Underpainting (in Oils)

Underpainting

If you are doing a fairly traditional figurative painting then how do you sketch your design onto your canvas? In theory you could use pencil or charcoal to do this, but if you’ve established a coloured underlayer you may struggle to see this and you also run the risk that any graphite or charcoal will mix with the paint that you apply on top and turn it grey. It may be that you are happy just to launch in and start painting without any kind of sketch. However many people prefer to do some kind of underpainting, whether a simple sketch in thinned paint to help them map in different areas of their design, or a more substantial blocked-out underpainting that helps them define light and dark tones and maybe adds some depth to their final paint layers above.

There are several different techniques of underpainting that arose from different painting traditions. It’s useful to be familiar with one or two of the most famous methods because you’ll often come across references to them in relation to oil painting, although there’s no need to follow them if you don’t want to.

• Grisaille underpainting refers to a thinned down paint in an earth colour or a grey tone applied to block in areas of light and dark. In the past grisaille referred to a grey coloured underpainting and brunaille to a brownish one, but today the term is used interchangeably for any monochromatic underpainting. If a grey containing a white pigment was used this was often referred to as a dead colour layer. A grisaille layer may be very loose and sketchy, or may look like an entire desaturated painting rather like a black and white photograph.
• Ébauche underpainting, from a French word meaning first pass is a type of coloured underpainting where areas of slightly desaturated, slightly dull washes of thin colours are used to establish large areas of different forms in something close to their actual colour. It is sometimes known as a lay in of paint.
• A more modern way of working is to simply paint in fully saturated, fairly opaque blocks of colour for your lower layers. You can then either fully cover these blocks, or allow some of them to form your dark, light or mid tones. I paint my underlayers differently depending on what I’m painting: for skin tones I tend to begin with a paler underlayer and build up my colours whereas for clothing I’ll choose an exact mid-tone and then add shadows and highlights on top. Whatever method works for you is absolutely fine.