"Market Day" was an amazing project to work on. The painting was done in the "grisaille" technique. Using only black and white oil paint, I mixed an underpainting of neutral gray and completely covered the canvas. After transferring my sketch to the gray canvas, I painted only black and white to establish value control and the structure of the portrait.
After letting the grisaille painting dry for about 10 days, I applied the first of three glazes– cadmium yellow mixed with refined linseed oil.
After another week of drying, a magenta glaze is applied and the colors begin to come alive.
Finally, a Cerulean blue glaze is applied and local (natural) colors are added to lighten her skin tones, her scarf, and her hands cradling the coffee cup.
As a result of this grisaille process, there is a luminosity to the finished painting that I love.
"Grisaille is a term from the French word 'gris' meaning gray. Working through the process of applying the glazes, the painting seemed to come to life. In fact, the final painting is anything but gray - it has a luminosity that I love."
The reference photo
I found this photo online of a woman in a market. I really liked the detail of the grapes in the basket and on her scarf. Using this photo for reference, I sketched it onto my gray underpainted gray canvas.
Adding black and white
Here I've painted the darkest darks of black and gray to give structure to the painting. Then I added white highlights and lighter areas of gray.
I deliberately left out the surrounding visual "noise" of the reference photo, focusing on the portrait by choice.
Glazing cadmium yellow
The first glaze is cadmium yellow, thinned way down to a mere tint with refined linseed oil. You can see the yellow hue on the left side of the painting on the closest basket of grapes where I began to paint over the dried black and white painting.
Finishing the glazes
In this photo you can see how adding the red and blue glazes really brought the grisaille to life.
The whole process reminds me of four color CYMK printing where cyan, magenta, yellow and black combine to create "all" colors.