Next door's tree - basis for my monochrome studies exercises
To make my grey, I mixed ultramarine and burnt umber oils, mixed with turps to apply the thin, dark wash and used prepared A3 painting boards.
To make the pale grey I used the above colours and added white until a pale grey was achieved. I sketched a tree in next door’s garden which they have cut back recently so the branches were more open.
As suggested, I used charcoal to lightly draw in the tree on the light ground, but this would have been indistinct on the dark ground, so I used a white pastel pencil here.
I mainly used a small flat brush for the outlines of the branches, as I found this gave a much cleaner, defined line than a round brush. I used the small round brush, however, for the smallest branches, twisting to achieve fine lines.
Assess the strengths and limitations of both effects:
The transparent over opaque has a much “flatter” feel to it – the background grey is totally solid and flat, with no texture or variation. The transparent dark grey is probably too dark to give the effect it should have; I should have made it more transparent with a little more turps, but you can still see the colour of the light grey coming through, and as transparent paint can be quite streaky, this actually gives a good effect for the tree bark and adds a little texture to the painting.
The opaque over transparent feels much more interesting – the same opaque grey, when painted over a dark canvas board, is much more textured and varied, showing the dark ground through the tooth of board. The dark tree texture (transparent paint) is also more visible and luminous, due to being painted directly onto the white board (as opposed to the opaque grey). On a visit to the Tate Britain recently I viewed a painting which used opaque paint over a much darker ground to good effect - Anwar Shemza’s Chessmen One. – This has a light blue over a black background giving a really textured, almost textile feel to the background, leaving the dark ground chess pieces as negative space.
I found the transparent over opaque quicker and easier to paint, and it was easy (using a very small brush) to produce the lines of the twigs and ends of branches. The opaque over transparent took a lot longer to paint – mainly due to the fiddly nature of having to paint around all the branches, and it was much more difficult to get the very fine lines of the twigs, but, as mentioned before, I think it makes for a much more interesting painting.
Both techniques can be exploited to provide interesting paintings. Applying layers of transparent paint is a classic technique (known as glazing), used to great effect by the old masters and is a very good technique to achieve subtle changes in colour.
Applying layers of transparent paint is a very time consuming method, as each layer has to be allowed to dry before the next is applied, but produces effects which would be virtually impossible to achieve in any other way.
Glazing allows you to use the white of a canvas or painting to achieve a luminous quality not possible with thicker, opaque paints as the light cannot get through opaque layers. Glazing is a form of optical rather than physical mixing of colours.
I have not yet tried out this technique with oils, but have used glazes previously in watercolour painting. Rather than mixing up a solid red, for example, the same colour can be achieved by painting transparent layers of pink and yellow which will make an orangey-red, but one which is much brighter and more vibrant than a colour mixed on the palette.
By using both techniques you can get the best of both worlds – using opaque paint allows for solid colours to be applied quickly and easily while the glazing allows for much more subtle effects. One way, I think, which this could be exploited, would be to use both a solid dark ground with an area left (or painted) white in order that transparent glazes can be applied, giving interesting variations in the colours. I would like to try this effect out using, say, a glass or wine bottle created with glazes against a very dark background – may have a go at this when we come to using a dark ground!
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