Trying out the underpainting technique using a wet brush.

 This scene is from Karnala Bird Sanctuary, which is about nine to ten kilometres away from Panvel ( Navi Mumbai ).

For long I had been wanting to do an underpainting with pastels and water hence I went ahead and tried out something new this time. ie after applying the initial colours I ran a wet brush over it value by value. ( In order to avoid too much of colour mixing on the paper ). After the paper dried up, I did not have to put any fixative and I immediately started with putting in details in the foreground.

I have not done any blending in the final layer and kept the background with very less details and contrast. The foreground is a lot in shadows. Since I was more keen on working out with this new technique of underpainting, I did not really spend a lot of time completing this work.

Through the forest

Soft pastel painting on Fabriano paper

Size 6" x 9"

I quite enjoyed this technique but since the paper is about less than 220 gsm ie it is not very thick so there is a little crumpling that takes place after the underpainting is done. Nevertheless for a small sized painting, I think it will really not make much of a difference. What I liked in particular about the second layer is that the pastels settled well and the dark bright lustre got retained very well.

I will definitely be doing more works with an underpainting rather than just blending with fingers.

( The dry method )