Demo- Tonal Underpainting

My Glasscock students are working on tonal underpaintings, so I thought I’d crank up my new favorite singer, LP, and make a time-lapse demo to share with everyone.

This is an early stage of indirect painting (painting in layers), when corrections of values are made. Prior to this stage I transferred the drawing.

I prefer to  work from dark to light values, and from the background to the foreground. I also work big to small and fast to slow. Details are absolutely last (if they even exist in at this stage at all). All edges are left soft. It's much easier to harden an edge than to soften it during the painting process.

I used Rublev’s Italian Burnt Sienna oil paint  for my color and thinned it with odorless mineral spirits to get a variety of values. The darkest value is the mass tone,  which refers the darkest a pigment can be coming from the tube.  

Acrylic Painters can modify this exact process using paint and water.

Colors I often use for tonal underpainting include both Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber.

BTW, I used 3 brushes on this painting. Two were hogshair and my round brush was synthetic.

Now, it’s your turn! Go make something! Or, if you're one of my students, do your homework! :)