The imperial city - My biggest oil project to date

Today I want to share with you the process behind an oil painting I've worked on last summer. My most ambitious by this time, and biggest canvas ever !

The global idea

I wanted to paint something about Oblivion, as I was playing a lot Oblivion : Remastered, and was inspired by what I've done many times before for Skyrim.

But for these (and a lot of my others oils) the process hasn't been that's longs : small canvas, one sitting and everything done in a couple hour with strong colors and not that much planning. I've done it again after this big one, with another Oblivion inspired scene and more mixing work but the idea is still the same : speedpaint focus on textures and wide strokes

But this time, I decided to paint a wider landscape around the Imperial City, so I challenged myself with a bigger canvas: 40 x 50 cm. I hadn't painted anything so big since I first tried oils two years before (and haven't done it again since).

The hardest part : starting

I first covered the canvas with blue, as I often do for speedpainting starting by defining an horizon lines and some basic cloulds. But actually getting started was quite frightening, and it took me two weeks to start painting anything on the blue background, between busy planning and apprehension of messing everything up. I finally decided to start with the clouds, having fun with various hues of purple mixed with blue. As you can see, I took a completely different direction to the one I had planned in the first layer of paint, but it worked surprisingly well and gave me the motivation I needed to get started!

Experimenting with colors

There was one big change for this oils compared to my previous work : I started working with limited color tubes and actually practicing mixing. That's somethings I've done a lot more since and for instance the dragon statue above was done with only primary + white.

Even if at first glance mixing every colors from three primary may sound frightening, it was actually easier to get the right result that way ! Color theory in direct practice ! What I noticed with a bit more experience is that it force myself to better respect my color gamut, while giving more variation to each colors, the mixing not being the exact same between two strokes.
For this one I used Primary Yellow, French Ultramarine Blue and Magenta, so my palette was depleted in red/orange and rich in purples/pinks – perfect for a dreamy dawn setting. It also allowed me to move from a blue-purple background with nearly no yellow in it to a more greenish first ground using far less Magenta.

More experimentation

I tried some other things on this, that I keep using to this day, mostly finally applying advice I read hundred of time, so here they are for you to read one more time.

First, I forced myself to always use the biggest possible brush for an area, which helped me to define shapes with brushstrokes instead of getting lost in the details.

Second, worked with paint that was far more diluted than usual, which helped me achieve a softer look with finer details. I used lavender oil as a medium — it smells good, dries quickly and does everything I need, even if it's not the best option and can cause cracking in some blues. Since then I started using more linen oil and even if I dislike the smell and it take ages to draw I can only notice how it give better transparent effect and smoother texture. Well, oils need patience.

Finally, I used my bigger brush to support my drawing hand while adding details – the idea is basically to stabilize the hand without touching the wet paint. I have the habit to work digitally or in pencil with my hand laying on the paper/tablet so it was really useful to get more stability this way

And that's a good opportunity to remind you to ALWAYS WEAR GLOVES AND WORK ON A WELL VENTILATED WHILE OIL PAINTING. Solvant and pigments are toxic, you neither want to breath that's nor to have it on your hands. Also gloves allow you to use your finger for some tasty bonus texture without second thought, something I've done a lot on the smaller dragon !

Painting process

I started by painting the clouds, then the background mountains, and finally the middle and foreground, moving closer and closer. I hadn't properly planned anything, but I knew I wanted the Imperial City to be near the focal point. I added details by scrolling through my in-game screenshots while working on it. I waited for each plane to dry before moving on to the next one. I also waited for everything to dry before adding the final details.

One of the more challenging steps was adding a transparent white layer of paint to the background hills to make the foreground stand out. Composition-wise, it worked really well, but I ended up with some scratches in the background that I had to repaint later.

One last process picture : waiting for the varnish to dry !

Behind the painting, here the palette
You can also see my palette shifting progressively from blue and purple to yellowish as I move towards the foreground. I love being quite messy with my palette, just going with the flow, and not being afraid of mixing colors together or having a shift in hues – that's the joy of oil painting compared to digital painting, having this random element in the colors!

I took a photo of my palette before and after a one-hour session, during which I mostly worked on the foreground (And yes, my palette is just a small piece of cardboard, left from when my last moving. There's nothing fancy here, but it helps with my lower-quality oil tubes that tend to be too oily).

Bonus details

I retook recently some details pictures of it so enjoy ! Also you can see here the white scratches due to wrong medium for glazing i was mentioning earlier;

Thank you for reading trough ! As a bonus enjoy some sneak peak of my current oil project, probably the most ambitious to date !