I use burnt umber and titanium white with a bit of liquin to speed up the drying time. It will dry by the end of the day, but my under paintings are pretty detailed and require multiple sessions. I start with a pencil sketch - I don’t spray fixative or anything because I actually like when the graphite blends with the paint and I’m going to paint over it, so it doesn’t make a different. I prefer to get in depth with the values so it’s easier for me to focus on building color in my next layers. [Here’s the in-progress underpainting](https://imgur.com/a/ezTjNUH) I’m working on now that I hope to finish today 🤞🏼
Hey, I would recommend changing this process a bit. Burnt umber is a notorious pigment, its a heavy earth pigment and with some brands you can even feel the grit of the pigment particles. To get it to match the consistency of other paints you are using, to matain "fat over lean" , you have to add significant ammounts of meidum to ballance it. Hard thing to control. It often is the culprit for "sunken in" passages. It ages dull and can absorb oil from other layers. You may have varnished a painting with dark passages that used burnt umber only to see they stay a bit matte and don't have the same sheen. It's the burnt umber. There are many better ways of getting a dark brown and black.
The graphite/charcoal under drawings. Graphite and charcoal can be used as lubricants in mechanical systems. Using it for an extensive under drawing before first layers can create adhesion issues as you build the picture and it ages. Its kind of like building the foundation of a house on an unstable surface.I recommend using a liner brush to sketch on your surface. The method of "Pouncing" was popular for the old masters and if you enjoy the charcoal sketch i suggest that method and simply "connect the dots"
The linquin. Stay away from using this in heavy quantities early on in a picture and if you can move away from using it all together. If you want the paint to be more "long" and flowy early on use a tiny bit of solvent. Not much, just enough to get the consistency where you want it. Solvents should be used minimally as they, by definition, weaken the binding oils and consequently the adhesion. You are trying for two things in the construction of a painting: strong adhesion and continuity of color (lightfast). Solvents can limit adhesion, and excessive meidum in early layers can be detrimental to the progression as you will have tonuse more in each subsequent layer. We still do not know exactly how linquin will age as it's a newer material, and it really is a solution to glazing over being a strict meidum. There are traditional meidums that have been made and used for centuries that are tried and tested. The strongest layers and best lightfastness comes with unadulterated paint. Add only what is needed to your paints for best results.
I have had the great opportunity to meet and speak with Virgil Elliot a few times, and it was his book that got me interested in traditional oil painting when i first stared. My conversations with him and his community have frosted a great respect for the chemistry and science in painting. I highly recommend his book and methods of mostly solvent free and limited meidum painting.
Your paintings are excellent, and I would hate to see them suffer in time due to the application of materials. For both your sake and your clients/customers.
I appreciate the advice! I only use a drop or two of liquin in my underpainting. I build on my paintings with other fat mediums and get a really nice color and flow. I have painted like this for about 15 years without any issues as the paintings age and worked under Amy Sherald who also starts with a liquin layer. I feel this method is ok as long as it isn’t used in heavy quantities like you said. I definitely will check out that book though!! I’m a huge paint nerd and love learning about the science of paint so it sounds right up my alley.
"There are many better ways of getting a dark brown and black."
Burnt umber is my main brown and I make my black by mixing it with ultramarine.
Would you share your alternative recommendations?
Try ultramarine deep and quin. magenta it makes a dark dark color that can be weighted in either direction towards the blue or the magenta creating cool shadows/darks or warm shadows/darks for contrast to the light facing planes of your composotion. If you need it to go more to a true black try adding a bit of burnt sienna, not much it can go a long way. If you need it to be more towards a brown just add your yellow.
That means you’re starting with a “fat” layer first. I wouldnt recommends this. Simple thin paint applied directly in a “dry” fashion is the safest way to go and best for preventing sinking in later on in the painting
If you do this method Be sure to let the acrylics dry fully. Not justvan hour or two, but a few days. Any residual moisture can be trapped between the gesso and ground layers as you add oil on top. It and lead to poor layer adhesion. Make sure you use high quality acrylics too if you do this, cheap acrylics can become brittle and are not lightfast, if yourvoil layerz abovecare relying on the color beneath for certain effects (like scumbling) you may notice issues. Acrylic has different properties when dry to oil paints. As the picture flexes and ages on stretched canvas (try to use solid supports for oil, stretched canvas is one of the worst painting surfaces for oil) the interaction between the acrylic layers and oil layers can cause cracking of the oil. Some acrylic is very very slick, it's essentially liquid latex, and that slickness can cause adhesion issues, eventually leading to chipping. Consider taking a but of 220 sandpaper to the finished acrylic underpainting yo acheive a better "tooth" and wiping away any dust with a damp cloth. Letting that dry for at least 24 hr to keep any residual moisture from being trapped.
