I seem to have become seriously lazy with blogging for a while now. I blame unemployment. I pretty much don’t get anything else done either, except for my daily routines. I love routines, my whole life is about striving to make it as routine as possible. That means it takes a lot of effort to do anything that isn’t quotidian for me.

Without further ado, may I present my fairly recent painting:

I made this during the autumn semester of my painting course. I didn’t plan on it at all, it just happened while I was waiting for Amoena’s portrait to dry so I could finish it. With oil painting it is basically a must to have several projects underway at the same time, or you will have to take irritating breaks from painting altogether.

The male was supposed to look like a photographer whose work I’ve been admiring for a couple years now, but it doesn’t look like him at all, hence no reference picture. The female on the other hand was based on Noomi Rapace, the actress from the Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She’s really stunning. I think I may have to paint her another time and make a real effort to try and make her look exactly right.

For once though, the characters were not the main point about the painting. I wanted to create something colorful very quickly, so I speed-painted it within an hour. But at the time, Tuomo the professional painter and painting instructor had just introduced a new painting technique to us novices. It’s called glaze, or lasuuri in Finnish. It was the perfect opportunity to try this new and slightly intimidating technique on a painting that I didn’t feel very passionate about.

A glaze in oil painting means that you choose a transparent kind of color that isn’t too rich in pigment – titanium white is a no-no, but lemon yellow or viridian green, much better. You thin the paint with water or turpentine, depending on whether you use water-soluble oils or not. I do, which means I can thin my paint with water without the hassle of turpentine. The paint should be very thin, almost like water colors.

Then you apply the extremely thin and flowing paint on the whole surface of the painting, preferably with a large brush so you can avoid too many brush marks. The point of a glaze is that you shouldn’t be able to notice it. It is simply a layer of color with very little pigment, but enough so that when light reflects from it, the other colors in the painting will get a different hue. You can add several layers of glaze as long as you let the layers dry in between so you can achieve a wonderful effect of depth to the painting.

There’s only one layer of glaze in my painting: I used ultramarine blue on the left just trying it out, but went with lemon yellow for the rest. The imprimatura color is a rosy pink, but it looks more earthy after applying the yellow glaze, and bluish purple on the left, aptly demonstrating the striking difference that a glaze can make. The two faces really seem to pop out from the background – they look like they are floating in the middle of nowhere. The effect is so cool that I am definitely using it more from now on, probably for every painting.

There is one difficulty with a glaze, however. If you do not know your color theory through and through, it can be difficult to predict how the hue of the background color will change from the glaze. I have spent a fair amount of time pondering on which color I should choose for the glaze with my latest painting in progress.

In the end, however, I have never felt like an unexpected color change actually does any harm to a painting. I have no preconceptions of what colors my painting should have or what color my subject-matter should be. I simply go with the flow, using colors that please my eye. That may sound like a cop out, but the truth is I can’t bring myself to be too determinate about colors. As long as the colors work well together within the painting itself, I don’t care if a face of a character ends up being green, pink or blue, or any other color for that matter.