Painting Portraits

 

Glazing with Portraits

David,

You seem to be an expert in glazing... And as an aficionado of similar painters, I was wondering if you could give me any suggestions of specific colors that I might glaze for flesh tones (Caucasian)....warm and cool... I am familiar with the glazing process, but am now just getting into portraits and I don't know where to start. Any suggestions???

Thanks!
Camille

Hi Camille,

Good question. I will assume that you are painting in oils. Doing portraits in acrylics using glazing techniques would be... umm... tough. There are several ways to go about this. I will give you a few takes on it and you can come up with a combination that suits you. The basic colors for skin tones are:

-burnt umber and/or raw umber
-burnt sienna
-yellow ochre and/or transparent yellow ochre (oxide)
-vermillion (cadmium red light)
-alizarin crimson used to be the transparent red for figures, it has now been replaced with the more lightfast quinacridone reds.
-black
-white

You first have to decide how you want the underpainting to look. When studying the portrait painting techniques of the Old Masters from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century, the ‘golden age’ of oil painting IMHO, you will notice that the most common approach for the underpainting is to do a simple "grisaille" using black and white. Some of the earlier painters also liked to add cooler colors, green or blue perhaps, to the grisaille to counteract the inevitable yellowing of the oil paint with age. DaVinci fancied a purple hue for his grisaille as he figured that the yellowish skin tone would be best offset by its complimentary. Regardless of which method you use the essential factor is to keep this underpainting light because subsequent layers (glazes) will darken the image. A rule of thumb is to make the underpainting 1/2 as dark as you think you want the final painting to be. Once the underpainting is dry you can start adding the layers of color. You can go about this in several ways.

You can choose to glaze the whole area with the burnt
sienna and blend a mixture of white and ochre into that wet glaze. Or just reverse that order and glaze the yellow first, especially if you have a transparent yellow oxide instead of the opaque yellow ochre. Later, you can blend in the red (vermillion) accents.

Alternatively, you can mix a semi-opaque veil of flesh tone by adding a transparent medium to a yellow ochre, vermillion and white mixture. Paint this over the entire area and commence blending the vermillion and white accents into it.

Most painters would leave the shadows and highlights to the end. The shadows can be glazed over the dry skin tones or blended into them wet, as you prefer. The browns, black, blue, purple, and greens can all be used in various combinations to create glorious shadows and dark areas. Don't forget the important neutral gray tones that can be achieved by blending your dark colors with the light tones. These grays are usually painted into the transition areas between light and shadows.

Another approach would be to put down a brown glaze to start then mix the grays into it and then blend the flesh colors while the whole underpainting is still wet. Later you can return to this dry preparation to add more glazes and opaque accents. A favourite method of painters like Rembrandt was to start every sitting by putting a glaze (usually brown in Rembrandt's case) over the whole painting and then blend opaque colors into the wet glaze.

I could go on but I trust you get the idea. Perhaps the best method of learning is to watch a good portrait painter in action. David Goatly (SFCA) of Victoria does fabulous portrait work.

Hope that helps to get you started anyway... Have fun, David

David,

What a thoughtful and insightful response! (I wasn't even sure if you would get back to me.) You blew me away with your expertise and knowledge! So few people out there know this stuff -- today is my lucky day!! :). This information is bound to help other artists out there. THANK YOU!!! THANKYOU!!

Best,
Camille