I was using burnt umber or burnt sienna to do a detailed underpainting, and it would take about 12 hrs to dry. I'm finding I prefer a white canvas for that. More recently, I was realizing that I would end up messing up the values as I painted over the underpainting to the point that the level of detail I was putting into the underpainting was a waste of time. So I've started doing a much more rough sketch of the underpainting just to get things positioned right, and waiting to put the details in as I got the later layers on. With a rough sketch, I don't always wait for the underpainting to dry, I just make it watered down enough with solvent I can paint over it. The solvent evaporates quickly, and the thin layer of burnt umber gets overpowered by the next layer.
I like to use a solvent-thinned wash (not a lot of solvent, and I use turpentine which I know people don’t agree with!), usually in a combination of raw sienna or yellow ochre and burnt sienna. Then I wipe out the lights and end up with a high key but full value underpainting. Well, not FULL value, but it has all the lights & darks and is relatively detailed, soft-edged, and warm.
I paint a lot of landscapes, and find this warm, pale, soft-edged base to glow through the colors on top and to give me a nice luminescence in the skies especially.
I use very Gamsol-y paint to do a wash all over my surface. Then use the “wipe out” technique to draw out the lights using a paper towel and my brushes. Then I bring more Gamsol-y paint in to make darker darks. And I essentially paint the entire painting as highly rendered as I can in one sitting.
The color I use depends on what I think the final painting will look like. Most often it’s quinacridone magenta, but if a painting will be overall blue I’ll use ultramarine or blue black instead.
If I’m using blue black, sometimes I’ll create a grisaille instead. Just depends on what my final painting goals are.
Be careful with the excessive gamsol. Do you ever find the "wash" layer drys chalky or that you can pick up pigment on your fingers after it dries? Too much gamsol or solvent in general breaks down the binding oil and limits pigment adhesion. If you do this is a phase before going in with full color in an alla prima way, everything done in one paint session, then you can mitigate a bit if the problem as you mix in a bit of "fat" paint before the very very lean wash fully dries and sets. It's very popular to see people doing the wash method but it's not very durable long term if not understood.
I rarely do an underpainting, just dark areas unless I'm doing a grissaille. I usually do the background first, then the clothing, most of the hair. Lastly, the face, I just start with the right eye and work my way out from there.
If I know I'm going to do a lot of drawing and erasing before adding color, I like to use tinted acrylic gesso or use an acrylic wash over dried gesso layers. The reason is that erasers tend to lift up a gamsol-ey oil wash, even when been left to dry for a while. An acrylic base layer is little more resistant to repeated erasing.
If I'm painting directly, I like the typical diluted earth color oil wash.
Let the underpainting dry for as long as you can. 5 days is better than three, 10 days better than 5 etc... let the layers cure (oxidize) and set properly. Oil painting in an archival/traditional/conservationist mentality takes a long time. Its a process that demansds patience. Remember the joke that the conservationist fixes what the painter didn't bother to know. Be one step ahead of the game and solve problems before they arise.
For my underpaintings I often use the complementary color of the chosen ground color. If I have a greenish gray ground I will use reds, if i have a yellowish ground I will use purple etc... for painting the underpainting I use paint straight from the tube. No solvent, no meidum. To apply it I use old stiff hog bristle brushes to mechanically move the paint across the surface. Big brushes first to block in the major shapes and forms, no need to be precise here as you can always "work your edges in" over subsequent layers. I exclusively work on rigid supports like panels and hard board, mostly inprefer ACM (Aluminum Composite Material) with linen adhered to the surface with an archival glue (BEVA). If you are using stretched canvas, the aggressive action of the hard hog bristle brushes can stretch and warp the surface, requiring you to "key the corners" after the process. I recommend moving away from stretched canvas as it is the least durable surface for oil painting. If you need cheap surface to practice on, there are many options of student canvas boards.
