Painted in November, 2025. 12”x12”. Acrylic on stretched canvas. Price $200.00 Cdn., (Unframed.)
As part of my university painting course, we did one session on the grisaille painting technique. I chose to do a self-portrait, because the technique is well suited to portraiture. I’ve been trying to get a smoother portrait style in my paintings and this technique helped me to achieve this.
In grisaille, you do your entire underpainting in black, white and various shades of grey. The same mono-tone technique can be done with brown, blue or any other colour. Of course, the colour of underpainting will impact the colour of the painting once the glaze is applied, but it’s still the same technique. Only when you are satisfied with the portrait do you start to apply layers of transparent acrylic using a glaze medium mixed in with the colour. This gives you rich colours that reflect over the under painting. It helps to deal with the inherent flatness of acrylic paint and creates a subtle glow. Here are two colour photos of the self-portrait. The left is before I glazed the painting, the one on the right is after:
I was surprised how much the glazing added depth to the painting. There is also a glow with the skin-tones that was unexpected. I am going to continue to play with this technique and see what kind of results I can achieve.
