This is the second pass with the Studio Products Gel Maroger's Painting Medium ( No.2 in the 3 part kit ). For my Grisaille, I generally let a little more of the underpainting show through, but even with a heavier coat the initial tone will be evident. I'll work this up a little more ( add another two or three layers in some areas) to get all of the values and details correct, but this is pretty much the form that I'll work around when I start to glaze in color. This dried pretty quickly and has kind of a satin finish.
Don't get scared when you're making you're Grisaille and try to correct the colors. There's a temptation to do this due to the fact that you'll end up with "dead man's hand" where you've got a creepy corpse-like thing happening. This all changes in the glazing. All of the painting up to the color glazing is "foreplay" ( and in an odd parallel, the most fun and time consuming part of it... to me, anyway). When you lay in the the final glazes ( strange again, the shortest but also a very gratifying part...), you'll see why this technique gives you a result that you cannot get with other methods. The chemistry married with manipulating color theory is, to me, the very reason that painting with oil is truly wonderful. Over and above your image, manipulating the materials in a scientific way adds kind of a transcendent dimension of depth. You don't want to be the guy who buys a Ferrari, but never gets it over 35 mph. You can make "pictures" with oil paint, but the chemistry is the cool part.
Hey, what's with this? I took this picture of my backyard actually to prove that we had real snow.
The bad part about snow in Georgia is that every "Bo" and "Luke" thinks that this is his big chance to use his gigantic truck to "command the elements". Unfortunately, the converse is true, and you get to see the roads littered with abandoned vehicles ( and guys name "cooter" stumbling away from them with those little animated birds spinning around their heads). Georgia doesn't have much in the way of snow equipment, but it isn't really that big of a deal to hang out at home for one day. It's not like every car on the road is a mission to "get Mama's Insulin".
FUN FACT:
For the 12-20 hour period of "real" snow in the south, the grocery stores are descended upon like the crowds in Soylent Green fighting over bread and milk. Yeah, milk ! You know, the thing that spoils within a week.
Apparently, the fear of osteoporosis is a bigger problem than I could have ever imagined down here in "dixie". Pin It Now!
