"Summer Sky" - why I chose tan paper for a blue sky

Last Sunday I shared this as a “Happy Mother’s Day” greeting on social media. I thought you'd enjoy seeing the image on the full sheet of “Bisque” Canson paper, and hearing why I chose Bisque (dark tan) paper for this piece, even though most of it is blue. 

1

The cropped image.

There is a particular reason this piece was done on “Bisque” Canson Mi-Teintes paper. I’m very deliberate about my choice of paper color, because it will dictate the look of the entire artwork. 

An artist friend refers to that as the “mother color”: it influences every color added to it.

2

The full sheet of paper, “Bisque” (now called Havana Clear) Canson Mi-Teintes. 

You can see where I added brown watercolor underpainting on the lower left (the bottom of the column) and dark green underpainting on the lower right for the grass. The sky was done with acrylic paint, so as to completely cover the tan paper. This sky would have been very hard to do with colored pencils. But the opaque acrylic paint covered the “orange-ness” of the paper and gave me a beautiful gradation from pale lavender up to very dark saturated blue. 

Everything else was done with colored pencils: the column, the figures, the mountains, and the shooting star. On the bottom of the column I worked over the dark brown underpainting with colored pencils to add the 3-dimensional shading and the dark veins in the marble. The modeling on the mountains was done with colored pencil over the acrylic sky. The next picture shows the figures and how I used the paper color for the warmth in their skin tones. 

I chose the Bisque paper because I wanted that warmth of the reddish-tan paper for the column and the figures. Using colored pencil on that beautiful “Bisque” (one of my favorite Canson colors) is unlike working on any other ground color. If you lightened that particular tan, it would be the color of sunlight. Working on this paper gives me the tones of summer warmth in a piece like nothing else does. 

3

You can see how I used the paper color to get a lot of warmth in the figures. (This was scanned from a photo of the piece. So the detail is not the greatest.) I did not have to try to cover white “tooth” or any other color that would have contaminated the color I wanted in the figures. The tooth of the Bisque paper can show through on these figures and it’s exactly what I want. That’s the beauty of working on a colored ground. 

I specialize in working on colored grounds, and using the paper color as the basis for a piece. I’m an expert in that, I’ve been doing it for over 45 years. I’m now working on my first tutorial about using paper color.  

🎨 "Summer Sky", circa 2003

Prismacolor pencil, with watercolor underpainting and acrylic sky, on "Bisque” Canson Mi-Teintes paper.

The full sheet of Canson paper is 19.5 x 25.5, the image is approx. 18 x 21.5 inches.