Dark and Near Black Color Blends in Oil Painting

Jon Amdall

1 year ago

I had an itch to get some practice with dark oil painting color blends, partially inspired by wanting to improve on a prior portrait painting that featured tons of darkness with small bright highlights. I thought I’d take a shot at similar concepts again, really pushing myself to practice some blends. With this piece, I used a few different mixes of varying proportions: Raw umber, ultramarine blue, phthalo blue, alizarin crimson, and burnt umber in various combinations. I was able to get some really distinct versions of very dark areas, which felt good to put onto paper.

I really like the zones of distinct color in the subject’s face in this piece, and enjoyed exploring the warmer and cooler areas of color. This portrait study was painted on 12 x 12 oil paper and was my 196th overall. I’ll follow my standard format here, which is to share an image of the painting, the Instagram time lapse, and some verbiage specific to the piece. Then, I’ll embed the YouTube discussion video, including another brief writeup on the topic, materials used, and some other hopefully useful information. I’ll wrap the post up by sharing the YT Shorts time lapse and some other similar painting videos.

Shop link related to this piece:

Sitting in a Dark Room, Giclee Art Print

$85

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This painting really incorporates a lot of lessons learned over the past two years for figure studies with oils. One of the biggest ones has been trying to using confident brush stroke to depict distinct zones or blocks of color. I say some variation of this phrase in almost every painting video: “distinct shapes of color”, “distinct color blocks”, and so on. I’ve long admired and appreciated those portrait artists who masterfully combine aspects of impressionism and realism, like John Singer Sargent and Richard Schmid, so this has naturally become a major focal point. Along those lines, early on I came across the advise to blend my own blacks or near-blacks, which I practiced as well. In this piece especially, as I tried to push forward with multiple very dark combinations.

Another aspect, which is arguably at least as important as the above, is freehand figure painting. In my pencil drawing days a few years ago, I typically used measuring tools to help me along (rulers, calipers, grids, etc). But, when I started painting, I decided since I was dedicated to putting in the work to get better on this new medium, I may as well put in the work to try to get better at freehand proportions. I will talk more about this in a separate post, but this portrait also shows progress towards that point. Overall, I think this portrait combines all of these efforts pretty effectively.

In this embedded discussion video, I went for another start to finish walkthrough of my portrait painting process. Most of the conversation centers around mixing dark colors and how to show bright highlights where light reflects. As I mentioned, much of the dark color blend compares mixing different browns (burnt vs raw umber) and blues (ultramarine vs phthalo) to get variants of “near black” colors.

Here are some additional details of the video I shared on YouTube, including materials used and some other information. I’ll also embed the Shorts video, although it’s kind of redundant to the Instagram Reels post, as I typically just share the same edited vertical time lapse on both platforms. As I mentioned, it was my 196th total oil painting and was originally done in February 2024. The main video I’ve embedded is about 10 minutes, and is similar to some of the others I’ve done (also linked after the timestamps).

Discussion Video Timestamps: