Oil Painting Underpainting Technique
Underpainting is used as a preliminary stage to oil painting on a canvas. Artist Jess Bates explains that it can be used either as a rough guide that will eventually be covered or as a background to the finished painting. It can also be used to set up a dominant color key for the finished painting, or to reflect light through the back of the canvas to give your painting luminescence.
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Color-block underpainting
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In this technique the main areas of your oil painting are colored. For example, in a landscape you might draw the sea as a dark blue, the land behind it as green and rolling and the sky above a light blue color. You may even include large white clouds. You would not, however, use any detailing. Instead, the block colors provide a base and guide you when you go on to add highlights and shadow.
Tonal underpainting
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Tonal underpainting is used to highlight the major differences between light and dark. Using just one transparent color, paint only the areas of your painting which you expect to be dark. For a portrait, you might paint an outline then fill in the eyes, nose, mouth and hair and leave the major skin tones and background areas unpainted. Once dry, add your top layer of oils, giving light areas a particular radiance because you left the canvas below blank. Similarly, the dark areas will be particularly dark.
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Tonal ground
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Tonal ground is used much like the backgrounds in a power point presentation. Use either one single block color or a gradient, fading from light to dark. The color chosen dictates the color set for your entire painting, with the main image painted on top of the dried background tones.
Monochrome
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Michael Gorges, Contributing Editor to the website Wetcanvas.com, writes how underpainting with monochromatic colors is a way of learning how to paint with oils. This is done to practice how to paint realistic pictures, with the emphasis on using just black and white to create a 3D impression on a flat surface. Detail is then added on top, once the monochrome is dry. The French grisaille method uses neutral or gray tones, while the Italian verdaccio method is famed for the use of gray-green tones on top of the monochrome.
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References
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