Still Life Oil Painting

Learn the critical foundations of painting a still life that will allow you to interpret your own compositions onto canvas.

This four-week online course begins by exploring the basics of still life composition. You'll learn to draw thumbnail compositions and create a drawing for painting based on proportion and placement. You'll then strengthen your ability to see color values by executing a tonal value painting of your still life. From there, you'll move deeper into color theory and color mixing to create a final painting from your own still life set-up. 

The interior space around us is filled with everyday wonders. This course will strengthen your observational skills, along with your technical painting skills, motivating you to paint what is all around you. 

This course is for all levels of painters who want to learn the basics of still life composition and dive deeper into color mixing of oil painting. It is recommended that you have some prior knowledge or studio work in oil paints or have completed Interlochen Online’s Introduction to Oil Painting course. 

What you will learn:

✔ Identify and put into practice 6-10 different strategies for creating strong compositions        
✔ Set your own still life of colored objects including background draping        
✔ Identify line, shape, and color in your still life subjects        
✔ Draw a still life to paint, with an understanding of why it is important to draw your composition before it is painted        
✔ Understand the concepts of transparency and translucency and use them in your paintings         
✔ Mix shades of gray without using black and create shadows with complementary colors        
✔ Create a still life by balancing tonal values, working on shadows and highlights, and putting finishing touches in place

Join our visual arts courses online and take your skills to the next level.