, in yellow (the first primary color). Then going clockwise, you skip a wedge and color the next one in, say, blue (the second primary color). Finally, you skip another wedge and color the next one in red (the third primary color). The respective uncolored wedges will be filled in with the secondary color produced by the mixture of the two neighboring primary colors.

None of the tube colors you can buy in the art stores are pure. For example, both Lemon Yellow and Cadmium Yellow obviously look yellow. However, if you mix these two yellows with another color, say, Cadmium Red you will get two different oranges.

In general, tube color mixtures will yield secondary colors that do not always answer your expectations. Sometimes they will be really off. You may, for example, expect green but get a dirty brown instead.

This reason for this is that tube colors invariably have one or more undertones, i.e., colors that are different from the dominant hue and are present in small amounts. It is these undertones that can change the expected character of a mixture in often drastic ways. So, it is true that red and yellow, for example, generally make an orange but certainly not always a clean orange and sometimes even a color that cannot be called orange.

However, the palette consisting of the following three tube colors will always give you very decent secondary colors:

1. Lemon Yellow

2. Permanent Rose

3. Phthalo Blue (Red Shade)

Here are the properties of these three tube colors:

Note that White and Black are generally not classified as colors.

Lemmon Yellow – Lemmon Yellow is a cool, greenish leaning, and opaque yellow. This yellow is a medium-to-slow drier with medium to low tinting strength.

Permanent Rose – Permanent Rose is a cool, violet leaning, and transparent red. This red is a medium-to-slow drier and has a medium tinting strength.

Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) – Phthalo Blue is a cool, green leaning, and transparent blue. This blue is a medium-to-slow drier and has a very high tinting strength.

These three primary colors are made from synthetic organic pigments and produce very agreeable and clean secondary colors. Lemon Yellow and Permanent Rose despite their respective leanings still make a clean orange mixture. Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) and Lemon Yellow yield an excellent green. Finally, Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) and Permanent Rose result in a first rate violet.

It is possible to improve on this three-color palette if we use two versions of each primary color. We choose them in such a manner that, for example, one version of yellow has an orange bias (i.e., leans towards orange) and the other version of yellow has a green bias. Similarly, one blue will lean towards green and the other towards violet. Finally, one red will lean towards violet and the other towards orange.

Here then, is the ideal six-color palette:

1. Lemon Yellow (green bias)

2. Cadmium Yellow (orange bias)

3. Cadmium Red (orange bias)

4. Permanent Rose (violet bias)

5. French Ultramarine (violet bias)

6. Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) (green bias)

Now, Lemon Yellow and Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) will give a superb green because both colors have a green bias. Similarly, Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Red will give a brilliant orange because both have an orange undertone. And Permanent Rose together with French Ultramarine will produce an outstanding violet because they both have a violet bias.

Together with Titanium White and Ivory Black the above six colors form an excellent beginning palette that can produce an amazing number of excellent secondary and tertiary (i.e., a mixture of three or more colors) colors.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips and Advice – One Basic Approach to Creating an Oil Painting

In this article I will give you an overview of my personal approach to the creation of an oil painting. There are of course many valid approaches to painting and with experience you will develop your own specific approach. But if you are a beginning painter you may want to try and practice the following approach.

The Drawing Phase – Usually I first execute a regular drawing on the canvas. This drawing can be anything from a few lines to a completely detailed map of all the forms. This may even include indications of where the lights and the darks are and what colors need to be used.

A good drawing tool for an oil painting is charcoal. Of course, the best tool is some neutral mixture of thinned paint and a brush. However, this takes some getting used to. Often, I actually use a graphite pencil and when the drawing is finished I spray the drawing with workable fixative.

The advantage of starting with a drawing is that many important decisions can be made up-front and that everything is in place by the time you finish the drawing. After that, all that is left is painting.

The Block-in Phase – This is the first painting phase. I use fairly thinned-out paint and a brush that feels a little large than it should be. Here you focus on the big shapes that you see in your drawing. Don’t pay attention to detail. What is important here is that you observe the colors of the shapes correctly and that you maintain the integrity of the drawing.

Usually I start out with the dark shapes. Then I proceed with the brightest colored shapes, always making sure the colors stay harmonized. Finally, I put in the more subtle colors many of which will be duller and more difficult to judge.

Again, in this phase hold back on painting details. Maintaining the correct geometry of the large shapes, their exact color (hue, intensity, and value), and their correct position within the composition is the task at hand. And don’t forget to include the background.

At the end of this phase my canvas is usually completely covered with paint, i.e., no white areas are left unpainted. This gives you a good idea of how all the colors look like relative to each other and if they harmonize without the influence of bright white areas.

The Shaping Phase – Now you can begin to model the large shapes and refine them so they start to resemble the actual objects you are trying to paint. In this phase I use a thicker paint than in the Block-in Phase and also a somewhat smaller brush. Also, I refine the color relationships in terms of hue, intensity, and value as best as I can.

This phase usually requires the most time and effort. Still, do not be tempted to put in fine detail. At the end of this phase you should already have a very good idea of how the end product will look like.

