I’m finally starting to lay paint on this background (see the bottom of the post). The magenta underpainting is slicker than snot on a doorknob, and the first layer of paint didn’t stick to it very well in some places. It’s reminiscent of the trials and tribulations I had painting with oils on smooth Gessobord. So, perhaps my problem with that whole thing was a lack of tooth. I’ll sand the gesso less next time and let you know.

Anyway, this is my first painting using gamut mapping. I had my color wheel all ready and cut a triangle into a sheet of palette paper. I picked my gamut and taped the sucker down.

My three primary tubes are Primary Green Light, Quin. Red, and Cerulean Blue. I wanted to start with the neutral grey in the middle, and so mixed the three together. Looks pretty neutral to me, maybe a bit brown. Excellent. I added white to give myself two shades:

I proceeded to paint it onto the magenta underpainting. The more I painted, the greener it looked. It’s a pretty cool effect to see just how relative color is in our brain! The color on the palette looks nothing like the color on the board. And once I paint over the magenta, it’ll look different yet again.

p.s. you can see how it was tough to get the grey to stick to the underpainting. I love learning.