An Artist's Sketchbook

Sampson WIP (work in progress)


Normally I premix my major color notes and then begin by covering the entire surface with the different color shapes. For this I am going to apply a ground color and work the painting up from there. I worked the tone on in thin passes to allow the underdrawing to show through. This tone ended up being a mix of Titanium White, Cadnium Yellow Light and a small touch of Ultramarine blue.

Being a graphic designer I use Photoshop a lot. So instead of mixing my best guess as to what color note I should start with, I isolated the color in Photoshop. I opened my image up in Photoshop and using the eyedropper tool, I selected the lightest "yellow" note in Sampson's fur. In a new layer I selected a square with the selection tool and filled it with that color. This made it easy to see the color without the influence of neighboring colors in the fur. This is the first time I have doing this. I was surprised at the result. Had I mixed this color as I normally would, it would have been warmer, leaning more towards red. Although, in the end this would have been fine, I just want to try something new and see how it works.

Seeing the yellow tone in the images above is a good example of how color can be so different on computer monitors. In person my mix is pretty much on with the selected color. You can see how different it is between the digital photo, computer monitor screen capture, actual paint, reference photo and even your computer monitor.


After applying the undertone I went in and "wiped out" the lighter areas of Sampson's head and front leg. Normally this works great as it exposes the white of the canvas and gives you a nice tonal map of the major value changes. Unfortunatly I wasn't thinking. The panel I am working on is one that I made my self. When I primed these I mixed some color into the gesso to help give the panel a neutral tone. So when I wiped out the yellow instead of getting a whiter surface I got the ground exposed, which is almost the same value as the yellow note I applied. Ooops.

Being that the gesso ground and the yellow are about the same value, the exposed underdrawing actually ended up being darker than the surrounding area. Not what I want. So making things up as I go along, I went in and painted a thin passage of Titanium White in those areas to help with value. I dont normally apply white this early on. It can make a big mess blending in further passages of paint. That being the case I will leave this for the night and let the whole thing dry.