If painting in monochrome seems a strange thing to do given all the paint colours available to us, think for a moment about how beautiful and powerful black-and-white or sepia photographs can be. Likewise paintings done with black ink only. We don’t feel a lack of colour when we look at these, yet when thinking about painting with only one colour our instinct is often to feel that we’re missing out somehow.
- Only one colour to deal with, so you really get to know its characteristics and what it does (opacity, transparency, tinting strength).
- Helps you focus on tone without the distraction of colour. Reminds you that less is often more: tone is often the solution to a problematic painting rather than colour.
- Encourages patience and persistence (because you can’t distract the viewer with colour and have to fix things).
- No wasted paint from colour-mixing mistakes.
- You’ve only one brush to wash (unless you’ve used various sizes).
- You can add the art term “Grisaille” into your vocabulary.
- Gives you the chance to pretend you’re Rembrandt, working in dark moody browns.
Remember:
- Monochrome doesn’t mean it has to be a tube colour, you can mix a colour.
- Consider using a coloured ground (in a light tone) rather than working on white.
- Transparent pigments are more versatile than opaque for this.
- Using the white of the canvas/paper gives a different result than adding white paint.
- Zinc white is more transparent than titanium white (which is a very opaque pigment).
Discovering how much can be achieved with only one colour is a step on the journey to discovering the joys of working with a limited palette. Using fewer colours but ones that you know intimately will produce better paintings than using lots of colours. It adds a cohesion as the colours work with one another across the whole composition.