This is a detail of a painting that I have shown before of the effect of glazing over a grisaille underpainting in a short time.
I like to use disposable palettes. I like to start with them looking nice and clean, a clean slate. I can’t leave the colours on the palette to dry and then work on top. I find its just good to start afresh with each session, so I’m always miserly about how much I squeeze from the tube, although there is always some waste. At the…
Sap Green is a generic name of a rich deep green, warm in hue. I used it for all of my portraits and in this blog explain how I go about it.
I have been reworking a long standing grisaille portrait painting in oil and experimenting with a more colourful painterly approach. I am still using the glazing technique, but with a more complex palette than some of my other work. The original photo reference was taken in an interior space under a combination of artificial light and daylight. This gave the skin in the…
This is a recent portrait commission, which I really enjoyed painting! Particularly, organising the group composition was a great challenge. I started with a photoshoot, taking a lot of photos of everyone relaxing together and interacting as a family. Obviously we could spend days doing this, going through many combinations and settings, making sketches etc. But this can also be achieved in a relatively…
I reworked this drawing a bit today and realised again how much I love working with willow charcoal! I’m hoping to start a new series of work inspired by dance using this medium. I have always loved life drawing and working from the figure and its nice to have something to work on between painting portraits.
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 are a selection of photos showing the completed glazes done over the grisaille underpainting in this portrait commission.
My latest film, another shot while putting on the first glaze over a grisaille underpainting, is now finished and on youtube. Here’s a link to the first installment: It’s been an interesting experience filming myself working, and quite strange to watch it back as I’ve never seen myself working before. I wanted to make an authentic account of working with this method, and create…
I was able to practise my dry brush blending with this portrait of a beautiful girl called Violet. This portrait commission was a staging post for me in developing my understanding of the grisaille technique. I’m now much more comfortable marrying techniques of glazing with my earlier familiar method of building up solid planes of colour. I took a lot of care over the blending and…
This is the first stage, the grisaille. I will be posting a video of the first glaze in a few days. The sitter is the sister of the earlier portrait posted. I will be able to continue modelling the forms as I glaze. I have talked about this elsewhere but the drawing never stops while glazing is taking place, each glaze revealing new areas…
I was recently commissioned to do a drawing of two twins. See if you can spot the difference. I worked very closely from the photo provided but the client didn’t like the way the tongue looked in the end, so I had to do a bit of human photoshopping. In hindsight it was never going to work, but I followed the brief and was…
This is Amy’s portrait, glazed in oil paints. I filmed myself doing this and it will shortly be on my youtube channel. Its still in the early stages, and when this layer is dry I’ll go over it again, up to 3 or 4 times. I don’t know if I’m going to film those other stages – they might be a bit boring as…
Process of glazing an oil painting step by step
This is a portrait I painted of my brother Tom a few years ago, and I wanted to share it as I love the composition. I don’t know if its obvious but he’s reading, and enjoying a cup of tea at home. I feel the composition of the painting has a compactness to it, whilst having three distinct spatial areas – himself in the…