For a more realistic painting of a weathered barn, look at a photograph for inspiration.
Oil paints are slow drying and blend easily. For this reason, using oil paint to make an object look weathered or beaten can be both simple and rewarding. For a painter used to working with acrylic paint, one notable step missing from this project will be the task of keeping the paint wet. Oil paint will stay wet for hours and even days after it has been applied to a canvas, so where as an acrylic painter would spend a lot of time trying to keep a painting wet, or trying to blend paint that had already dried, an oil painter will easily be able to achieve the weathered appearance of an old barn.
Instructions
1. Paint the barn with a base of dark red paint, thinned with a dab of turpentine. Apply the paint in strokes that run the same direction as the siding on the barn.
2. Dip the paintbrush in a brown paint like burnt sienna, and a yellow paint like yellow ochre. Mix these two colors with the dark red you used in Step 1. Mix the paint with a touch of turpentine to thin it.
3. Paint over the strokes you painted in Step 1, using this new color. Don't entirely paint over the red you applied in Step 1, but apply the brown-yellow-red paint to the edges of each board of the barn, and randomly in the middle of some of the boards.
4. Dip the paintbrush back in the red paint and put a second coat of red paint over the areas of the boards that you didn't cover with the brown-yellow-red mixture. Don't mix the paint with turpentine this time. In oil painting, thinner coats of paint go on bottom and thicker coats of paint are applied on top (see the rule of "fat over lean" in the tips section).
5. Smooth the transition between the brown-yellow-red paint and the dark red paint on the barn siding, using a dry brush. Run the dry brush between the colors until the line between the two applications of paint is smooth and natural.
