Casey portrait in progress 7 - Why I made a green underpainting

Yesterday I described how I used a blue watercolor wash for the sky.

Today I made a green underpainting for the grass and trees.

That gives me a green base color, similar to working on green paper, which saves a lot of work covering the white of the paper with green pencils. I leave the white paper showing for Casey’s white coat.

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Here's a close-up of part of the underpainting. In the upper part of this pic you can see the distant grass I did with colored pencils. Everything below that - around Casesy’s body and the butterfly - was done with a fairly dense wash of green watercolor. I gave it a little bit of texture by by making a few vertical strokes with the tip of my paintbrush here and there as it dried. I will draw the grass blades with colored pencil over that after it has dried thoroughly.

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This shows the entire sheet of white paper, which will be trimmed down at the end. The whole lower half of the scene is now filled with green underpainting around Casey.

I’ve also made a green underpainting on the trees. They are a basic green color now, instead of white paper. Now I’ll just need to add some tight little scribbles with darker green pencils for the shadowed tree areas. This green underpainting gives me the highlights on the tree leaves...saving a lot of little fussy scribbling motions with several colors of light-green and medium-green pencils.

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I adding colored pencil details over the underpainting. Here's a before-and-after....

TOP: Before I did the watercolor underpainting, I outlined the dark edges and shapes of the trees with dark-green pencil. Then added green watercolor wash over the whole tree area with three different greens, working “wet into wet” (the greens flow into one-another with no sharp edges). Those dark green pencil lines are still clearly visible through the thin wash.

BOTTOM: Tree detail was added with several colors of medium and dark green pencils. I’m able to get much richer greens working on the green underpainting than I would on stark white paper.

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IN THE STUDIO I’m working on the trees in the left side of the landscape. Casey is protected with white paper where I rest my hand as I’m working, to keep the virgin white paper of his coat clean.

When the trees are finished, I’ll move down to the lower half of the artwork and add a lot of grass blades with colored pencil over the green watercolor underpainting. Colored pencil strokes are perfect for making hair, fur, and grass blades!

🎨 Prismacolor pencil and watercolor on white Canson Mi-Teintes paper, 15 x 20 inches.

“Casey” (GCHS Ch. Marrics Just In Case With Grand Oaks).

Commissioned by Doug Eicher.

From reference photos taken by Doug and a show photo by Lexi D Photography (Alexandria Darienzo).