Portrait painting step by step, glazing over grisaille

Portrait painting in 3 stages: The grisaille, the 1st glaze, and the 7th glaze. The glazing process is the same each time, and the portrait just gets steadily refined as it progresses

I’ve nearly finished this commissioned portrait painting. It’s had 5 glazes over the initial underpainting. This picture shows the grisaille, the first glaze (which I filmed and is on youtube please click here to view) and then the 5th glaze which is almost the last one. I still intend to go over the hair and background again, amongst other things. The hair really leant itself to glazing and turned a beautiful flame red with just two glazes. The background was a dark green the glaze before this! It still shows through and gives it a nice depth. The lovely thing about working in this way is that everything can change with just one glaze. This portrait has been through many stages. Sometimes I misjudged a colour or the tonal values – the lights and darks, weren’t right. In each case I was able to correct the painting in the following glaze, either lightening or darkening.

I love painting highlights in a portrait so I guess I overdid it somewhat and the lightest light ended up too bright by the 4th glaze, but in the latest glaze which you can see here I went over the whole portrait again with a darker glaze just to soften it a little. In areas where it was too dark again I just used a dry brush to pick off the paint and continue blending. I can always keep adjusting a portrait at a late stage if the client commissioning the portrait feels there is something that needs changing.

It is surprising just how close to the original grisaille the painting is, even when its possible to see how much refining and drawing has gone into the portrait over all the glazes. It’s strange to see later very finished versions of a portrait where the grisaille is like a ghost, still very present but disguised under veils and glazes of colour.

The grisaille functions like an anchor that holds the structure of the portrait in place, and many changes can occur but the painting is still held firmly together by the initial drawing. Drawing is king in art. Without this a portrait painting falls apart, and my paintings live or die by their drawing. If that has gone wrong somewhere reworking can be painful. And this is something you don’t want to have to do when working to commission. Its the main reason I started learning how to paint using the grisaille method. Apart from the sheer magic of it of course. Glazing oil is a truly magical process where we can breathe life into inert matter. Grisaille could stand for death, the shadow, truth. Colour glazes are like life, they are pure light. Together life and death make the whole. Like finding fire in a stone, or lighting up a cave that has been dark for a thousand years.

One thing to always bear in mind is to keep the underpainting slightly more uniform, with a narrow tonal scale. A tonal scale is a device used in academic art to show in stages the darkest dark moving to the lightest light. So her when I say narrow I mean there aren’t really dark darks or very light lights. This is something that we can add when we start glazing, and this is where the magic is. Here’s another example:

I’m just talking about the tonal range of the face in this example. I work the highlights and shadows in as glazes:

This was a very satisfying painting because in a few hours of glazing I could pretty much resolve the colour. This is because the drawing held everything together. I loved the eyes and they show the deeper darks and lighter lights after glazing. Nothing changes in the drawing, or if anything the drawing is strengthened with the glazes. Drawing never stops with every brushstroke.

I always use the same mixes when I paint portraits using the grisaille method. Here is another example video in my Bouguereau copy. All my glazes start with various quantities of the same colours: Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red, Raw Umber and Sap Green (a warm Sap Green). All the glazes are mixed with these colours but with additions, like Ultramarine Blue to cool it down, a bit of Titanium White to make a velatura or semi opaque glaze, some Cadmium Orange.. but always hovering around the same original mix. Of course this depends on the commission and the sitter.

If you are interested in having a portrait created using this grisaille and glazing technique, you can commission a portrait – I work in oil, pencil, marble and bronze, for clients across the UK and internationally.

Portrait painting in 3 stages: The grisaille, the 1st glaze, and the 5th glaze. The glazing process is the same each time, and the portrait just gets steadily refined as it progresses