More Advanced Demo from my Drawing into Painting Class

This is a semi-colored grisaille underpainting done over a drawing done

with a mechanical pencil and then covered with a thin layer of acrylic

medium tinted orange. The oil colors used to develop the picture so far

where simply black and white, with a bit of brown and green on the mag-

nolia blossom.

The interesting color phenomenon occurring here is do to a situation

known as "optical grays". That is that any medium (center of a value scale

of five values) gray placed near a color or about the same value and intensity

will take on the complement of that color. Notice how the sphere appears to

be blue in parts. This is because the background is slightly orange. The

sphere is really only a gray made of black and white.

Color is amazing.

2nd Project Demo from my Drawing into Painting Class

This is a demonstration of a grisaille underpainting that has been partially

painted over, by painting into a wet "imprimatura", or layer of transparent paint.

A grisaille, some of you may not know, is any monochromatic underpainting, but

is called what it is because the word gris means "gray" in French, and in the early

days of the development of oil painting technology, underpaintings were most often

done in black and white, or raw umber and white. Leonardo actually used brown,

and a close inspection of Vermeer reveals that he sometimes used a greenish color.

Anyway, this type of painting is known as "Indirect Painting", in that you separate

the drawing, or "form" part, from the color part. It is actually the easiest type of painting,

and is believed to have been developed in Flanders by the Van Eyck brothers in the late

14th C.. -- My underpainting in this demo was done in black and white acrylic, but in my

classes, we use Mars Black and Titanium white, because Mars black is the leaset oily black,

It is important to keep the lowest levels of a painting almost oil-free, and then gradually

add oil (fat) as you build up the layers of the painting. This lessens the chances of cracking

and crazing of the paint surface over time.

This type of painting is directly opposite that done by alla prima ("all at once", "at the first",

who began working in the late 16th, early 17th C.'s, such as Frans Hals and Rembrandt. Later

on, Van Gogh and John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt are marvelous examples of this

direct approach in which one both draws and paints onto a bare canvas, creating form and

color all at once with the brush.

Thanks for stopping by.

Desi Standing

This little sketch I did at an all-day figure drawing
class I taught today at The Art League School in
Alexandria, VA. The model was so beautiful, I now I
did not do him justice, but let's face it, how much can
you do in ten minutes. The drawing practice is the
thing, after all.