Underpainting - Trying it out

[Karin Wells]

OK, it's time to get radical. I took the liberty of altering your painting to show you the following:

Flatten your lights.

Flatten your shadows and lose some edges.

Ignore reflected light at this stage.

Massing areas of dark and light will help to establish a strong composition and help to unify your finished painting. This first stage can look very "poster-like." All the "painterly" stuff should be saved for the upper layers of color.

At this first stage, pay the utmost attention only to where and exactly how the light meets the shadow (halftone).

Each and every object in a painting has a light and shadow -- only these two extremes of value -- and the range in between where the two meet.

This is the stage where you make or break your composition because it is so easy to see mistakes in an "abstract" form. This abstraction is the solid base upon which you will build "reality."

Once the halftone (light meets shadow) is correct, let it dry and then you can begin to model the form and finish the underpainting with more detail.

Your mistake thus far has been to jump into detail too soon (i.e., eyes, highlights, accents and so on). The really hard work is the halftone.

Because I am not particularly good in Photoshop, I have been unable to show you here how exact this halftone needs to be. You must force yourself to eliminate the superficial details within light and shadow and concentrate on establishing this halftone first.