Rose at 08:00 for a full day of painting. This turned out to be one of the darkest June days I have known!
Here's the underpainting from last year:
And after today's first day of glazing:
You may note some colour differences. Everything is a lot smoother in the glazed areas, but the underpainting itself is high quality, not everything requires glazing. 90% of the time, a glaze layer improves things, but sometimes it can make a good underpainting a little worse.
Why glaze at all, you may ask? Glazing serves 3 purposes:
1. Pigments may vary in their lightfastness, so it can help the security and longevity of a painting to give it several layers.
2. Fine detail requires a glaze layer because oil paint is thick and gloopy. It's impossible to paint fine lines into wet oil paint. Imagine dragging a stick though wet porridge; you can carve a rut, but never make a fine and neat line. Oil paint behaves exactly like this. Painting a fine line on a dry background is possible, but for this the background must be your desired colour.
3. The chromatic effect, the beauty of the colours. The brightest and prettiest colours are too transparent to paint with directly, and look very different (usually worse) in solid-mass tone than in transparent filter-tone. Colours arise in two ways: reflecting from a solid mass, like opaque red paint; or transmitting though a filter, like a white surface viewed through a red filter. These two types of mixing, direct (additive) and filter (subtractive), give different results, and a master of painting needs to master both types. The super-luminous greens in the lower image are possible only by glazing transparent yellow over green (note that, with current 2-dimensional RGB technology, photographs of a painting like this will not accurately portray what it looks like in real life).
I have much to do.
