Let's be Perfectly Clear---as long as possible.
Each week
my students fall asleep as they hear me say, yet again, "Keep your colors
transparent as long as you possibly can!"
I'm a
firm believer in the precept "keep
your darks transparent, and load your lights". In my teaching, I try to
get students to solve compositional and values issues while still in a
transparent stage, before the temptation to color causes muddy mixtures as a consequence of muddy thinking.
Personally,
I like to stay transparent as long as possible. This allows me to keep all my
options open. An example is this grisaille that I did for my weekly plein air
class yesterday. The canvas is 20"x20". This is a big canvas to
attempt to take very far when one is also helping students at their easels. By
leaving the hasty lay-in en grisaille,
I could allow myself to think about the painting more later, when not in class.
Grisaille, strictly speaking, means
"in grays', suggesting a nuanced black and white painting. In my loose
usage, it means painting essentially in monochrome while keeping everything
transparent. In a sense it's just drawing with the brush. With few exceptions,
I do this with a mixture of burnt umber and ultramarine. For both I use
Rembrandt colors because they are somewhat less-pigmented than some other
brands and thus are easier to use transparently. The mixture varies during the
grisaille, sometimes tending to the cool side and sometimes toward the warm. In
this particular sketch I also used some W&N Prussian green (also
transparent) for the grass and large shrub.
This
morning, when I arrived at the studio, I immediately thought that I'd like to
make yesterday's grisaille into a
moonlit scene instead. I was able to completely change my conception of the
painting because I'd done my lay-in just in values, essentially drawn in
monochrome. If I'd hastily started slapping color on yesterday, under the
noonday sun, I wouldn't have had today's option.
I put a
quick covering of some homemade Payne's Gray-like color on the sky---just
slapped it on. This particular mixture was just ivory black, ultramarine and OH
mixed white. It has neither the usual tiny bit of red or of yellow ocher. For
now I just wanted a cool, dark color.
I covered
the rest with a very thin veil of pure, transparent ultramarine and then wiped off
selected areas of the blue to become the "moonlight" on the building.
Those bits of ultramarine that remained in the otherwise wiped areas became cast
shadows from imaginary branches behind the viewer.
Here's a detail, probably close to actual size.
At this
stage of the painting everything is, both literally and figuratively, still fluid.
I could yet find a mid-day painting by giving it a different, lighter sky. But
I think I'll cast my lot with moonlight.
Now all I have to do is correct the architecture, construct the trees, adjust the values, and paint the painting. Perhaps I'll do none of that, and just enjoy having had fun with it today.
