Verdaccio
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Verdaccio is a style of underpainting, which uses green-grey colours to establish values for later layers of paint. The technique is renowned for being particularly effective when painting flesh tones. As such, it was popular amongst Renaissance artists, and Leonardo da Vinci used verdaccio underpainting in his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa.
According to American born Naturalist / Realist Painter, Adrian Gottlieb, in order accomplish this southern Renaissance style of underpainting, you'll need two ranges of color; one green, and one a bit pinker.
"The colors on your palette will be chrome green oxide, sinopia (a redish-brown earth color used in painting and fresco), lead white and ivory black. All values are around two or three steps higher than in nature. This insures that the underpainting will drive up the luminiosity of the colors that are laid on top.
Shadows are made of green, red, and black if necessary. Midtones are of the green range, and lights are of the pink range."
It has been Gottlieb's experience that "other reds and greens are not as effective for this method. There is a brilliance to sinopia and chrome green oxide that others can't seem to match quite as well." He uses this method particularly in paintings of women and very complicated passages, especially hands.
"Glazing over Verdaccio is actually quite simple. Since the color being left out in the underpainting is yellow-orange, a glaze of varying mixtures of yellow ochre and genuine rose madder are usually all that is called for."
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