dead coloring

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Dead coloring

19 January 2007 in art technique, oil painting by David | 2 comments

“Dead col­or­ing” refers to a paint­ing tra­di­tion com­mon in 15th cen­tury Glab­norkia, in which the flesh tones of all fig­ures are ren­dered as if they were dead, as a reminder of the tem­po­ral lim­i­ta­tions of the human body and the need to focus on mat­ters of the spirit rather than the mate­r­ial world.

Well, no.

Actu­ally, “dead col­or­ing” refers to an ini­tial layer in multi-layered oil paint­ing. This ini­tial layer is used to estab­lish one or more ele­ments of the final form and color of the paint­ing, while leav­ing other ele­ments to later stages of paint­ing. Nor­mally, the under­paint­ing is allowed to con­tribute to the final visual effect of the paint­ing. There are dif­fer­ent ways to accom­plish this. They include:

  • The ini­tial layer is done in shades of gray; this is called a gri­saille. With this method, you solve all prob­lems of value, com­po­si­tion, and place­ment, with­out hav­ing to worry about the com­pli­ca­tions of color. The next layer is a glaze of full color.<
  • The ini­tial layer is done in a monot­one hue. For exam­ple, it could be in shades of blue. The under­layer pro­vides an over­all tone that affects each part of the paint­ing. In effect, this is sim­i­lar to paint­ing in one layer while includ­ing a “mother color” in each paint mixture.
  • Paint each gen­eral area of a paint­ing with a sin­gle color, with­out details or shaded mod­el­ing. So, for exam­ple, a blue shirt would be painted with a flat blue that reflects the over­all aver­age hue, chroma, and value of the whole shirt. The next layer would begin to estab­lish mod­el­ing and detail.
  • Paint each area with the visual com­ple­ment of the final color. A green tree would be under­painted in reds. The idea is that the com­ple­men­tary under­paint­ing pro­vides a visual res­o­nance with the upper layer.
  • The ini­tial layer is painted as a blur, with all edges blended. Throw your eyes out of focus, then paint what you see. Fur­ther lay­ers are painted with pro­gres­sively increased focus.

All of these are essen­tially vari­a­tions on the gen­eral idea of an ini­tial dead col­or­ing layer. Some of them could, of course, be combined.

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