Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Underpainting

Downham Hill (Smallpox Hill) from Uley Bury
Underpainting - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic on MDF
20cm x 40cm (7.75" x 17.75")

Lesson 38 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler introduces underpainting as a technique used by historical painters. They would create a monochromatic painting using cheap quick drying pigments to establish the composition and major tonal values. They would then glaze this with more expensive pigments introducing colour and more subtle tonal shifts. He points out that monochromatic underpainting provides another opportunity to work with a new medium without having to deal with the complexity of colour.

I created this underpainting with a 10-year-old, unopened tube of a cheap Payne’s Grey acrylic. I also glazed it with 10-year-old acrylics. These were better quality, but also unopened. 

Underpainting - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic on MDF
20cm x 40cm (7.75" x 17.75")

This is the most ambitious painting I’ve tried in acrylics. One of the biggest challenges was that some colours barely tinted the underpainting, while others completely obscured it. I should have expected this because the transparency/opacity of different pigments is an important factor in watercolour, but it still blindsided me when the same thing became important for acrylic glazes. It is only when I wrote this post that I compared the two versions of the picture. Each change of tone in the underpainting is still visible in the glazed version - even when I thought the underpainting was completely obliterated, it still has an impact on the final painting - lesson learnt.

Philip suggests experimenting with different underpainting colours, but one is enough for me (for the time being). This exercise has opened my eyes to acrylics. I’m excited to paint some more, but this style of underpainting is not top of my list of techniques to explore.