Grisaille

"Grisaille" is a fancy word for an underdrawing in monochrome. It is derived from the French "gris" and means "grey." It traditionally describes first step of the practice of the medieval and flemish masters, which involved creating an elaborate underdrawing, in a monochromatic higher key, which was then overpainted with glazes and scumbles of greater chroma and intensity. This unfinished painting of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery by Peter Bruegel the Elder is an example of the technique. As is often the case, necessity was the mother of this invention. The lack of intense opaque pigments meant that artists desirous of bright coloring, must take advantage of the optical properties of transparent pigments to achieve their goal.

As artistic practice evolved and more opaque colors were introduced this function of the grisaille changed as well. Baroque painters like Velazquez and Titian employed orange and red ground for the purpose of modeling flesh by varying the opacity of their lights and darks. The effect of the red ground is masterfully employed in Velazquez's Vulcan's Forge, where many of the warm notes in the flesh are nothing more than the ground showing through his brushwork. His contemporaries would see his work and exclaim: "It is made of nothing... but there it is!"

My use of a grisaille will be similar to this last example. Most of the painting will be opaque, but especially in the flesh, this underlying warmth will give the painting more vigor. I use raw umber to draw out the composition, and to model the values in the shadows. As cool color, the umber allows me to develop the temperature relationships in the flesh and establish the greys, greens, and blues that often show up in shadows on the human form.