Black and white Lilies

My boyfriend asked me not to proceed to the colour layer as he liked it a lot as soon as I reached the final stage of the grisaille.

This was just a little study on cardboard I did in 2018 (my most prolific year to date), and as such was quite rough at the edges, but he wanted it - it was the only painting he asked for, so it became his. It is of course still hanging on his shelf, over his desk.

As you can see from the below, I started with a really rough outline in red pencil (as that was the desired predominant colour of the painting I had in mind for the end) and then applying colour in an almost mono-chromatic fashion. Here I used:

• lamp black, cadmium yellow hue, flake white

• my medium was very lean (5 parts turpentine, 1 part Damar varnish, 1 part linseed oil)

The finished first layer looked like this:

For the second layer (below) I changed my pallette and I only used Titanium White and Paynes Grey

My medium here was "medium" (2 parts turpentine, 2 parts Damar varnish, 1 part linseed oil).

Notice that I lay down the colour quite thin, and you can see very well the tones of the first layer coming through:

At this point, as mentioned, we decided to leave it in black and white, but I wanted to add more depth and needed to work a bit more on the shadows and highlights.

I left my pallet as per above, but changed the medium.

The "fat" medium I used is made of 2 parts turpentine, 1 part Damar varnish, 2 parts linseed oil.

If you look carefully below, you can see this third layer (the final of the Grisaille) half way through:

Once completed, I added the dots on the petals.