Beginning a Large Underpainting: The Sky
It's the end of a full week of work on the underpainting for the "Free Will' Commission painting, and I've made great progress. The sky is finished, and I'm ready to begin work on the background landscape next week.
Working from multiple photo references of skies both blue and stormy, I spent the week figuring out how to transition from the blue skies on the right side of the painting to dark, stormy skies on the left, getting progressively darker and more ominous as I moved from right to left. There may be some slight adjustments made once the landscape is in place, and then again once the figures are in place, but for now I'm quite pleased with how it's working, and it's really fun to feel the space behind the figures opening up as the illusion of depth starts to kick in.
This video condenses five days of painting, roughly 25-30 hours, into fifteen minutes. I've tried to speed things up more in areas where I'm mostly filling in space and slow down just a bit when the area being worked on is more interesting. In general, filming progress on a painting this large is difficult, particularly when working on a large area because I have to move around a lot, and the camera has to be farther away in order to frame the 96x40 inch panel. There are also several areas where it is nearly impossible to set up a shot because of the proximity of the edge of the panel to the wall of the studio, and so I've cut out the sections where the close-up work is completely blocked by my body. Given all of that, I hope you find the footage interesting and possible instructive.
I'm working with my standard monochrome palette (I've posted a video on mixing this palette) in straight oil colors with no added medium. it may interest some of you to know that I was able to complete the entire week of work without re-mixing the colors, as I transferred the paint to a glass palette stored in an airtight container with a few drops of clove oil, all in the refrigerator between painting sessions. this almost completely stops the drying process when I'm not actually working with the paint.
The largest open areas of sky were painted with a number 6 flat brush and a number 4 flat brush. The tighter areas were blocked in with a number 2 and a number 1 flat, while the finest details (the rocket plume and the fires on the left side) were painted with a number 1 and a number 2 round. All these brushes were Gray Matters synthetics made by Richeson & Co. In the open areas, I did my best to knock down the brush strokes with a fan brush in order to keep the surface smooth for the color pass.
It's difficult to know what to say about this process other than that is is very much like drawing with paint. In fact, I tend to categorize the underpainting as part of the drawing process, which is why this video will be available to the drawing tutorial tier of patrons in addition to the painting tutorial tier. I highly recommend asking any questions you might have in the comments, as I have a lot more underpainting to do, and will have many opportunities to answer them both in writing and in future videos. I'd love for there to be more discussion both between myself and al of you, but also amongst those of you who are interested, as so much can be learned by discussing things rather than just showing them, and I love discussing all art related topics.
Thank you all so much for your interest and your patronage. Please let me know what I can do to make this experience as useful as possible for all of you.
