First still life: Part 1 The underpainting

I can't be exactly sure but I think it was seven or eight years ago back in college when I last attempted a still life and never in oils. However after seeing some fantastic still lifes recently I've been wanting to give it a try, plus it gives me an opportunity to try out a different oil painting method.

The painting technique I'm trying out is called Grisaille, from the French 'gris' for grey, it involves creating a tonal black and white painting and then glazing in the colour afterwards. This does two things, first, it allows the painter to focus on tone and detail when working on the greyscale underpainting.  This makes the painting process easier as you don't need to worry about mixing various colours in tonal shades. Secondly, by building up the colour in thin layers brush strokes are softened to blend them together creating a smoother effect and a luminescent quality is added to the painting as the colours show through each glazed layer.

I usually work from start to finish in colour and deepen the tonal qualities and add detail as I go and I wanted to see whether working in this way would benefit my artwork in future.

So both inspired by some of the work I've seen (and slightly influenced by my time working at a vineyard) I raided the fridge for some grapes and grabbed a wine glass for my still life. Lighting is very important for a still life as well as the composition of elements within it so I tried a few setups to photograph before selecting one as my reference.

Here's the photo I'm using

I chose to eliminate the background entirely so the focus was solely on the subject matter especially as I didn't think the actual background of the photo would add anything to the image. Instead I would leave it dark, something like the dramatic paintings I like from Caravaggio. 

So here are the stages of me building up my greyscale underpainting.

Sketching the composition out

Adding in the first layer of background

Second background layer is added. Starting to work on the grapes and glass from rearmost to foreground

Building up the details and working on the grapes. You can start to see the textures and light now.

The finished underpainting

So far I'm pretty happy with how the painting has gone. Next step will be the colour glazing, something I'm very new to so it'll be interesting to see how it goes!