Grisaille and Underpainting

A grisaille is an underpainting done in a single neutral, usually grey, sometimes umber. You paint the whole image in value first, light to dark, with no color decisions to make. When it dries, you glaze or scumble color on top. The reason is plain. Settle the drawing and the values while they are still cheap to change, then color has somewhere solid to land.

That is the whole idea. Everything below is how to do it, which version to use, and when to skip it entirely.

What grisaille is, and the cousins people confuse it with

Grisaille is a monochrome underpainting in grey, from the French gris. The confusion starts because three close relatives get used as if they were the same thing, and they are not.

An imprimatura is a thin colored stain over the ground, usually an earth tone like raw umber or burnt sienna. It is a tinted surface to work over, not a worked-out value structure. A dead layer, or dead coloring, is a closed grisaille where muted color goes down but the value and saturation are held back, so the subject still reads grey. And verdaccio is the green-toned version, born in fresco and egg tempera, used mostly under flesh because the green sits against warm skin and keeps it from going pink.

The technique is old and the names are worth knowing, because a painter telling you to do an underpainting might mean any of the four. Jan van Eyck painted the outer panels of the Ghent Altarpiece in grisaille to imitate carved stone. Rubens used grisaille to plan large compositions, and some of those plans survive as paintings in their own right. When someone says the old masters underpainted, this is the family they are pointing at. Titian made some of the first opaque tonal underpaintings, and you can see how he built a painting on his page.

Why paint in one color before painting in many

Painting in a single color first takes one of the two hardest problems off the table so you can actually solve the other. Value and color are separate jobs. Trying to nail both in the first pass is how most paintings go muddy.

When the only variable is value, you can shove the drawing around without guilt. Move a shadow, lift a highlight, darken the whole background a step to see if the figure reads better against it. None of it costs you a color mixture you spent ten minutes matching. There is a material reason it works in oil too. Raw umber is semi-transparent and dries fast, often in a day or two, so a lean umber layer is dry and ready to build on before the week is out. That fits the fat-over-lean rule. The lean, fast-drying layer goes down first, the oilier color layers go on top, and the film stays stable instead of cracking later.

Is it necessary? No. Plenty of strong painting skips it. But if a piece is fighting you on drawing and values at the same time, splitting the work in two is the cheapest fix there is.

How to build a grisaille, step by step

Tone the surface, draw, build your values out from the midtone, let it dry, then glaze color over the top. Five moves, and the order matters more than the brand of paint.

First, kill the white. Stain the panel or canvas to a middle neutral so you are not judging every value against a glaring white ground. Working on a midtone, a true light reads as light and a true dark reads as dark, because you can go both directions from where you started.

Then place the drawing. Locate everything before you render anything. I treat this like the start of any painting, location first, then form and nuance. If the shapes are in the right place, you can come back and make sense of them. If they are in the wrong place, no amount of beautiful rendering saves it.

Now build value. Block the big shadow masses, then work toward the lights, or work down from the lights into the darks. Either direction is fine. What matters is that you are reading the whole field, not polishing one eye while the rest of the head is still a flat shape. Keep it lean. A little medium, thin paint, nothing you cannot scrape back.

Let it dry. This is the unglamorous part people skip, and skipping it is why their color layer lifts the grisaille and turns to mud. With raw umber you are usually waiting a day or two. With a heavier black-and-white grisaille, longer.

Then color goes on top, glazed thin and transparent so the value structure underneath does the heavy lifting. The grisaille is the skeleton. Color is the skin.

Which underpainting to use, and when to skip it

Match the underpainting to what the painting needs, not to a rule. A neutral grey grisaille gives you the most honest read on value, which matters when color accuracy is the whole point. An umber imprimatura is faster and lays a warm note under everything, which is why landscape and portrait painters reach for it. Skip the underpainting entirely when you are painting wet into wet in one sitting.

That last case is worth saying plainly. If you are working alla prima, finishing while the paint is wet, an underpainting is not just unnecessary, it gets in the way. The two approaches answer different questions. One asks you to plan in layers. The other asks you to commit in the moment. Knowing which painting you are making is part of knowing yourself as a painter, which is the longer project underneath all of this. More on that in how to develop your own painting style.

The thing that quietly wastes the whole layer

The most common way to waste a grisaille is to render it like a finished drawing, then bury all that work under opaque color. An underpainting only earns its keep if the layers on top let it show through.

This is causality, the way I think about lead white. Lead white is a semi-transparent white, so when it goes over a warm passage it does not dry brilliant white. It cools the color and you still see the warmth underneath, and the two make a third thing. Glazing color over a grisaille works the same way. The grey you see through a thin layer of transparent red is not the red you squeezed from the tube, and it is not the grey either. It is what they make together. If you cover the grisaille completely with thick opaque paint, you threw away the layer you spent a day building. Lay the color so the value beneath keeps doing its job.

Is any of this easy? No. Simplicity rarely is. A clean grisaille looks easy precisely because someone took the time to find the simple version of a complicated head. That time is the cost. If the result is worth it to you, it is worth it.

If you want to know which way of working actually fits you, the layered planner or the direct painter, the Artist Reading is built to surface that. And the workshop that teaches this as a process rather than a recipe opens enrollment soon. You can join the waitlist.

A good grisaille disappears. You only notice the head it was holding up.

FAQ

What palette did the old masters use for a grisaille? Most often a single earth or black plus lead white. Raw umber was a favorite because it is semi-transparent and dries in a day or two. Some worked in ivory or bone black with white for a cooler grey. Van Eyck and Rubens both used grisaille, Van Eyck to imitate stone sculpture and Rubens to plan compositions.

Can you do the grisaille in acrylic and paint oil on top? Yes, and it is a common shortcut. An acrylic underpainting dries in minutes instead of days, so you can start glazing oil the same session. The rule only runs one way. Oil over acrylic is fine. Acrylic over oil is not, because it will not bond.

How long should an oil grisaille dry before you glaze? With a lean raw umber layer, usually a day or two. Thicker paint or black and white can take a week or more. The test is simple. If the underpainting lifts when you drag a loaded brush across it, it is not ready.

Do you actually need an underpainting to paint well? No. It depends on the painting. An underpainting splits the drawing-and-value problem from the color problem, which helps on complex pieces. Direct, wet-into-wet painting skips it on purpose. Neither is more correct.