This week, we’ll cover some great practices in laying the foundation for a wide variety of painting styles and developing an image with low tones and high values. These are in some ways similar to the approach we took in the last lesson, creating a monochome painting, however this time we’ll use some colour!

Laying foundations

I’m known as a bit of a colourist, but typically evolve my images in a very limited palette, applying colour on previously established values. It’s difficult to deal with colour and value at the same time and adding colour is never a substitute for a lack in the value department – you can’t solve a value problem with more colour!

The initial foundation, sometimes called an underpainting, is therefore a most important stage of a painting. It’s the place for refining the composition, working through the value equations and evolving ideas. Maybe there will be a Eureka! moment, when the painting starts talking and you learn where it has to go.

Painting with Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue

Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue are my go-to tubes. These two colours work superbly together: warm browns mixing to cool, intense black and then blues – needed to establish a foundation. I add some titanium white to make some grey tones and highlights. In the following video I sing the praises of these two workhorse colours:

Exercise

1. Mix Burnt Sienna with Ultramarine Blue in the same manner as in the video – notice that the mix turns very dark, essentially black.
2. Repeat the process and this time add a little white – just to lighten the combinations – with a grey appearing in the middle.

Laying out a painting with a limited palette

You don’t need to be skilled or fussy in applying the paint – you can add and correct later. The idea is to have a roughly-formed painting that you can work in subsequent stages. Foundation blocking can be completed in any (typically subdued) tone: blues, browns, greys and greens can all work. Each will assert a certain feel into the final work – sometimes dramatically so – the foundation forms an integral part of the final image, peeking through wherever you need.

I might start with a mid-tone base in any colour. I generally favour using a brown (normally Burnt Sienna) and a blue (typically Ultramarine Blue) as a limited palette variation of a pure monochromatic underpainting. The thing I like is that it allows for a variation of warms (browns) and cools (blues) that can almost complete a painting…without adding much colour at all!

In the following video I develop a foundation, in this instance painting a landscape, plein-air in acrylic:.

My process is independent of subject and in the following video, I lay out a portrait in a similar manner – this time starting from a brown base.

My general rule is: the darker the value, the bluer it must be. Mid-tones and lights in brown, with darks all having a deep blueish tinge. Warm tones advance and cools recede, giving the viewer all the right messages. Don’t be frightened of blues in the shadows and features, you need them!

Some Examples

This demonstration study established layout and prescience of forms.

 

 

Exercise

• From the reference of your choice or the Reference Gallery, develop a low-tone painting using a brown and a blue. Start from a mid-tone and proceed in a similar manner to the the above studies. That is, make the primary focus the  lights, mid-tones and darks (3 zones). The additional opportunity in this study is to make the darks cooler (that is bluer) than the lights, plus you can use white to reinforce lights.

More on limited warm-cool palettes

Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue are indeed a fine pairing, although of course not the only ones. A range of combinations works famously and experimenting and investigating their potential takes effort.

Start by simply substituting another “red” for Burnt Sienna  – try it and see…. I’ve done this regularly using Alizarin Crimson with Ultramarine Blue when I want a brighter, purpler effect. The idea of painting with 2 colours, typically a warm and a cool, can lead to some interesting effects: Raw Sienna and Purple, Alizarin Crimson and Veridian, Alizarin Crimson with Ultramarine Blue and with another blue, such as Phthalo blue…..Yellow Ochre and Ultramarine Blue perhaps. With each combination, you will see that the work takes on a dramatically different “feel”.

Exercise

1. Experiment with mixing 3 different versions of a warm (red through orange) colour with 3 different cool colours (blue through green). Start with the warms at one side of your palette and the cools at the other and gradually mix one into the other to achieve the tonal spectra.
2. A couple of quiz questions: where are the pigments brightest? What happens to the value as you mix the warm with the cool?

Through this lesson we’ve been getting comfortable with using some colour and mixing two colours together to obtain a range of effects. In the next lesson, we’ll immerse ourselves in the wonderful world of colour!