The Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa has been described as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world.” I could add “the most glazed” too. Leonardo used his famous “Sfumato” (literally smoky) technique to soften and blend edges with a milky glaze. That’s why there’s the enigmatic smile (on this and other Leonardos). You can’t quite pin it down.
Leonardo painted Mona Lisa, or should I say Lisa Gherardini (most likely anyway), in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. He started with a neutral gray or brown underpainting, applying his colors in layer after layer of transparent glazes on top. It’s believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1517 – plenty of time for Leonardo to continue fiddling with that smile. He was renowned for not completing paintings, or anything else for that matter. For some reason or another, it stayed with him in his studio and was never delivered.
The Mona Lisa is of course the most famous of all glazed paintings. When you peel away all the layers of mystique, parodies, bullet proof glass, years of yellowed varnish you get Lenonardo’s key technique: glazing.
As a footnote, the Mona Lisa was one of the first portraits to depict the sitter in front of an imaginary landscape and Leonardo was one of the first painters to use aerial perspective. Behind her, a vast landscape recedes to strange surreal mountains. I have never looked at a Yes album cover the same way again (OK, I’m showing my age).
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 nearly almost 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, if it blends into the surrounding area.
The solution is of course, quite simple: make the darkest dark even darker and the lightest lights 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 surrounding – 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 in 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
Traditionally, glazing and varnishing were separate and distinct processes, glazing being part of the paint surface and varnishing a separate and removable layer – not part of the painting itself. With acrylics, the terms have become interchangeable as a final finishing process using acrylic mediums.
Now that you are relishing plopping your portrait into a frame, there are a few potential reasons to consider glazing or varnishing:
- To even up the finish, bring the surface together, integrate and harmonize – and this can be accomplished with your choice of a matte or gloss surface finish.
- To adjust the colour by 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 bringing out a feature (warm).
- To protect and seal – by adding paint, you are separating the form from the surface with a sealant (probably less critical these days).
The following videos review the general process:
Care of watercolours
So we come to the end of the course and I thought it useful to include some information on looking after your watercolours. There are of course many good references on the subject.
Flattening
I do press flat when finished. I dampen on the back, place between a few blank sheets of acid-free paper or in a watercolour pad and then sandwich between plates of flat, hard surface (glass, melamine or similar) and compress by weighting with books overnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-nr9DULRaA
Some watercolourists will gently iron their work: I’ve tried it, but it still scares me.
Tearing rather than cutting
Watercolour paper tears along the weave, with due care, of course. The result is a nice “Deckled” edge which looks great as a feature. The procedure I use is to carefully tear against a good steel ruler pressing hard supported on a flat surface. The following video shows how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pck66N_O2nc
The following approach should work too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaG6zUVpxJ8
https://www.paintingwithwatercolors.com/how-to-frame-a-watercolor-painting/
Exercise
- Review a selection of your portraits – 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 that highlight.
- Look at your paintings obliquely and assess the surface finish, allying a final finish, if required, in line with the above video. Should you like everything you see – time for one last portrait!
- Look through your coursework and select a couple of paintings to share with the group – we’ll be having our own Zoom gallery tour next week!