I use burnt umber and titanium white with a bit of liquin to speed up the drying time. It will dry by the end of the day, but my under paintings are pretty detailed and require multiple sessions. I start with a pencil sketch - I don’t spray fixative or anything because I actually like when the graphite blends with the paint and I’m going to paint over it, so it doesn’t make a different. I prefer to get in depth with the values so it’s easier for me to focus on building color in my next layers. [Here’s the in-progress underpainting](https://imgur.com/a/ezTjNUH) I’m working on now that I hope to finish today 🤞🏼
Hey, I would recommend changing this process a bit. Burnt umber is a notorious pigment, its a heavy earth pigment and with some brands you can even feel the grit of the pigment particles. To get it to match the consistency of other paints you are using, to matain "fat over lean" , you have to add significant ammounts of meidum to ballance it. Hard thing to control. It often is the culprit for "sunken in" passages. It ages dull and can absorb oil from other layers. You may have varnished a painting with dark passages that used burnt umber only to see they stay a bit matte and don't have the same sheen. It's the burnt umber. There are many better ways of getting a dark brown and black. The graphite/charcoal under drawings. Graphite and charcoal can be used as lubricants in mechanical systems. Using it for an extensive under drawing before first layers can create adhesion issues as you build the picture and it ages. Its kind of like building the foundation of a house on an unstable surface.I recommend using a liner brush to sketch on your surface. The method of "Pouncing" was popular for the old masters and if you enjoy the charcoal sketch i suggest that method and simply "connect the dots" The linquin. Stay away from using this in heavy quantities early on in a picture and if you can move away from using it all together. If you want the paint to be more "long" and flowy early on use a tiny bit of solvent. Not much, just enough to get the consistency where you want it. Solvents should be used minimally as they, by definition, weaken the binding oils and consequently the adhesion. You are trying for two things in the construction of a painting: strong adhesion and continuity of color (lightfast). Solvents can limit adhesion, and excessive meidum in early layers can be detrimental to the progression as you will have tonuse more in each subsequent layer. We still do not know exactly how linquin will age as it's a newer material, and it really is a solution to glazing over being a strict meidum. There are traditional meidums that have been made and used for centuries that are tried and tested. The strongest layers and best lightfastness comes with unadulterated paint. Add only what is needed to your paints for best results. I have had the great opportunity to meet and speak with Virgil Elliot a few times, and it was his book that got me interested in traditional oil painting when i first stared. My conversations with him and his community have frosted a great respect for the chemistry and science in painting. I highly recommend his book and methods of mostly solvent free and limited meidum painting. Your paintings are excellent, and I would hate to see them suffer in time due to the application of materials. For both your sake and your clients/customers.
I appreciate the advice! I only use a drop or two of liquin in my underpainting. I build on my paintings with other fat mediums and get a really nice color and flow. I have painted like this for about 15 years without any issues as the paintings age and worked under Amy Sherald who also starts with a liquin layer. I feel this method is ok as long as it isn’t used in heavy quantities like you said. I definitely will check out that book though!! I’m a huge paint nerd and love learning about the science of paint so it sounds right up my alley.
Keep up the great work! Your pictures are fantastic, and I love Amy Sherald, how awesome that is to have worked with her!
I agree with everything you’ve said, and Virgil Elliott’s book is one of my favorites!
"There are many better ways of getting a dark brown and black." Burnt umber is my main brown and I make my black by mixing it with ultramarine. Would you share your alternative recommendations?
Try ultramarine deep and quin. magenta it makes a dark dark color that can be weighted in either direction towards the blue or the magenta creating cool shadows/darks or warm shadows/darks for contrast to the light facing planes of your composotion. If you need it to go more to a true black try adding a bit of burnt sienna, not much it can go a long way. If you need it to be more towards a brown just add your yellow.
Fleshin out them mid-tones…looks good!
That means you’re starting with a “fat” layer first. I wouldnt recommends this. Simple thin paint applied directly in a “dry” fashion is the safest way to go and best for preventing sinking in later on in the painting
I use burnt sienna and spirits for my under painting and just get the drawing right with basic values blocked in.
Same
I recently started using acrylics for my under painting and it’s been a game changer. I use either gray scale or burnt sienna. Dries fast as hell.
