Hopper did his underpaintings in local colour in order to lay the solid colour ground for the many layers of scumbling to follow. His oral history interview states that he does nothing but use paint and turpentine for the underpainting, slowly adding more and more paint with each layer.
Here’s my underpainting!
My biggest challenge was figuring out just how to get as close to local colour as possible without using any white! It’s *so* hard to mix greys with pure solvent and pigment without white. I resigned to it being a solid 4/10 and looked forward to moving on to the next stage.
Hooray for cracking open the flake white!
*breathes a slight sigh of relief*
The tones and their temperatures are still off, but I think I’m starting to work the tonal relationships a little closer during each session. I’m going to need to lay down many more-a-layer to get this thing to where it needs to be if I have any hope of being a good art thief.
I really needed to warm up that mid section. Being a bit daft and committing the cardinal sin of not being fully set on what my palette was going to be, I used some really dumb choices of pigment (alizarin crimson!), when I should have used an umber. Lesson learned. The alizarin wasn’t totally lost though, because there are definitely hints peeking through in the original.
I am not accustomed to using linseed oil; so this stage of the painting was a really nice opportunity to learn to use it. I find that I don’t need to use more than a drop or two to paint in the style of Hopper, as any more turns a scumble in to a slurry. The beauty of scumbling is in using the texture of the canvas and paint that came before it, in order to layer new paint whilst allowing the work that came before it to peek through.
I had to be careful to not go too sharp too soon. Although Hopper’s work is known for its distinctive lines; one must be mindful to leave this definition until very last in order to not build up a lump of paint where edges meet.
In order to achieve the final texture on the white wall, I rubbed back in to it with solvent. While I hadn’t read about Hopper doing this anywhere, he was a practical sort of guy (and hated washing his brushes during painting, just like me!), so I ran with it.
I was given some final feedback from my teacher, to make the couch more orange, and to yellow-up the sun-lit part of the floor. My next post will show the finished painting with those adjustments, as well as a side-by-side progression of the piece to completion.