The First Layer: Why Underpainting Changes Everything in Oil

There is a version of every painting I've made that no one ever sees. It lives underneath the color, worked thin across the canvas in those first 30 or 40 minutes before anything is decided. Most painters call it the underpainting. I think of it as the skeleton.

The concept is simple enough. You're working out the values, the lights and darks, before you introduce color into the equation. You're answering the hardest questions first: Where is the light coming from? What's the deepest shadow? What disappears entirely? Once those decisions are made in paint, everything that comes on top of them responds to that foundation.

What surprises most people when they first try it is how fast the stage goes. You can block in the full tonal structure of a painting in 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes less on a smaller study. The speed is partly the point. You're not precious about it. You wipe back the lights, push the darks deeper, and let the canvas tell you where it wants to go.

I've been doing this long enough that I can feel when I skip the step. The painting fights back.

What the Shadow Knows

When I was working on Cowboy Study, the figure came together quickly because the underpainting was strong. The shadow under the brim of the hat, that dark zone across the upper face, was the first thing I committed to on canvas. The rest of the painting followed that single decision.

Get the shadow right in the block-in and the rest almost places itself. The painting is small, maybe ten inches. But the values hold the way they would on a larger canvas because the underpainting established a hierarchy. Dark areas stay dark. The lights read as light because they're surrounded by something that anchors them.

Cowboy Study is available as a poster, a framed print, or as the original painting.

The Ground Matters

My approach is usually burnt sienna thinned almost to a wash. Oil on a warm-toned ground reads differently than oil on white gesso. The toned canvas shows through in the half-tones, in the places where the brushwork is loose. You get warmth baked into the painting that you can't fully replicate by mixing the same temperature into your top layers after the fact.

Painters have known this for centuries. It's easy to forget in the era of pre-primed linen and panels you can buy ready to go. The white surface is convenient. The toned surface is better, at least for the kind of work I'm doing.

Raw umber is my other option. It's cooler than burnt sienna and goes darker faster, which makes it useful when the painting is going to live on the cooler side of the spectrum. That early choice, warm or cool, sets a temperature for the whole painting that everything else either works with or fights against. Better to make that call consciously, at the underpainting stage, than discover it halfway through.

Where It Really Earns Its Keep

The other thing underpainting teaches you is editing. When you're working in a single transparent color, there's nothing to hide behind. No interesting blue-green to distract from a composition problem. The structure either works or it doesn't, and you find out while you can still wipe the whole thing off and start again.

I've made bad underpaintings. Ones where I couldn't figure out where the light was coming from, or where I'd split the composition in a way that divided the eye rather than pulled it through the painting. The right move is always to wipe, rethink, and start over. That's much easier to do at the underpainting stage than two sessions in, when you've built up layers you actually care about.

Tethered Souls took two separate underpainting sessions before I was ready to commit to color. The horse, the hand, the physical relationship between them — the spatial depth of that moment is almost entirely established in the tonal block-in. Color came later and mostly confirmed what the values had already said.

The original painting is available in the shop.

Try It Once

If you're painting in oil and you're not doing this, give it one session. Work in a single earth tone, burnt sienna or raw umber, thinned with a touch of mineral spirits. Don't sketch anything in pencil first. Block in your dark shapes directly with the brush, wipe back your lights with a rag or a clean brush, and sit with it for 30 minutes before reaching for anything else.

What you'll probably find is that you've already made most of the real decisions before you've opened a single tube of color. The underpainting isn't a preliminary step. It is the painting, just without the color yet.