Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Hipsters and Experimenting with Underpainting


I'm channeling our quarantine/social distancing frustrations with these cards.  These images are from Tim Holtz's Hipster set by Stampers Anonymous, and they just look so conflicted/frustrated to me.

Each of the images was stamped with Versafine on a panel of watercolor cardstock.  Then I did some underpainting, adding highlights with a coordinating color so that when you do the painting with the actual color you want, it creates more natural shading.  It's a technique I've been wanting to try for a while, and I thought this would be an easy way to do it.

It kind of was, except that I think it works best with colors.  Obviously, two of my images here are painted with grays/black, so I don't think these first two are as effective, but tell me what you think.  For this first guy I used browns.  Note that for all of these I added the underpainting just the the critter itself, not any of the clothing/accessories.


The sentiment is from the Crazy Talk set by Tim Holtz for Stamper's Anonymous.

You can better see some of those brown highlights in this close up, but again, it's not very pronounced.


Next up the ostrich.


For the ostrich I used some blue and brown in the underpainting.  Since the ostrich is a lighter gray you can see a bit more of that underpainting.  


The sentiment for this one is from the Hipster set.

Finally, this bird, no idea what kind of bird it is, but isn't his hair great?


The underpainting is most obvious on this one.  Normally you use the complementary color to what you want the image to be.  In this case, I knew the bird would be yellow, so I used purple for the underpainting.


The sentiment for this one I actually used in my previous post as well, but it is so appropriate for this time that I might be using it a whole lot.  It's from Simon Says Stamp's Healing Hugs set.

I definitely need to do some more experimenting with underpainting.  I liked the results, and I'm thinking I'll try some florals next.  

Hoping your week is going well and you're staying safe and healthy!

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