Painting the Shirt and Waistcoat

The underpainting of the shirt was built up with glazes of titanium white to create a luminous background for the tone. Fortunately, the drawing was still visible through the underpainting and the lines of the folds were then outlined in grey with a fine brush to re-establish their shape. Finally, the tones of the shirt were applied using a grey glaze ( equal mixtures of red, yellow and blue ) and carefully blended with small sable brushes.

The lines of the waistcoat were simply painted with several glazes of sap green to create a flat, even stripe.

Painting the Waistcoat

Next, the tones of the folds on the waistcoat were rendered with glazes of sap green ( the same colour as the jacket ), gradually applying more layers to darken the shaded areas.

Painting the Waistcoat

Finally, the excessively bright yellow front of the waistcoat was subdued with several thin glazes of sap green, while glazes of prussian blue were applied to deepen the tone the darkest areas.

Painting Technique for the Shirt and Waistcoat

In our actual size detail above, you can see the tonal, textural and colour effects of the paint surface on our shirt and waistcoat.

You can see that the folds on the shirt have been created by minute stippling with the grey glaze. The darker tones are simply more densely stippled than the lighter ones.

A similar painting technique is used for the softer folds of waistcoat. The dark tones of these folds were built up with stippled and smudged layers of of sap green which were gradually darkened with prussian blue to create the areas of deepest shade. Then several transparent glazes of sap green were evenly stippled overall to subdue the luminous yellow front of the waistcoat. The resulting soft felt texture of the front was a by-product of this technique.

Follow the progress of our Portrait