The Painter in Oil / A complete treatise on the principles and technique necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors

by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

Ébouch of Portrait. Th. Robinson.
One sitting of one hour and a half.

In the matter of color, too, there is great difference of method. Some men lay in the picture with stronger color than they intend the finished picture to have, and gray it and bring it together with after-painting. Others go to the other extreme, and paint grayer and lighter, depending on glazings and full touches of color later on to richen and deepen the color. All the way between these two are modifications of method. The main difference between these extremes is that when stronger color is used in the first painting, the process is to paint with solid color all through; while if glazings are to be much used, the ébouch must be lighter and quieter in color, to allow for the results of after-painting. For you cannot glaze up. You always glaze down. The glaze being a transparent color, used without white, will naturally make the color under it more brilliant in color, but darker in value, just as it would if you laid a piece of colored glass over it. And this result must be calculated on beforehand.

Which of all these methods is best to use depends altogether on which best suits the man and his purpose in the picture or his temperament. A rough ébouch will not make a smooth picture. A mosaic gives a pure, clear basis of color to gray down and work over, and may be scraped for a good surface. It is a deliberate method, and will be successful only with a thoughtful, deliberate painter. If a man is a timid colorist, a strong, even crude, under-painting will help to strengthen his color. A good colorist will get color any way. For a student, the more directly he puts down what he sees, the less he calculates on the effect of future after-painting, the better.

But whichever way a man works as to these various beginnings, the chief thing is, that he understand beforehand what are the peculiar advantages and qualities of each, and that he consider before he begins what he expects to do, and how he purposes to do it.

Further Painting.—The first painting may be put in from nature with the help of the several models in succession. More probably it will be put in from the color sketch which furnishes the general scheme, and from a number of studies and ébouches which will give the principal material for each part of the canvas. With the next painting comes the more exact study from models and accessories themselves. The under-painting is in, the color relations and the contrasts of masses, but all is more or less crude and undeveloped. Every one thing in the picture must be gradually brought to a further stage of completion. The background is not as yet to be carried farther as a whole. If the canvas is all covered, so that the background effect is there, it is all that is needed as yet. The most important figures are to be painted, beginning with the heads and hands, and at the same time painting the parts next to them, the background and drapery close around them, so that the immediate values shall all be true as far as it has gone.

No small details are painted yet. The whole canvas is carried forward by painting all over it, no one thing being entirely finished; for the same degree of progress should be kept up for the whole picture. To finish any one part long before the rest is done, would be to run the risk of over-painting that part.

After the heads and other flesh parts, the draperies should be brought up, and the background and all objects in it painted, to bring the whole picture to the same degree of completion. This finishes the second painting. It is all done from nature direct, and is painted solidly as a rule. Even if the first painting has been a frottée this one will have been solidly painted into that frottée, although the transparent rubbing may have been left showing, whenever it was true in effect; most probably in the shadows and broader dark masses of the backgrounds. In this second painting no glazings or scumblings come in. The canvas is brought forward as far as possible with direct frank brush-work with body color before these other processes can be used. Glazes and such manipulations require a solid under-painting, and a comparative completion of the picture for safe work. These processes are for the modifying of color mainly; you do not draw nor represent the more important and fundamental facts of the picture with them. All these things are painted first, in the most frank and direct way, and then you can do anything you want to on a sure basis of well-understood representation. There will be structure underneath your future processes.