The Detail Phase – This is the last phase. This is the time to indulge in the details. Details include things like small twigs, pupils and irises for the eyes, small lines and curves, and highlight, in other words, anything that cannot be done with a large brush. Some details require thin paint (best done over a dry underground) and others, such as highlights, often require lots of thick paint right out of the tube.

The above guidelines are admittedly not complete in detail but are a good starting point for any beginning oil painter.

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Fundamentals of How to Draw with Pencil – The Form of Objects

In this article we will deal with the most fundamental property of any object in relation to the act of pencil drawing. This fundamental property is the form or structure of the object. Ultimately, it is the drawing of form that is most responsible for the reproduction on your drawing paper of the actual scene.

It is important to possess a simple but complete mental image or memory of the property of form. This mental image is very useful to you as a pencil artist because it will lead you to a simple and systematic way of approaching the drawing of any object under the sun. It will give you the essential tools of the first phase of a drawing.

The idea of dealing with the numerous forms that constitute any real scene involves a visual decomposition of the scene’s forms into a set of basic geometric forms followed by a reconstitution of those forms into a likeness of the original real object. With some practice, you will find that this analysis and reconstitution becomes very quickly second nature.

After analyzing the form of numerous objects, artists of the past came to the following conclusions.

All object forms can be seen as a composition of four basic geometric solids: the brick, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone.

Of course, the actual forms will almost always deviate somewhat from these perfect geometric forms so that part of the drawing process will consist of adding the variations. But all that is done in a later phase of the drawing process.

Concentrating on those four large geometric forms allows you to much better see the overall structure or composition of the global scene you wish to draw.

The extent of these large forms is fairly easy to discern and the dimensions easily estimated.

Drawing a real scene while constantly thinking of bricks, spheres, cylinders, and cones will automatically give your drawing three-dimensionality and a certain amount of gravitas. With some practice you will soon notice that you have become a much faster and more accurate draftsperson.

This approach to viewing a scene, i.e., seeing the scene as a composition of basic solid geometric shapes, naturally separates the big picture from the details and gives you an excellent starting-point for tackling any drawing.

Once the large geometric shapes are in place you should already see a good likeness of the scene as a whole. You can then concentrate on the details without having to worry about whether or not all the objects are in the right overall position.

In this article we developed a method which initially views an arbitrary pictorial scene as a composition of four basic geometric shapes: the brick, the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. This allows us to separate the big picture from the detail.

The task then is to render each basic geometric shape while at the same time reconstituting the overall scene, i.e., putting each geometric form in its correct position.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips – Advanced Palette

In this article I will discuss the tube colors belonging to an advanced palette based on a basic 6-color palette. I find these colors the most useful and often necessary to round out a versatile palette.

The 6-color basic palette consists of the following colors:

1. Lemon Yellow

2. Cadmium Yellow

3. Cadmium Red

4. Permanent Rose

5. French Ultramarine

6. Phthalo Blue

To these 6 colors we, of course, add

7. Titanium White

8. Ivory Black

For various reasons, artists tend to add a variety of other colors to their palette. One reason is that tube colors are, by and large, always brighter than mixed colors. Other reasons have to do with the tinting strength or the undertone of certain tube colors. Or, maybe just because a certain tube color looks particular good to the artist and can not easily be mixed.

Here are a number of tube colors I like to work with beyond the ones already mentioned:

Burnt Sienna – Burnt Sienna is a warm, orange-red, and transparent brown. This brown is a medium-to-fast drier and has a medium tinting strength.

Cerulean Blue – Cerulean Blue is a cool, green leaning, and opaque blue. This blue is a medium-to-fast drier and has a medium-to-low tinting strength. Mixed with Lemon Yellow it yields a spring green.

Cadmium Orange – Cadmium Orange is a warm, red or yellow leaning, and opaque orange. This orange is a slow drier and has a high tinting strength. Mixed with Permanent Rose it yields a sharp hot orange.

Cadmium Yellow Light – Cadmium Yellow Light is a warm/cool, somewhat green leaning, and opaque Mixed with Cadmium Red Light it yields a bright orange.

Cadmium Red Light – Cadmium Red Light is a warm, orange leaning, and opaque red. This red is a slow drier and has a high tinting strength. Mixed with Cadmium Yellow Light it yields a bright orange.

Yellow Ochre – Yellow Ochre is a warm, brown leaning, and opaque yellow. This yellow is a medium-to-fast drier and has a medium tinting strength. Mixed with Cadmium Yellow it yields a glowing sandy color.

Burnt Umber – Burnt Umber is a warm, red leaning, and fairly transparent brown. Mixed with Cerulean Blue it yields a series of colors from green-gray to green-brown.

Viridian – Viridian is a cool, blue leaning, and transparent green. This green is a medium drier and has a medium tinting strength. Mixed with Burnt Sienna it yields a nice fall green.

Cobalt Blue – Cobalt Blue is a cool, violet leaning, and semi-transparent blue. This blue is a fast drier and has a low-to-medium tinting strength. Mixed with Permanent Rose it yields a glowing violet.

