Learn oil painting to a finished still life in six months
Six months of three painting sessions a week — about two hours each — gets a beginner with basic drawing skills to a finished still life or portrait study. Roughly 120 hours total. You will not be a working representational painter. You will mix colour without mud, see value before hue, and finish a painting on purpose rather than abandon it.
6 months · ~120 hours · finish a 12×16 alla prima still life or portrait study from life
1.A limited Zorn palette and three brushes
Don't buy 24 tubes. Start with the Zorn palette — ivory black, titanium white, yellow ochre, cadmium red — plus ultramarine blue once you're past month two. Two flat brushes (size 4 and 8) and one filbert. A small bottle of Gamsol (odorless mineral spirits — ventilate). Five 8×10 canvas panels. Total cost roughly $80 from Blick or Jerry's. The constraint forces you to learn value and temperature before colour theory, which is the right order.
~$80 starter kit
Dick Blick oils →2.Color and Light — James Gurney
Gurney's book is the most useful single volume on representational painting written in the last fifty years. Read one short chapter a week — they're each two pages of theory and a dozen examples. The chapters on form principle, edges and atmospheric perspective will change every painting you do afterward. Don't try to read it in a weekend; it's a reference manual you return to for years. The free GurneyJourney blog is the same author riffing daily.
~$25 paperback
Color and Light →3.Cesar Santos — YouTube and Quickdraws
Santos paints at a working-pro level and explains exactly what he is doing while he does it. His free YouTube vlogs cover the alla prima portrait, still life and figure approaches; the longer Quickdraws on his channel are paid demonstrations and worth the money. Pick one of his demos a month, copy it from his reference photo, and try to reach the same value structure. Then paint the same set-up from your own table, from observation. That second painting is the one that teaches you.
Free YouTube; longer demos ~$15–35 each
Cesar Santos on YouTube →If this doesn't fit you
If you can't ventilate a workspace for solvents, switch to water-mixable oils (Cobra or Winsor & Newton Artisan) — same kit, no Gamsol. The handling is slightly different but the path is identical. Don't switch to acrylics expecting the same result; they dry too fast for the alla prima approach this curriculum is built around.
Why this path
Oil painting has been taught the same way in ateliers for two centuries because it works: limited palette, value before colour, painting from life beats painting from photos. Gurney teaches the why, Santos teaches the how, and the limited kit forces the discipline. Skipping life-painting in favor of photo references is the universal beginner mistake — photos lie about edges, value range and colour temperature in ways that flatten your work.