My new glazing technique is unstoppable

[avram]

Inspired by that book on techniques of the masters, I’ve been fooling around with glasing. That’s when you apply thin layers of transparent or translucent color to a painting, generally multiple layers, often of different colors. With acrylics, you generally do this by diluting your paint with medium, five to ten parts medium to one part paint. A common technique is to start out with a monochromatic underpainting and then add color on top of it. So here’s a head in four steps:

Step 1:
Underpainting, burnt sienna and titanium white. Here I’m establishing the light and dark values.

Step 2:
Adding some color. It’s much too red; I was still using my watercolor reflexes, thinking that since I was using transparent color I didn’t need to add white. That fleshtone is built from alizarin crimson (hue, to avoid fading) and (I think) yellow oxide. it looks a bit like muscles tissue, like a skinned head. Kind of appropriate, even if that wasn’t what I was going for.

Step 3:
Correcting the fleshtone, adding in titanium white. I went too opaque here, losing some of the underlying darks. Notice how the fold at the edge of the mouth and nostril vanishes, along with the original eyebrow.

Step 4:
More fleshtone, more shadows, and highlights. Also added the eye whites and eyebrow.

After all that, I think I like the first step best.

This was a really time-consuming effort; I could probably have gotten faster results with more opaque paint, and I think I would have had more control over the final color. Halfway through I had loads of sympathy for those modernists who tossed aside painstaking technique in favor of more immediate and gratifying ways of handling their paints. Centuries of art history branded right on my brain in one week of practice.

Another experiment: I didn’t use any pre-mixed black. The shadows were built out of burnt sienna and ultramarine. I think I should have laid it on thicker, with less medium.