04-27-2019, 02:54 AM
The grisaille is mostly just establishing context and getting the drawing down. You can of course take a grisaille very far and then thinly glaze in your colors but I think that's sort of outside of what we're talking about right now. There was an issue with the one you did where it essentially was very muddy and you tried to go for half tones and you ended up over-stating them, harming the larger light impression. Having a strong light impression is very useful for when you go from a grisaille to a full painting. So eliminating all half-tones and just going for a kind of binary light vs dark is very useful.
When working in color, you should consider your colors a kind of axiom rather than 1:1 comparison. If you don't have a strong yellow, you have to compress that range of visual colors and shift all the colors in your painting to make room for it. It's like value keys and compression. You can compress all light values together into one in order to make room to explore the variance in the darks, you can also compress the darks to make room in the light and compress both to fit a middle range. Then what you do is work with the values in relative contrast to each other, rather than 1:1 comparisons with your subject.
It's very common for people to now mostly brush mix all their colors but I'd really recommend using a palette knife and mixing up every tone you want by hand before placing it on the canvas. It will both teach you how to mix what you want without putting any risk to your painting, it also lets you keep a great degree of purity and directness to your colors and values, always getting exactly what you want where you want it with no mixing on the canvas or in the brush.
I don't know what pigments you're now using exactly but you should always be very careful with reds. Unless it's something like transparent red oxide, they almost all have extremely strong tinting strengths and if you get too much red into a mixture on the palette you may as well re-mix that color from scratch because you can't really balance it out.
There is no need to give up on an image unless you've seriously overloaded the canvas (and even then - see Mancini). Rather than giving up on it, you can try to figure out what the issue is and correct it. You're working with oils, you can easily let it dry and re-paint it. Think of it like a problem to be solved. You ran into an issue, if you give up now there's a problem out there lurking that may hit you in your next painting just when you thought it was going well. Instead what you could do is to tackle the problem and solve it so that every other time you will encounter it, you know how to defeat it.
roanna you mentioned covering the canvas with a thin layer of oil. It is a practice that should really be done very carefully because it can really mess up a painting. It's usually referred to as "oiling in" or "oiling out" and 90% of the time it's to counteract or prevent the sinking-in of colors. Sinking in is when a second layer of paint has enough of its oil sucked into the first layer that the surface becomes matte and it distorts the colors and values. When adding oil is otherwise done, the argument is that it provides a layer of oil for the second layer to bind to the first however it doesn't seem like this is the case and actually it may harm adhesion as well as come with a lot of other disadvantages.
Oil paints take months to fully harden and during that time, the surface remains relatively absorbent, enough so that any second layer of paint will have part of it's oil penetrate the existing layer forming a good bond. There are issues however when paintings can become oversaturated with oil so that surface isn't absorbent anymore and the second layer won't properly penetrate and bond with the first. This can happen when youse too much of an oily medium or if you oil-in the surface too much. Every time you add oil to your paints or cover an area with a thin layer you move the painting surface closer to the stage of being oversaturated, so you want to use it very carefully.
There are techniques developed to counteract the over-saturation of oil. One is to use the bones of a cuttlefish to scrape back a layer of the painting, pressing the calcium of the bone dust into the painting layer. The bones of cuttlefish are mostly calcium carbonate and it's a material that can absorb a lot of oil, adding an absorbent layer that things can stick to well.
There are reasonable reasons to oil-in a layer of a painting. Dark colors can easily sink in and look much lighter than when they were initially painted but you have to be very careful to use very little of the oil when doing this, many artists have cut their oils with mineral spirits to use even less oil because each drop of oil harms the painting. Artists have long used resins to prevent the oil from sinking in without the need of oiling-in. Oil darkens and yellows with time, they can also contribute to bad cracking and adhesion issues. Even if you buy "refined" linseed oil, you'll still have this issue because the refinement process isn't particularly effective in commercial products. The best option is to refine it yourself and even then, you still need to be careful.
Also, most of this can be fixed with a non absorbent oil ground canvas.
Peter, what you probably did was an imprimatura, not oiling in the canvas. Gamsol is a solvent and is meant to evaporate leaving nothing of it left in the paint film. Think of it like just toning the surface with some pigments.