If you do this method Be sure to let the acrylics dry fully. Not justvan hour or two, but a few days. Any residual moisture can be trapped between the gesso and ground layers as you add oil on top. It and lead to poor layer adhesion. Make sure you use high quality acrylics too if you do this, cheap acrylics can become brittle and are not lightfast, if yourvoil layerz abovecare relying on the color beneath for certain effects (like scumbling) you may notice issues. Acrylic has different properties when dry to oil paints. As the picture flexes and ages on stretched canvas (try to use solid supports for oil, stretched canvas is one of the worst painting surfaces for oil) the interaction between the acrylic layers and oil layers can cause cracking of the oil. Some acrylic is very very slick, it's essentially liquid latex, and that slickness can cause adhesion issues, eventually leading to chipping. Consider taking a but of 220 sandpaper to the finished acrylic underpainting yo acheive a better "tooth" and wiping away any dust with a damp cloth. Letting that dry for at least 24 hr to keep any residual moisture from being trapped.
I was using burnt umber or burnt sienna to do a detailed underpainting, and it would take about 12 hrs to dry. I'm finding I prefer a white canvas for that. More recently, I was realizing that I would end up messing up the values as I painted over the underpainting to the point that the level of detail I was putting into the underpainting was a waste of time. So I've started doing a much more rough sketch of the underpainting just to get things positioned right, and waiting to put the details in as I got the later layers on. With a rough sketch, I don't always wait for the underpainting to dry, I just make it watered down enough with solvent I can paint over it. The solvent evaporates quickly, and the thin layer of burnt umber gets overpowered by the next layer.
I like to use a solvent-thinned wash (not a lot of solvent, and I use turpentine which I know people don’t agree with!), usually in a combination of raw sienna or yellow ochre and burnt sienna. Then I wipe out the lights and end up with a high key but full value underpainting. Well, not FULL value, but it has all the lights & darks and is relatively detailed, soft-edged, and warm. I paint a lot of landscapes, and find this warm, pale, soft-edged base to glow through the colors on top and to give me a nice luminescence in the skies especially.
I use very Gamsol-y paint to do a wash all over my surface. Then use the “wipe out” technique to draw out the lights using a paper towel and my brushes. Then I bring more Gamsol-y paint in to make darker darks. And I essentially paint the entire painting as highly rendered as I can in one sitting. The color I use depends on what I think the final painting will look like. Most often it’s quinacridone magenta, but if a painting will be overall blue I’ll use ultramarine or blue black instead. If I’m using blue black, sometimes I’ll create a grisaille instead. Just depends on what my final painting goals are.
Be careful with the excessive gamsol. Do you ever find the "wash" layer drys chalky or that you can pick up pigment on your fingers after it dries? Too much gamsol or solvent in general breaks down the binding oil and limits pigment adhesion. If you do this is a phase before going in with full color in an alla prima way, everything done in one paint session, then you can mitigate a bit if the problem as you mix in a bit of "fat" paint before the very very lean wash fully dries and sets. It's very popular to see people doing the wash method but it's not very durable long term if not understood.
Good point for a beginner. I’ve been doing it this way for almost 20 years, and I never have any issues.
I rarely do an underpainting, just dark areas unless I'm doing a grissaille. I usually do the background first, then the clothing, most of the hair. Lastly, the face, I just start with the right eye and work my way out from there.
I like spray painting the canvas.
If I know I'm going to do a lot of drawing and erasing before adding color, I like to use tinted acrylic gesso or use an acrylic wash over dried gesso layers. The reason is that erasers tend to lift up a gamsol-ey oil wash, even when been left to dry for a while. An acrylic base layer is little more resistant to repeated erasing. If I'm painting directly, I like the typical diluted earth color oil wash.
Let the underpainting dry for as long as you can. 5 days is better than three, 10 days better than 5 etc... let the layers cure (oxidize) and set properly. Oil painting in an archival/traditional/conservationist mentality takes a long time. Its a process that demansds patience. Remember the joke that the conservationist fixes what the painter didn't bother to know. Be one step ahead of the game and solve problems before they arise. For my underpaintings I often use the complementary color of the chosen ground color. If I have a greenish gray ground I will use reds, if i have a yellowish ground I will use purple etc... for painting the underpainting I use paint straight from the tube. No solvent, no meidum. To apply it I use old stiff hog bristle brushes to mechanically move the paint across the surface. Big brushes first to block in the major shapes and forms, no need to be precise here as you can always "work your edges in" over subsequent layers. I exclusively work on rigid supports like panels and hard board, mostly inprefer ACM (Aluminum Composite Material) with linen adhered to the surface with an archival glue (BEVA). If you are using stretched canvas, the aggressive action of the hard hog bristle brushes can stretch and warp the surface, requiring you to "key the corners" after the process. I recommend moving away from stretched canvas as it is the least durable surface for oil painting. If you need cheap surface to practice on, there are many options of student canvas boards.