Underpainting Technique Page

I need to blog more. So tomorrow is my birthday but today is Monday so today we start working on the better me. Today since I had off I did a technique page for underpainting in acrylic. Underpainting sounds either magical or dirty depending on how I swing it. And as an aside, my scanner has died. So we'll just have to deal with my less then premium camera skills. 

So in this I did the top sample, just some shapes with a shadow by starting with an under coat of paint. While that was drying I did the second sample in my usual style of just painting and mixing as I went a long. Since this was just a quick technique page I wanted to keep things very simple to allow for both paintings to stand on the merit of the paint alone, not the picture itself. We will call the underpainted layer Sample A and the straight paint layer Sample B.

So the first thing that I noticed with Sample A was that underpainting made for a lot more planning in the picture. Instead of going in with a general idea of where things like light and shadow would go it pretty much forced me to commit to a light source and keep it that way. There would be no real changing of my mind. Without the undercoat I would general just stretch colors until I like the way it looked.

The underpainting worked well for me when it came to the shadows on the table as well as the coloring of the surface itself. It allowed for a more natural blending and depth which the Sample B lacked. In the Sample B it looks more like I just stuck some dark paint on top of brown. I also felt more confidant with blending the yellow in Sample A because I knew that it would not get lost in the brownish color underneath it.

Also, using the underpainiting technique I could make more subtle color highlights in the shadow as is the case with the red form. There is just a hint of color with the underpaint where as with Sample B its more of a splash of color because I felt I had to use a lot more to make it show up in the shadow.

Where the underpaint didn't work out for me was in the blue ball. The idea of light and shadow worked much better in the straight paint one. In sample A the blue ball looks like a dark blue almost black ball but in sample B it looks more like a the glass effect that I was sort of going for.

In conclusion I do like the over all effect of the underpainting in Sample A a bit more and will be using it more often in my acrylic work.