Underpainting

I'm playing around with the idea of letting the underpainting show through in my art in a painting of two sisters that I'm working on right now.

Usually, when I paint people with oils, I would put on the fun colours that give skin it's vibrancy in a thin layer with a flat brush. Then I would take a large round dry brush and do the sophisticatedly named "dab-dab" technique, which simply involves blending the colours together by dabbing the wet paint with a dry brush. The result is an all skin colour smooth face with a soft texture.

I don't have anything against the dab-dab technique, but in this painting, I'm painting two vibrant people, so I wanted those stronger colours to stick around. So this is an experiment in letting the underpainting show. I'm stopping after the flat brush step - just getting the colours on there, and not dab-dabbing them until they all blend into a skin colour.

At first, I had to tone down the blues; the two sisters were looking like something out of Avatar! The challenge will be to make these blues, yellows, and reds believable as real aspects of skin colour.

In some ways, it may be an false exaggeration to paint skin with these colours. But I think, letting the underpainting show is perhaps and even more honest approach than smoothing everything together. We'll see how it goes!

Well, enough writing about painting - I'm off to paint some more this afternoon!