Garden Solace: Step 3
Phase two of the underpainting now begins. Like I said before, the overall feeling of building up to your final detail in a series of steps is that you only have to sort out a small, very manageable and easily changeable amount of the composition at a time. It has a safe and secure feel to it, whereas the Xerox method (I’m not advocating against either approach) does feel a little like dumping the family fortune into a single security. You should have a very good idea of what you’re doing before you dive into it.
If you haven’t worked out a crystal clear idea of your composition, or if you don’t feel that you work well making final decisions as you go, then you’ll probably find this approach suits you better. I would say that I personally find this is a less stressful manner of working, but not necessarily one that produces better or worse results, per se. If you like paintings with a lot of paint texture on their surfaces, then this will allow you to control exactly how much texture your final painting has. I myself usually tend away from too much texture, but I confess it can be fun to play with it when painting wombats.
You can see that all I’ve really done here is to add more color and depth to the areas that I already mapped out in the first sweep. I’ve begun to sculpt more of the bushy tree bits in the background, as well as to get some initial sparkle in what will be my future flower beds. Working this way is actually a lot of fun, and I find that I often have to fight against the temptation to “fire in a happy little tree”.
