Oil painting workflow
From blank canvas to finished picture
The map does the deciding at the start, then steps aside for the part that is actually painting.
- Stage one — the drawing. Switch to all layers in outline mode. Those boundaries are the shapes you are about to fill, so squaring them up gives a drawing that agrees with the map rather than fighting it.
- Stage two — pre-mix. Sort the layers by Largest area to see which shades carry the picture — typically three or four cover half of it — and note each recipe with the percentage it covers. Mixing several shades before you start beats interrupting yourself to mix a fourth time. The value-ladder tool helps if you would rather mix a string.
- Stage three — lay in the lights. Select shade 01 and paint only where it says. Because shades run light to dark, the early passes establish the structure while everything is still correctable.
- Stage four — work down the values. One shade at a time, down the strip. Dot mode is useful in thin passages where you want the mark placed but not the area covered.
- Stage five — bring back the photograph. Slide from the map towards the original. Now the hard boundaries are just guides, and you soften, break and lose edges by eye — the decisions that make it a painting rather than a chart.
- Stage six — detail from the source. For eyes, jewellery, lace and the last few accents, work straight from the original at full zoom. The map has done its job by then.
Where a map genuinely helps
- Deciding value relationships before you commit paint
- Keeping a colour consistent across a large area painted over several sittings
- Judging how much of each shade to mix
- Spotting that two areas you thought were different are in fact the same shade
- Working in poor light, where your eye cannot be trusted anyway
Where it should get out of the way
Hard boundaries are an artefact of measurement, not an instruction. Skin does not have contour lines. Treat the outlines as where a transition happens, not as an edge to paint, and lose most of them as you go. Everything expressive — the weight of a stroke, what to sharpen and what to let go, where to exaggerate — is deliberately left to you.
A note on working thin to thick
Nothing here interferes with a normal oil discipline. Many painters use the map for an underpainting or a colour block-in, let it dry, and glaze and refine on top with the reference alone. The exports are designed for that: you can print any single layer, the flat map, or a sheet of every shade with its mixture.
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