Paint and Pigments

Warm Underpainting

  • Instead of painting on a white canvas, pre-tone the surface before painting in opaque media
    • initial color is called the underpainting or imprimatura
  • Color recommendations; Venetian red/burnt sienna
  • An insistent warm underpainting will force you to cover the background with opaques, requiring you to make mixing decisions
  • For plein air painting, prime the canvas with oil priming
    • paint layers tend to float on the surface rather than sink in
  • Tips: mix up a tint using a palette knife on a scrap of palette paper
Image result for new paltz in the rain gurney
Warm Underpainting

Sky Panels
  • A surface prepared with sky gradation as a base layer for future painting
    • painters would typically paint the sky first, let it dry, then paint the other elements over dry passages
  • Alla prima; completing the entire painting in one session
    • good for painterly handling
    • difficult for intricate details
  • sky panels are useful when the main interest is in the middle ground tracery (signs, trees. clouds)
  • Oiling out; rubbing the surface of a dry painting with a thin medium makes it more receptive to paint
  • Tip: make a few sky panels a few days in advance of outdoor painting
Image result for cumulus sky gurney
Sky Panels

Limited Palettes
  • small selection of pigments, results in a painting with more harmonious effects
  • it is more effective to limit the amount of paints
  • 3 reasons why:
    • paintings are more harmonious
    • forces you out of color-mixing habits
    • compact, portable, and efficient
  • Tips; 
    • make color wheel tests to preview the range of possibilities
    • it is good to pick one full-chroma color and combine it with two weaker colors from across the center of the spectrum
    • also experiment with combinations of transparent and opaque colors
Image result for blue girl gurney
Limited Palette

The Mud Debate
  • Beware of mud:
    • over mixing sometimes makes colors muddy, especially when more than 3 are used at a time
    • partially mixed colors are more apt to yield harmonious colors in the painting
    • wary of colors that look drab/dirty
  • Mud is a myth
    • there is no such thing as a muddy mixture: there are only muddy relationships of color in a given painting
    • the effect of drabness comes from poor value organization
    • what matters is where you put the paint and what you surround it with
    • some painters scrape up unused paint, stir it together, and put it into empty tubes for reducing the chroma of mixtures
    • more paintings suffer from too much pure color than muddy colors
    • "a well placed gray makes pure color sing"
Image result for humboldt on the orinoco

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