The Underpainting

The first task in painting our portrait is to complete the underpainting for each area of the picture. The underpainting is the local colour applied to each section of the portrait: flesh, hair, jacket etc.

The form of the image will gradually be rendered by overpainting each section with transparent and opaque glazes. Therefore, the colours of the underpainting must be brighter than the colours you envisage for the final result as they will become darker when overpainted.

The basic acrylic colours used for the underpainting of our portrait were:

Mixing Paint

Although you may use water to thin acrylic colours to a suitable consistency, it is best to add some acrylic medium to maintain the durability and elasticity of the paint. Acrylic medium comes in bottles of gloss and matte medium to meet a range of surface effects. You need to experiment with various mixtures of paint, medium and water to create the type of glazes that suit your painting technique. Some artists will patiently build up many thin glazes of paint to achieve a specific result, while others want to get there fast and use thicker mixtures.

In our portrait, the underpainting is built up in thin flat layers of colour mixed with equal amounts of gloss and matte medium. This gives the overall paint surface a neutral sheen. One of the advantages of painting thinly is that you may still be able to see some of your drawing beneath the surface. This often depends on the natural opacity of the colours you choose. However, if you lose some of your image, don't worry as you still have your preparatory drawing to refer to. It is in the nature of most painting to regularly lose and re-establish areas of the work.

Painting the Background

The underpainting of the background was done with several thin layers of an opaque light blue whereas the overpainting of the tone was built up from darker glazes of pure colours: Prussian Blue, Ultramarine and Cobalt Blue. Several blues were used to give some complexity to the monochrome depth of the background. A small amount of Titanium White paint is carefully blended around the edge of the head to increase its contrast with the background.

NB. The background should be painted over the outline of the portrait so that no gaps remain once the figure is completed.

The artist decided to use a graduated blue tone for the background for several reasons:

Painting Technique

The image above shows an actual size detail of a section of the background.

Technically, the background was probably the the most difficult and time consuming part of the picture to paint. The artist attempted a gradual transition of tone from the invisible light source behind the head to the darkness that surrounds the figure. This could have been done more evenly using an airbrush, but the artist wanted the irregularity of hand painted marks to unify the painting technique of the background with the rest of the picture. The effect was achieved by using small sable brushes and carefully stippling layers of transparent dark blue glazes over the light blue underpainting.

Follow the progress of our Portrait