Strip away the final layers of many old master paintings and you’d find a ghostly, monochrome image underneath, already fully composed in light and shadow. That’s underpainting, the quiet foundation most viewers never see but every finished painting depends on.
Underpainting at a glance
- Underpainting is an early, usually monochrome layer that establishes the values, or light and dark, of a composition.
- It is typically painted in muted tones like gray, brown or green before any full color is added.
- Renaissance and Baroque painters relied on it to plan complex compositions before committing to expensive pigments.
- Glazes and color are then built up over the dried underpainting, letting the values beneath show through.
- Many contemporary painters still use a simplified version, often called a “block-in,” for the same reason.
Underpainting in Questions and Answers
What is underpainting in art?
Underpainting is an early stage of a painting, usually done in a single muted color or a limited palette, that establishes the composition’s values, or how light and dark different areas should be, before any final color is applied. It functions as a roadmap for everything painted over it.
Why did old master painters use underpainting?
Pigments in earlier centuries were expensive and often unstable, so painters worked out the composition, lighting and proportions in an inexpensive monochrome layer first, catching and fixing mistakes before committing to costly color. It also let them plan complex, multi-figure scenes with confidence before a single stroke of final color went down.
What is grisaille, and how does it relate to underpainting?
Grisaille is a painting technique using only shades of gray, and it is one of the most common forms of underpainting, giving painters a full range of values to work with before glazes of color are added on top. Some painters also used grisaille as a finished technique in its own right, particularly to imitate sculpture.
What colors were commonly used for underpainting?
Gray, brown (sometimes called verdaccio when mixed with a greenish tone) and a muted green called terre verte were all popular underpainting colors historically. Green underpainting was especially common for flesh tones, since a thin warm glaze over it produces a naturally lifelike skin color.
Do contemporary painters still use underpainting?
Yes, though it is often simpler than the historical method, commonly called a “block-in” or “value study” done directly on the canvas in one or two tones before the full-color painting begins. Many painting instructors still teach it as a foundational step, since it separates the problem of values from the problem of color.
Can you see underpainting in a finished painting?
Not usually with the naked eye, since later layers of paint and glaze typically cover it completely, but conservators can reveal it using infrared reflectography, a scanning technique that sees through the top layers of paint. These scans have uncovered fascinating changes some old masters made between their underpainting and the finished composition.
Planning Before Painting
Before oil paint, tempera painters were already using monochrome under-layers to work out modeling and shadow. As oil painting matured through the Renaissance, the technique became more systematic, with workshops developing standard underpainting colors for different subjects, a gray-brown mix for general values, a green tone specifically for flesh, each one chosen to interact predictably with the color glazes that would follow.
This layered approach let painters separate two hard problems, getting the composition’s light and shadow right, and getting its color right, into two more manageable stages instead of tackling both at once.
How Underpainting and Glazing Work Together
Underpainting and glazing are two halves of the same historical process. The underpainting establishes value, essentially a black-and-white version of the final image, and the glazes that follow introduce transparent color that lets those values show through, shifting a plain gray shadow into a warm, believable shadow on skin or fabric.
Rembrandt’s portraits show this relationship clearly: careful underlying structure gives his lighting its convincing solidity, while his glazes and impasto add the color and texture that make the final image feel alive.
What Scans Reveal
Modern conservation technology has let art historians see underpaintings that have been hidden for centuries. Infrared reflectography and X-ray imaging have revealed changed poses, moved figures and entirely different early compositions beneath finished paintings by artists including Vermeer and Rembrandt, offering a rare window into how these painters actually worked and revised their ideas.
Trying Underpainting Today
A simple way to start is to block in a composition using a single diluted color, working out the darkest and lightest areas before introducing any other hue. Once that block-in is dry, color can be layered on top with more confidence, since the difficult decisions about value have already been made.
Underpainting: Quick Facts
- Purpose plan composition and values before adding color.
- Common colors gray, brown, green (terre verte).
- Grayscale version grisaille.
- Paired technique glazing, applied on top once dry.
- How it’s found today infrared and X-ray imaging by conservators.
Artists to Know
- Rembrandt built convincing light and shadow from a careful underlying structure before adding glazes and impasto.
- Johannes Vermeer X-ray studies of his work have revealed hidden compositional changes beneath the finished paint.
In the WooArts Collection
Keep exploring: Glazing in Oil Painting · Rembrandt · Johannes Vermeer
Details on grisaille and historical underpainting practice were checked against museum and Britannica references.