Now you can see why I did the underpainting. This is a close-up of the upper left corner of the painting, where there is a forested hillside in shadow with sunlight touching a few of the branches. The dark blue-green underpainting gives me a base color to work on…then I add the foliage over that with colored pencils. Light green dashes and scribbly strokes with different greens makes very nice leaves with colored pencil.
The underpainting was done with acrylic thinned with water. My previous blog post shows that step. This shows the whole artwork, cropped as it will be when it’s finished. A nice little piece of shadowed hillside in the upper left.
The grey paper has been left bare on the right and left, giving me a nice grey for the rocks. I’ll do a similar thing with colored pencils as I did with the tree foliage, putting in all the detail of the rocks with colored pencils over the grey base color of the paper. And I'll do the ripples on the water with colored pencils over the green underpainting.
An underpainting that turns the paper the right color where I need it, saves me a lot of coloring with colored pencils.
