Underpaintings

I haven't posted a blog for a while so I thought I had better do some updates before you think I am the laziest artist ever!

Aside from my weekly teaching duties in Coloured Pencil, Acrylic and Watercolour I have been playing around with various ways of starting an under-painting for my oil paintings.

The first thing I wanted to establish was a good tonal value base but not have to many values to confuse the viewers eye, basically I want to have a variation of edges to make an interesting composition and leave some areas for the viewer to fill in.

I settled on, for now anyway, a white gesso ground with a wash of cadmium red and burnt sienna sansador thinned oil over the top, with the wolf having more yellow ochre added to it, see below.

As you can see the drawing was done freehand with a slightly heavier mix of the cadmium and burnt sienna mixture.

The next stage was to start blocking in values with Transparent Brown Oxide, being very careful to keep interesting edges and not put too much detail where it it isn't needed, this is the next stage:

I've used bristle brushes and wash brushes to keep my edges interesting as well as varying the thickness of paint, either straight from the tube or diluted down with a little Sansador. This is very much based on how I would paint my loose watercolours  but adapted for the oil under-painting, see below

I'm actually quite pleased with how the Wolf has turned out and for now quite like it just as it is so probably will leave it just as a value tonal sketch. I am however working on some other under-paintings in the same style but playing around with the colour of the grounds and also working on the top layers so will let you know how I'm getting on in my next post!