Studio Time

I sprayed this with clear acrylic to fix the pastels. I do tend to wonder how this would have worked out if I hadn’t.

I wanted a sort of general “mid” tone to this canvas, so… I mixed up three small tubs of acrylic medium, water and Sennelier’s Sepia, Burnt Umber and Mars Yellow paints, soaked the canvas panel with water and used a 4 inch house painters brush and a rag to give things a “not really all that even” tone.

Even wetted, the raw canvas tends to suck up paint. I salted this, which can give you some really nice effects with watercolor. Here, it just adds a sort of grainy look to the paint. You can see it better in the detail below. Salt does tend to give your underpainting a sort of “sparkle”. Some of the light spots come from spraying up close with a water bottle… The spatters are from bottles of Chinese Orange and Alizarin Crimson watercolors, mixed with water, that I keep to use with an airbrush. The acrylic tends to seal the watercolor. I’m still pretty sure they’re going to bleed when I seal this.

(I did a series of canvases a while back that I covered with acrylic and sprayed with a garden hose. It gave me some very nice, subtly blended colors. You can get stuff that looks like batik or tie-dye with raw canvas as well. 🙂 I’m not sure a wax resist has a place in an underpainting.)