We finished the sketch yesterday so today I want to start the underpainting. But first here's a little tale I'm telling on myself.
I actually went through 7 years of college painting courses (4 undergraduate and 3 years more to get my Masters) and though I learned a lot, none of my teachers taught me UNDERPAINTING. As a result, one of the most frustrating things to me (and now a pet peeve of mine) was to paint a painting and have raw canvas show through. Especially as I painted more impressionistically, there were always brush strokes that didn't completely cover the canvas or had a dry brush effect and I was literally trying to fill in the "gaps" after the painting was completed. Years later I was working in the casinos of all places when a fellow blackjack dealer showed me some of her artwork and started talking about what she had done in the underpainting. Underpainting? It was the first time I had ever heard the word and as she explained its' simplicity I seriously felt like a fool. Then I felt kinda gypped that no one ever taught me anything about it for my artwork. I can't imagine how much further I would have been in the success of my pieces if I had been using underpaintings for the past 20 years. Don't let that happen to you. Go to all the seminars, talk to all your artist friends, read all the how-to books, ask questions, look at artwork up close and take all the classes you can until you find your artistic style and then still keep your mind open to more.
OK, lecture over. We're going to start our underpainting. Simply stated, an underpainting is a painting you put down first (in a wash or opaque style - it does't matter, you are going to paint over it later anyway). It's a painting UNDER the final painting. The most logical underpainting is a wash of the colors that you will choose to use later. Putting down this "same" color underpainting helps you see what the painting will eventually look like, covers all of the canvas with color (so there won't be any pesky white canvas peeking through like an unfinished paint by number set ) and gives you a chance to change any of the colors when you paint over the underpainting. How convenient! How brilliant! How "why didn't I see that earlier" neat!
Only I have one tee-niney little change to that definition of an underpainting that I am going to make on THIS painting. I mean, there are no rules in painting so I'm going to paint the opposite colors as an underpainting. Why? Because I can AND because I am really looking for some excitement in the colors of this piece so why not?
To paint the opposite colors I have to kinda think backwards. If you choose to do this it actually helps to get out a basic color wheel to keep you mind on track. And think SIMPLY. Don't get all complicated. Look at the picture and say, "OK, purple background, white shirt, brown instrument, peach skin color, blue pants, etc etc". Don't get all hung up on the exact shade or variations in shadows. Just like a coloring book, name the colors of the parts of the picture. BUT when you get ready to paint - paint a wash of the opposite colors like this:
In this part of the painting the jacket is going to be blue and the opposite color of blue is orange so I paint the jacket orange. His face is going to be peach which is like orange and the opposite of orange is blue so his face gets painted blue. The instrument is brown which is kinda hard to figure but put in it's simplest form, brown is warm like a dark orange so the opposite of orange is blue. It's not rocket science so don't get hung up, just paint. As long as you paint an object in an unexpected color, you're good. And don't panic (see next picture)
OK, I told you not to panic. Sure that blue face and hands on my American icon looks strange but bear with me. I mean I could have thought of the head and hands as pink (a shade of red) and painted them in green. Doesn't matter, it's my painting and I can paint it like I like (what an attitude).
Here's what all of the figures in the painting look like painted in opposite colors. The figure's dark purple/blue pants are now yellow, the yellow drum set is now purple, the white jacket (again I figure the closest to white is light blue so I went with orange). You can figure out your own colors. Nothing is "wrong". The shoes on the final painting are going to be white but instead of orange I decided to do a blue underpainting cause I wanted some neat blue shadows on them - see, even I break my own "rules". Jane's Perspective says "chill out". It's called "art", not "work".
I wanted the picture to have a dark background like the photo so for the opposite underpainting I also thought in terms of values. If the background was going to be so dark, to keep the painting light and exciting I painted the underpainting light shades of the opposite colors (the blue on the floor is thinking opposite of orange which is like brown which is basically what the wooden stage was all about - a lot more exciting than plain old brown wood - you'll see what I mean in the next step).One final note: Whenever you paint an underpainting this way, stop a minute and take a good look. You will be seeing your painting in a whole new light. What about keeping some of this opposite color in the final painting? What about enlarging parts to make a fabulous abstract? Open your artistic mind to the unexpected. Turn the painting upside down and sideways. Can you see a whole new painting that could come from this one? Especially if you paint a sloppy underpainting - how loose and creative did you get?
