Underpainting: a struggle to simplify

[Clive Fullagar]

Karin,

Thanks for your teaching here. I think I am going to go ahead and and lighten the values as you suggest. My main concern is that, if I don't, the underpainting will dominate the later layers, especially the shadows, and prevent me from putting life into them. I take your point about adding the half-tones in the later layers.

I have been doing a little research on underpainting and there seems to be some variation in the darkness of the values and the extent of detail. Vermeer, for example, used very dark values for shadows but did not take the underpainting into any great detail. Van Eyck, on the other hand, used lighter, far more detailed underpaintings.

I am going to try and reach a compromise. I will post the results of my efforts in the next day or so.