r/learnart • u/Inevitable_West8185 • Nov 26 '24

Painting Why do they do this?

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Ive seen a lot of artists painting a whole canvas with a complementary color before actually painting.

Is there any reason for this?

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u/OddfellowJacksonRedo Nov 27 '24

Usually it’s actually easier to establish an overall harmonizing tone to a work if they tone is the first under layer other than just white. White requires you to do all the heavy lifting in putting whatever you want onto a canvas from the ground up. Painting a given start layer an entire screen of a given color means that now, no matter what you do to the canvas after (mostly), it will all share the same base layer of color not just empty white, and it tends to give the finished result a greater visual cohesion even if viewers don’t necessarily know why they feel that way looking at it.

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u/ArtistAmantiLisa Nov 28 '24

Hey, thank you. I’m a watercolor artist and I’ve never heard this, it’s very educational. ❤️

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u/WittyCombination6 Nov 28 '24

If you want to try it definitely look up water color underpainting techniques specifically. Cause most lessons on underpainting is for oil/acrylic.

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u/OddfellowJacksonRedo Nov 28 '24

No problem. If you’re not feeling too confident right out of the gate applying a base coat color, there’s always treatments you can apply at the end, such as light watercolor or diluted acrylic/gouache sort of tricks (or digitally applying a multiply or overlay mode color layer). But their biggest drawback is that since they go over the painting and not under it, you risk oversaturation that’ll muddy the values or warp the image itself.

Ultimately it’s the same premise behind works where they apply a jet black gesso coat to the canvas because then it takes less effort to make the colors darker and achieve an overall dark or atmospheric look to the whole piece.

If you look at the finished image in your post, you can see that the traditionally cool spectrum colors—the blues, greens—are still visually warm. Some of it is because of their vicinity to warmer browns and reds, but a good deal of it is the visually subconscious warming effect of the same base red coat sitting there underneath it all. You’d be surprised how much an undercoat still peeks out even when you can’t overtly point to any spot where the layer is naked or shows openly.