Reinforcing Lights and Darks

An often neglected “stage” in a painting is restating lights and darks. Paintings often start well, particularly when they are following a value study: clear, maybe even monochrome darks contrast with lights. Forms are blocked and connected, colour and context added, details and adjustments made. Then suddenly, it’s gone all muddy! Or perhaps it very nearly works, but looks lifeless. What once looked really dark, or light, looks less so now, essentially because there is so much more going on. It’s about contrast, or relative value. It doesn’t matter a whit how dark or light something is when it blends into the surrounding area.

The solution is of course, quite simple: make the darkest dark even darker and the lightest light, lighter. This is often termed “restating”. Two things are going on here: when initially applied, what looks very dark is often not as dark as you think…because of the stark surroundings – and now the opposite is true, given it’s been surrounded by mid-tone paint.

Typical areas to look for intense darks include: corners of the mouth, upper eyelid, top of the nostril, hair line, ear. Then, correspondingly for highlights: cheek, nose, lower lip, chin and reflections on the hair.

I’m sometimes asked what’s more important, the lights or the darks? Well, I think TV’s Bob Ross got it right when he said: “you have to have the dark in order to show the light.” A dab of pure dark here and there, I’d say, a cool blue-black.

Glazing and varnishing

Glazing and varnishing are separate and distinct processes, glazing being part of the paint surface and varnishing a separate and removable layer – not part of the painting itself. The terms have become interchangeable as final finishing processes, however with oil, there are important differences.

Now that you are relishing plopping your portrait into a frame, there are a couple of potential reasons to consider glazing:

1. To even up the finish and bring the surface together. Integrating and harmonizing can be accomplished with your choice of a mat or gloss surface finish.
2. To adjust the colour, adding a tint into the glaze: over the complete painting or just over a specific area, perhaps just altering the prominence, settling an area back into the canvas (cool) or bring out a feature (warm).
3. To protect and seal – by adding paint, you are separating the form from the surface with a sealant – less critical these days and more appropriately performed with a removable varnish.

In this  video, I review how I generally apply the above and finish my oil portraits:

Exercise

1. Review a selection of your portraits in both paint and dry media for consistent and decisive treatment of darkest darks and lightest lights. Find 5 places to intensify the darks and 3 places to sparkle highlights.
2. Look at your paintings obliquely and assess the surface finish, applying a final finish, if required.
3. Give yourself a big pat on the back for your series of Expressive Portraits!