A Tale of Three Paintings
My current work in progress is not just 1 painting, but 3 paintings of the same landscape featuring the alpenglow we get often. The rational behind 3 paintings? I wanted to build a collection of a saleable inventory (usually smaller works), gallery-worthy paintings (usually larger canvases), and studies.
Also, each of them are different, right down to the substrate. The smaller one (8" x 14"), is a wood panel, coated with acrylic ground. The study one is a duck canvas on a 14" x 18" stretcher bars, hand-stretched and primed with acrylic ground. The large one is 24" x 36", pre-stretched primed canvas.
For the smaller one, I've left the ground white, and sketched out the landscape with raw umber. The study had a burnt sienna imprimatura, and again, raw umber was used to sketch out the landscape. On the large one, I coated it with a raw umber imprimatura, and used a brush dipped into OMS to remove the raw umber where white or light colour will be on. This method is a subtractive method rather than additive method.
I am having a good time learning the differences between the three methods:
Wood panel with white ground: I am finding that the white wood panel substrate seem to require more colour application, and care to ensure that the white ground doesn't show up where undesired. However, with the panel, I can be a little more ruthless, such as scraping off colour, scratching in sketches.
Handstretched canvas with burnt sienna imprimatura: Because there is already a warmth to the canvas, getting the underpainting colours on works very well.
I have not yet started to put on the underpainting colours on the large painting, but I think, because of such a dark imprimatura (and the size), more paint will be required to get a good coverage.