Mogilevtsev's books are kind of bad. They don't really have any information that you wouldn't easily be able to find online and even then, it's not a lot they say. It's somewhat disappointing because the boys in Saint Petersburg don't really share much of what they do in regards to paintings (I think it's because their students struggle a lot with painting because of their particular drawing techniques).
When working in color, you should consider your colors a kind of axiom rather than 1:1 comparison. If you don't have a strong yellow, you have to compress that range of visual colors and shift all the colors in your painting to make room for it. It's like value keys and compression. You can compress all light values together into one in order to make room to explore the variance in the darks, you can also compress the darks to make room in the light and compress both to fit a middle range. Then what you do is work with the values in relative contrast to each other, rather than 1:1 comparisons with your subject.
It's very common for people to now mostly brush mix all their colors but I'd really recommend using a palette knife and mixing up every tone you want by hand before placing it on the canvas. It will both teach you how to mix what you want without putting any risk to your painting, it also lets you keep a great degree of purity and directness to your colors and values, always getting exactly what you want where you want it with no mixing on the canvas or in the brush.
I don't know what pigments you're now using exactly but you should always be very careful with reds. Unless it's something like transparent red oxide, they almost all have extremely strong tinting strengths and if you get too much red into a mixture on the palette you may as well re-mix that color from scratch because you can't really balance it out.
There is no need to give up on an image unless you've seriously overloaded the canvas (and even then - see Mancini). Rather than giving up on it, you can try to figure out what the issue is and correct it. You're working with oils, you can easily let it dry and re-paint it. Think of it like a problem to be solved. You ran into an issue, if you give up now there's a problem out there lurking that may hit you in your next painting just when you thought it was going well. Instead what you could do is to tackle the problem and solve it so that every other time you will encounter it, you know how to defeat it.
roanna you mentioned covering the canvas with a thin layer of oil. It is a practice that should really be done very carefully because it can really mess up a painting. It's usually referred to as "oiling in" or "oiling out" and 90% of the time it's to counteract or prevent the sinking-in of colors. Sinking in is when a second layer of paint has enough of its oil sucked into the first layer that the surface becomes matte and it distorts the colors and values. When adding oil is otherwise done, the argument is that it provides a layer of oil for the second layer to bind to the first however it doesn't seem like this is the case and actually it may harm adhesion as well as come with a lot of other disadvantages.
Oil paints take months to fully harden and during that time, the surface remains relatively absorbent, enough so that any second layer of paint will have part of it's oil penetrate the existing layer forming a good bond. There are issues however when paintings can become oversaturated with oil so that surface isn't absorbent anymore and the second layer won't properly penetrate and bond with the first. This can happen when youse too much of an oily medium or if you oil-in the surface too much. Every time you add oil to your paints or cover an area with a thin layer you move the painting surface closer to the stage of being oversaturated, so you want to use it very carefully.
There are techniques developed to counteract the over-saturation of oil. One is to use the bones of a cuttlefish to scrape back a layer of the painting, pressing the calcium of the bone dust into the painting layer. The bones of cuttlefish are mostly calcium carbonate and it's a material that can absorb a lot of oil, adding an absorbent layer that things can stick to well.
There are reasonable reasons to oil-in a layer of a painting. Dark colors can easily sink in and look much lighter than when they were initially painted but you have to be very careful to use very little of the oil when doing this, many artists have cut their oils with mineral spirits to use even less oil because each drop of oil harms the painting. Artists have long used resins to prevent the oil from sinking in without the need of oiling-in. Oil darkens and yellows with time, they can also contribute to bad cracking and adhesion issues. Even if you buy "refined" linseed oil, you'll still have this issue because the refinement process isn't particularly effective in commercial products. The best option is to refine it yourself and even then, you still need to be careful.
Also, most of this can be fixed with a non absorbent oil ground canvas.
Peter, what you probably did was an imprimatura, not oiling in the canvas. Gamsol is a solvent and is meant to evaporate leaving nothing of it left in the paint film. Think of it like just toning the surface with some pigments.
Mogilevtsev's books are kind of bad. They don't really have any information that you wouldn't easily be able to find online and even then, it's not a lot they say. It's somewhat disappointing because the boys in Saint Petersburg don't really share much of what they do in regards to paintings (I think it's because their students struggle a lot with painting because of their particular drawing techniques).
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