grisaille

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Grisaille work in progress

15 February 2010 in David's work, demo/in progress, oil painting by David | 6 comments

Sorry about the very long delay since the last post. That’s for two reasons:
  • I’ve been very busy with work, help­ing to raise a three year old, and tak­ing an online grad­u­ate course.
  • I’ve been fin­ish­ing up the large com­mis­sion I started over the sum­mer, and I have allowed that to kind of block my abil­ity to do other paint­ing. That’s just about done, how­ever, so it’s time to move on.

I had a whole day off today, so I took the oppor­tu­nity to start a new painting.

Layover

This is “Lay­over.” It’s 20 × 20”, oil on linen primed with lead white, toned with red earth and raw umber. This is a mono­chro­matic underpainting—a grisaille—which will be glazed over once it’s dry. I used var­i­ous mix­tures of Doak’s flake 1c and Nat­ural Pig­ments black earth (an iron oxide black).

The key is a lit­tle too dark for opti­mal glaz­ing (since glazes tends to darken what they cover). That means I’ll need to paint into the glaze with white to get the lights up.

I’ll keep you posted on this, and I’ll try not to let such a long time pass before putting up other stuff. Unfor­tu­nately, post­ing will prob­a­bly be inter­mit­tent for the fore­see­able future.

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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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