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Why the underpainting?
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Posted
Everyone varies in their approach, of course ..... on the whole, I go in for the underpainting route because acrylics, if used solidly (opaquely) anyway, require building up in layers, scumbles, and glazes. The underpainting - which really doesn't have to be in a different colour at all, but some people like to work on a contrasting tonal background and perhaps have some of the original coats show through - provides a structure, a tonal guide.
There seems to come a point with an acrylic painting where you reach a stage I can only describe as the Gawd-'elp-us platform: the thing just looks hideous - I've had this happen so often that I now give a little cheer if I avoid it: the point at which, if you've no experience of acrylics, you think you've just ruined it and need to sneak around to the back of the house and light a bonfire with it. All sorts of reasons for this - the fact that acrylic right out of the tube can be alarmingly garish, and needs to be toned down; and that the paint dries so fast that blending is very difficult for those used to working in oil, particularly. You get better at this in time, able to delay drying or even take advantage of the speed offered. The underpainting helps provide a unity - think of it in terms of building a painting, rather than realizing it in one or two coats.
This method is very similar in many ways - and not at all in others - to the older practices of oil painting, where underpainting was extensively employed, rather than the Impressionist method in which you might establish a broad wash with turps and paint, then refine it with just one or two layers.
It's perfectly possible to paint in acrylic without an underpainting to speak of - using acrylic inks lends itself to transparency, for example. But if you're using a paint like Cryla, for example, or W & N Artists' paint, the underpainting method would probably be the more usual approach.
Posted
A good answer above but a couple of points...
I personally havent been underpainting but on a coarse canvas sometimes it becomes necessary to go over the same area twice to get full coverage (unless the brush is heavily loaded the texture of the canvass can leave small dots where paint is not present) this is less of an issue if the canvass is not a hard white, also adding a layer of paint smooths the surface somewhat. I often like to sketch in pencil some guide to what I am painting though and pencil doesn't take so well to a painted surface.
In art school they like to tell you that the whole surface must be painted (I too break this rule often leaving the white area's baron on a ready primed canvas) and underpainting achieves this out of the starting gate. I see some people paint the canvass a bright colour which virtually disappears in the finished composition and they claim the warmth comes through...
Maybe this is something I should give more thought to.
Posted
On the last point, 'warmth comes through' - I was sceptical about this; but it perhaps depends on the relative opacity of the paint laid over the top: I remember using a crimson for a distant field of hay (or whatever it was: I'm no farmer..) and then painting over that with a warm ochre mixed with white - and it did work. But then there was a degree of optical mixing, even though the overlaid colour was, in theory, opaque. It could also be that I imagined it, and the warmth came from the overlaid colour alone! Don't know, really - but as I always put down an underpainting anyway, I thought it might as well be a strongly coloured one for a change. Not very scientific, but these things are often instinct as much as calculation.
Posted
Just dive in - get yourself a basic set of acrylics and have a play with them; and don't handicap yourself from the start by being pessimistic about success! Whatever we do in life, from boiling an egg upwards, we've got to learn how to do it in order to become proficient. Acrylic provides a good array of lightfast, strong colours, which you can apply to almost any surface, using any brushes you like (though don't ruin your sables), with knives, using water, using medium, used thinly, used opaquely/thickly; you can buy heavy-bodied acrylics, slicker versions, liquid acrylics in pots.... they're wonderful. But you've to get familiar with them (by which I don't mean making improper suggestions to your tubes of paint: that way madness lies).
Someone said, somewhere or other, that acrylics are the 'easy' medium, more so than oil or watercolour. I think that's probably led to more false starts than anything else, because people start with them thinking they'll be easy, and soon discover they have challenges all their own. I don't think they're 'easy'; I don't think any medium is easy, and I fear that acrylics still aren't held in the respect due to them by some. But they can be very rewarding when you've come to grips with them - I won't say when you've 'mastered' them, because we're never totally masters of our medium - and the sooner you start, the better.
Posted
I think I can now you've alerted me to look for it! I might not have done otherwise - but would have wondered how you got the warmth in the painting, in a scene which is relatively bleak - or could be, if the colour were colder. I do like your sky in this one, by the way - well, all of it, but the sky is particularly interesting.
(Comment refers to the first painting shown, of course - you move too fast for me!)
Edited
by RobertJones