Mokhtar Ibrahim painted this beautiful still life oil painting below. He is currently studying the Drawing and Painting Online Art Diploma Course and the Oil Painting Online Art Course with us. Mokhtar quite often posts his artwork and questions on our student forum. If students haven’t found our forum yet, its a fabulous place to chat about artwork, gain hints and tips and discuss the assignments and any questions students may have about their course. It has excellent resources too and you can and visit and bookmark it here – The Common Room >>
Mokhtar posted one of his recent paintings which we absolutely love and so we asked Mokhtar if he would write about it for our college news blog. We were thrilled to receive the text below and hope that our students enjoy reading about Mokhtar’s painting and would like to officially thank him here for working with us on this post. We hope it also gives students inspiration to set up their own still life and have a go themselves. If you do…let us know!
Still Life Oil Painting
“This work is the first true try for me of a still life subject. I did carry it out using the wet-on-wet technique for oil paint on A4 size ready primed canvas. The subject matter is based on a photograph (not by me). I have started the drawing of the subject using a color pencil on a stained canvas. For staining the canvas I have used burnt umber and white (1:3 ratio approximately) thinned using normal turpentine.
In preparing colors, I did consider the three primary colors only (yellow, blue, and red) in addition to white and burnt umber. I have prepared colors in advance in three groups, a group for each figure, with all possible shades of the three peppers appearing in the subject.
I completed the whole work in around 5 hours including the background. During painting, I was keen not to blend different shades as much as possible, in order to avoid mudding colors to reflect a bright painting. For still life subjects, I believe that excessive blending does not help to reflect realistic paintings.”
Mokhtar Ibrahim