There are few more colors I use occasionally, such as Dioxazine Purple, Permanent Sap Green, Raw Sienna, and Raw Umber. But the palette here described has more than enough colors in it to paint just about anything as long as you also use mixtures of these colors.

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Beginners Oil Painting Tips – The Skill of Seeing Color

Color is the central component of painting. It is what makes it a unique art form. Therefore, it is essential that we develop the skill of seeing colors as they really are.

Prejudice – The first step in learning to see color correctly is to get rid of all built-in preconceived notions about color.

The brain (luckily) has the ability to filter the myriad of visual impulses and often fills gaps with stylized memories of reality. Unfortunately, stylized color memories are often very wrong.

So, we must learn to approach the observation of each color as if we see it for the first time without prejudice.

Local Color – Each object has its own color which is sometimes called the object’s local color. It is the color of the object when seen in normal daylight.

Light – The local color of an object will be affected by the light that shines on it. We must realize that all surfaces are to some degree reflective. In other words, the local color of an object changes when subjected to light and we must be aware of those changes.

For example, let’s we have a perfectly red apple. That is, the local color of the entire apple is red. When a yellowish light shines on this apple sideways we will observe that the lit side takes on an orange undertone and that the side in the side receives a violet bias which is the complement of yellow. Note that the complementary color of a color is the color that lies opposite to it on the color wheel.

Harmony – A lit scene is naturally harmonized. The light that spreads over the scene has the effect of changing all the local colors in such a way that all colors become harmonized (i.e., simply put, the colors go together).

For example, the colors you observe in an actual landscape will always be in harmony. This is because the light source (the sun) drenches the entire scene. This is not the case when you put together an imagined scene in your studio. Indeed, it takes a bit of color theory knowledge to produce a harmonious painting.

Nomenclature – There is also the matter of nomenclature. People tend to use special names for certain colors such as lemon green, navy blue, etc. This is not the best way to go about describing colors.

A better way is to start with the three primary color names: red, yellow, and blue. Add to these the names of the three secondary colors: orange, green, and violet.

Then, a color that looks like red but has an orange bias is called orange-red. A color that is clearly yellow but has a green undertone is called green-yellow. Or, a green that has more yellow than blue in it is called a yellow-green. And so on.

Tertiary colors often have a clear secondary nature with a bit of a third color added. For example, we can speak of an orange-red with a touch of blue or white.

This way of thinking about color also aids us with color observation. When you see a color you can start by identifying the overall primary color. Then you can try to judge if there is a bias to that primary color. And finally, you can try to gauge if there are touches of additional colors visible in the mix.

In the end, as is the case with so much in painting, learning to observe colors correctly is a matter of practice and experience. The above tips, however, should help in this endeavor.

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Tips on Oil Painting – The Drawing Phase

The first phase of the oil painting process consists of drawing the scene on your canvas. Here are a few beginners oil painting tips.

Drawing – Unless you are into complete abstract art (and even then) it is absolutely necessary that you have some drawing skills. In fact, personally, I almost always start a painting with a drawing, be it in charcoal, graphite pencil, or thin paint. I find it reassuring that, by the time I start the real painting, the whole scene is already in place.

The Four Basic Shapes – I base my drawings on four basic geometric shapes: the sphere, the cylinder, the cone, and the cube. Just about every object can be built from these four forms. Of course, some objects will contain distorted versions of these shapes but they still will give you a good basis from which to create a first fairly accurate version of your scene.

Composition – Composition refers to the manner in which objects are positioned relative to each other on the page. More formally, it is the arrangement of forms and spaces within the format of the page.

The main characteristic of a good composition in drawing is that it creates a feeling of balance in position. The forms and spaces should be balanced relative to the vertical and the horizontal that go through the center of the canvas.

There should also be a balance in terms of value. Darks and lights should balance each other out in an overall sense.

The same is true for intensity. The intense parts as well as the dull parts in a drawing should show an overall balance.

Of course, sometimes an unexpected deviation from the perfect balance gives excitement and interest to a drawing. This is a matter of artistic sensibility.

Always choose a focal point in your drawing and compose the scene in such a way that all roads lead to the focal point. The focal point should also be the area where you add the most detail.

Make sure not to place objects such that they divide the canvas exactly in half. Also, space similar objects unevenly.

Don’t let objects kiss each other or the edges of the canvas. Make them overlap or crop them. Also, don’t staircase a series of similar objects and don’t let lines go out in the corners of the canvas.

Perspective – Here are few rules of simple perspective that may come in handy:

- Vertical Lines. Vertical lines in a scene are also vertical on your drawing paper.

- Parallel Lines. All horizontal parallel lines converge to the same vanishing point on the horizon. Of course, each direction has its own vanishing point. Also, the closer of two equal parallel line segments will always be seen as the longer of the two.

- Ellipses. The tops and bottoms of bottles and plates are circular. However, in perspective they become ellipses. The closer they are to eye level the flatter these ellipses become. The further away from eye level the rounder they become.

Of course, there is much more to say about drawing but these few tips will get you started particularly in relation to painting.

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