Another example would be to use a green colour for the ground of a painting consisting of many bright red poppies (the red poppies will look brighter against a green ground).Īnother method is to use the opposite temperature of your intended painting. An example would be using a peachy colour for a base of an underwater scene (the orangey-peach complements the upcoming blue tones of the painting). This will promote balance and will increase the perceived intensity and saturation of your colours. Generally, using the complementary colour to the main colour of your intended painting is a good idea. Really, though, the choice of a ground colour depends on what you’re painting and how you want your painting to feel. That depends on you! …actually, wait, there is one true answer: anything but white! Well, this question really has no true answer. What is the best colour to use as a ground?
Especially if you’re painting an abstract, the ground could simply be the initial layer of your paint, as long as it’s applied with the intention of fully covering the white canvas before the next layer is started. Tip: Your ground doesn’t always have to be a flat colour.
Related Post: The Online Art Courses That Shaped Me as an Artist This means that as you’re gliding your paint across the canvas, it will not be thick enough to fully cover the texture bumps of the canvas, and that stark white will shine through your paint, giving it an amateur, unfinished look! It will take many layers of paint to fully cover this glaring white, leading to frustrations and bad colour choices. We also generally start painting with thinner paints and work our way up to thicker applications. Your poor paint colours have no chance competing against that bright stark white! This is the exact reason we shouldn’t start a new painting on a white ground! White is incredibly bright – it will alter the perception of the colours you put on the canvas…making colours seem duller than they really are. It is the brightest, purest colour you will put on your canvas, and we generally save our pure white for the very last step to add that pop of brightness. In acrylic and oil painting, white is the highlight colour.
The problem, however, lies in this: White is the worst colour on which to start painting. This is all well and good, because cheaper costs mean a cheaper price for us as artists to buy our canvases. It is also the least expensive colour to use as a ground, and simply making all canvases have white grounds is much cheaper than making canvases available in a variety of colours. This is due to a couple reasons: these canvases are always primed, ready to accept paint, and the most popular colour of gesso is white. All purchased stretched canvases have a white ground. A ground is simply the initial flat colour of your canvas before you begin your actual painting.
0 kommentar(er)
