First still life: Part 2 The glazing

Now that the black and white painting has been done it's time to turn my attention to glazing colour into it. To do this the colour is diluted with more oils to allow for transparency (in this case I'm using liquin) with a little medium to ensure it dries. I kept these colour glazes relatively 'pure' in that I did not dull or muddy their vibrancy by the addition of black or white paint. These are built up in layers so the transparency provides a luminescence to the painting. Each layer is allowed to dry (around a day) before a new layer is added.

A reminder to where we were at the end of the underpainting stage:

In my first layer of glazing I glaze crimson into areas of the grapes as well as some yellow. It gives the impression of a faintly tinted photograph in my opinion.

Another couple of yellow and crimson layers are put in the grapes along with adding cool blues to the glass and I add some golden brown into the foreground.

I then warmed the grapes further with red. So far I have worked the layers over the highlights largely ignoring them. The highlights were cooler, more blue in colour so I would work them later. Areas of the stem were glazed with green and then brown glazes.

I then put the highlighted areas back in to the grapes with a simple white glaze to work over later. I also glazed the foreground and background with a warm brown including the dark clear areas of glass. . glazed over blueish hues.

Finally I worked blueish glazes into the grapes and added another brown background/foreground colour glaze. I also added some more warm red to a few of the grapes to finish.

I feel pretty happy with how it turned out although it's so shiny with the liquin glazes it is very difficult to photograph. I am interested to see how this technique would work with wildlife and pet paintings and hope to give it a try soon!

Let me know what you think of my first still life attempt :)

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!