Should You Oil Paint Dark to Light, or the Other Way Around?

Start with the darks and work into the lights. Not because a rule says so, but because of how oil paint behaves: lighter colors need more white, more white makes the paint thicker, and thick paint covers what’s under it. Paint light-first and you end up with a weak, dyed-looking picture instead of a painted one.

One of the most basic principles of oil painting is to keep your darks thin and your lights thick. Unfortunately, people follow it without knowing why, and it turns into a “law” in their head they’re scared to break for fear they aren’t “painting right.” So let me walk through what it actually means and how to use it.

First, what most people mean when a teacher says “paint dark to light”: when you paint an object like an apple, it isn’t flat — it’s round, it has depth. You can’t outline an apple, mix one apple-red, fill it in, and get something that looks round. You need the darker shadow red and the lighter red. That range of dark to light across the form is the “dark and light” in the saying. The basic premise is to put the shadow (darker) parts in first, then the lighter colors after.

Why paint dark to light?

The reason comes down to white paint.

White is the painter’s substitute for light. To paint lighter colors you use white — and as a rule, the lighter the color, the more white. The more white, the thicker the paint, and the more it covers what’s underneath.

If you paint dark to light with wet paint, you have to lay the light on thickly to cover the dark, and with a light touch so you don’t drag up the wet dark underneath and contaminate your mixture. If you paint dark to light with dry paint (the dark layer already dried), you won’t contaminate the light, but you’d still be going thicker to cover.

Look at the robe on the Van Dyck. Where the light hits the subject’s far shoulder there’s a bright white area painted right on top of the slightly darker “mass color” of the robe. It’s a pasty white, applied like putty — thick, so real light in the room reflects off it, and so the light tone doesn’t get contaminated by the darker color beneath.

1. The shadow areas on the face are dark, so little white is in the mixture — and the thick lead white the old masters used isn’t there, so the paint stays thin.
2. Shadows don’t show much detail, so they can be flatter, without texture — again, no need for thick paint.
3. The lightest areas — the furrowed brow, the highlight on the lips, the light mark on the robe — are the thickest paint in the whole picture, putty-like, heavy with white, going right over the darker colors underneath.

If you worked the other way — light thin first, then darks thick — you’d get pasty darks that are almost impossible to apply, or you’d be forced into a watercolor technique, and the painting would look “dyed” instead of painted. One of the defining qualities of an oil painting is that the paint has body and covers what’s under it.

Side note: you can use a watercolor-type technique with oils — glazing, veiling — but that comes after you’ve built the picture with more opaque paint. It’s more common than you’d think.

Do you paint the whole object dark and then gradually lighter?

No. You don’t paint the shadow color over the entire apple and then pile lights on top of that wet shadow. But as you mix on the palette, going from your dark mixtures to your light mixtures, the paint naturally gets thicker because you’re adding white. So you almost don’t have to try to keep darks thin and lights thick — it should happen automatically.

Dark to light in landscapes

The darker parts of nearly everything went in first, with the lights built up gradually — the lighter the passage, the thicker the paint, to cover what was beneath.

The lights of the sky meant more white than the darker sky. The light on the trees meant going lighter and thicker over the dark green shadow masses. The sunlit spots on the building are heavily bodied paint, thick enough to cover the thinner, darker structure underneath.

So how do you apply “dark to light”?

It’s all about the order. Where do I start on the apple? Where on this portrait of Jim’s head do I begin?

The answer: the darks. Not the darkest darks — I’ve never seen evidence the old masters simply painted from the single darkest tone to the lightest. If your apple has a shadow area (it does), start on the shadow side and carry the modeling across to the light, ending with the lightest lights and the highlight. Same with a head. Whatever the shadow situation is, the nature of your materials makes it easier to start dark and move into light.

The other meaning of “painting dark to light”

This is probably where the saying actually originated. The old masters didn’t paint on a white ground. The base was likely a bright white — smart — but before painting the picture they toned that ground, usually brown. (You’ll hear this layer called an imprimatura, which is just a fancier-sounding non-English word for it — the way a grey underpainting gets called a grisaille, French for “greys.”)

If you’ve had formal art instruction, you’ve probably met the teacher who loves those non-English terms like they’re revealing a mystical secret: “We’ll start with our im-pree-ma-TOOOO-ra and construct a gree-ZYE. The traditional gree-ZYE is black and white, and of course the traditional gree-ZYE is what we’re after.”

On a toned canvas you paint the underlayers dark to light, but the difference is you’re bringing the painting out of the dark that’s already there. Picture drawing with chalk on a blackboard.

All that brown is the bare canvas — dark, though not the darkest dark. Titian brings the figures out of it using white as an optical grey; the lighter he wants to go, the thicker he paints to cover the brown. Some parts of the figures are barely covered at all — the toning layer itself is doing the work. You couldn’t do this on a white canvas.

Once you understand the why of the procedure, you can use it — and adapt it to your own paintings.

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I teach the full version of this — optical greys, tonal transitions from paint thickness alone — inside the members’ area of the school. If you want the free lessons, get on the list.