Paint from Darks to Whites 

Artists Paint Oil Colour Dark to White Title underline

All artists make mistakes, including experienced, professional artists.  Professionals get around this by approaching their portraits in such a way that when they paint mistakes it doesn’t matter.  They follow a kind of insurance policy approach to painting if you like. This website is full of examples of how they do it and ‘Paint from Darks to Whites’ is one of them.   
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We saw in Tone, Transparency and Saturation that although a fully saturated Lemon yellow and a Cadmium yellow with a touch of white may have the same tone, the former is transparent while the latter is opaque.  You will also find that once you have added white paint to another pigment it is extremely difficult to correct it and make that area of your portrait darker again.  Only a touch of white oil paint added to a dark colour will lighten it, but you have to add a lot of a dark colour to a whitened paint mixture to darken it again.  So, once you have put white on to your portrait painting, that area will be opaque and it will be pale and the only thing you can do to correct that is to wipe it all right off with thinner or, if you want to darken it, you may get away with holding a fully loaded brush virtually parallel to the canvas surface and applying a really thick coat of the dark with one stroke to cover it up (see Surfaces, Brushes and Brushstrokes).  The latter is fine if you are in the final stages of a portrait, but if you are not it may well create more problems than it solves because the paint will be very thick now and painting from ‘thin to thick’ or ‘lean to fat’ is always easier.  

A further property of white oil paint that separates it from some of the others is that it has a slow drying time.  Titanium white is particularly slow, Flake white paint is a bit quicker but both take of the order of days to weeks to become touch dry.  The earth colours (e.g. Umbers, Ochres and Siennas), and others (e.g. indigo), if applied reasonably thinly, will be touch dry for a second portrait sitting by the next day.  So you could, if you wanted to, apply a glaze the next day.  Depending on how you like to work, this may be another reason for working from darks to whites 

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Summary

You will often hear artists say, in error, that this painting rule is ‘Dark to Light’, but paint ‘Dark to White’ or even paint ‘Anything to White’ is really more accurate.  You could, for example, quite reasonalby block in with a light toned yellow ochre and then go into that with a dark colour such as an indigo or a French ultramarine.  Although I have never done it I can conceive that one may, perfectly reasonably, decide early on to keep a particular area pale and thus apply a coat of wet white to it to prevent it getting too dark.  However, if you are not yet sure how your portrait is going to pan out, then save the whites and anything containing any white for towards the end when you’ve found your bearings.

With that in mind it is useful to know which ready mixed paints on the market already have white in them.  Off the top of my head Naples yellow is an obvious and popular one, as are most that are marketed as ‘flesh tone’ which is one of the reasons I would not recommend using them.  More subtly my Vermillion paint, I notice, has some in it too.
 

Copyright Fiona Holt 2010 
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