In Which I Tackle da Vinci

This post will be solely about oil painting, and specifically about copying an angel painted by Leonardo da Vinci.  You see, when I decide to tackle something new, I tend not to make it easy on myself.  Perhaps this is not the best strategy, but once in a while it works out just fine.

The new thing (sort of) is water-mixable oil paints.  These have been around for a few decades now, and I dimly recall trying them in the early 1990s.  I hated them, though I don't remember clearly why. Recently, I tried using traditional oils with their troublesome solvents, which made me unhappy, too.  But then I heard some folks claim that water-mixable oils had improved greatly, so I opted to give them another try, with Holbein Duo Aqua paints.

Boy howdy, were those folks right!

What I tested them out on was an angel from this painting, da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks

Here's the close-up of the angel figure that I worked from:

Here I'm starting an underpainting after drawing the figure on an 11x14" hardboard panel (that I applied a layer of gesso to).

The drawing is not totally accurate but then, who can copy da Vinci?  The point was not to slavishly copy the figure, but to test out the oil paint by using traditional oil techniques, and who better to represent those than Leonardo?  

So one traditional oil painting technique is the underpainting, in which one figures out the range of light/dark values in the piece by rendering it in monochrome.  Most often this is done with grays or browns.  I chose to use burnt umber.

I liked the way the paint handled -- it blended easily with just water for thinning, though Holbein does make quite a few mediums to be used expressly with its water-mixable oils.  These can be added to increase transparency, glossiness, and/or ease of blending.  I've ordered some to try out next time.

Traditional oils take a long time to dry, but these water-mixable ones dry more quickly, and after just 24 hours, the underpainting was ready for color layers. I had not purchased many colors -- just primary red, yellow, blue, and two browns (burnt umber and burnt sienna), and white.  From these one ought to be able to make pretty much any color.  Luckily, the original painting was not all that colorful (at least, not the angel), so it wasn't difficult to mix what I needed.

I had the most trouble with the hair.  Da Vinci is known for his love of painting curls, and they were always incredibly complex in terms of shape and lighting, and there was no way I could match his skill in rendering them.  I opted to aim more for suggestion than detail.

The next day, a disaster occurred!  I tried to mix the facial colors by using the traditional method, which involves red + yellow + white for lighter values, with a touch of blue to tone down the vividness, and red + yellow + just a little blue for darker values.  The mixes looked fine on the palette but when I applied them to the painting, they looked awful.  By the time I realized how much I hated the colors, I'd covered the whole face.  Aiiee!

I wound up lifting off that paint layer with paper towels.  The dampness of the paint and the subsequent harsh removal adversely affected the underpainting, and I lost quite a bit of the facial features, which I then had to reconstruct to the best of my ability.  The portrait now strayed farther from da Vinci's, but I wasn't unhappy with it -- in fact, I rather liked how the angel looked slightly more androgynous in my version.  Angels are, after all, supposed to be genderless, spiritual beings, and this seemed quite appropriate.  

Here is the newer, reconstructed face, with new color added using my own mixture of burnt umber, burnt sienna, and white:

Another traditional technique I tried out was sfumato, which was pretty much invented by da Vinci.  This is a blending of edges -- a softening of the changes in value from one plane to another.  For this I used a mop brush, which is a full and fluffy brush that looks like the ones some people use to apply makeup foundation/powder.  It worked brilliantly, and I was able to get quite subtle gradations in value across the face.

All in all, I'm extremely impressed with these paints.  I suspect the surface also had a lot to do with my success -- I've not been happy painting on canvas in the past, as I don't like the texture showing through.  This hardboard, manufactured by Richeson, is very smooth.  I loved how easily the paint glided onto this surface, and how smoothly the paint blended.  A very enjoyable exercise!  

Here is the finished piece:

Now I just need to figure out what to paint next....Hm.....

Have a lovely week out there, everyone!