If you’ve watched any of my painting time-lapse videos, you know I usually start with an orange base on my canvases. Why? It’s a fairly middle value, so it’s a good starting point. Plus, it warms up my painting, even if you never see the orange beneath.
Jump ahead to about the 57-second mark to see me tone the canvas orange.
This is called toning the canvas.
It establishes a base so sections of white gesso that smooths and protects the canvas don’t peek through. The tone can serve to unify colors somewhat. It’s generally a good idea to start with a middle value, so the artist can easily add darks and lights to build the composition. A lot of beginners start with stark white and can only make it darker. If you start with a middle tone, you can go darker or lighter.
Traditionally, painters start with a rich gray or brown tone, roughly halfway between the darkest and lightest colors. If I were painting more traditionally, I would begin my canvases with a wash of warm gray or burnt sienna. And what is brown but a dark orange?
I aim to create bright, vibrant canvases, so I use orange.
The warm tone creates excitement, energy, and warmth, regardless of the dominant color in the end. I think people sense that energy even if they never see the underpainting. Every now and then a little bit of the orange peeks through.
When I first started painting I used Cerulean Blue, which is a vibrant blue on the greener side of things. I’ve always liked toning my canvases with bright colors rather than neutrals. It makes the painting exciting for me. I think that carries over to my viewers.
I’m not the first person to tone with orange.
I actually picked up the orange technique from Robert Burridge. It’s how he was taught, actually. I wasn’t taught to tone the canvas any particular way. I discovered Bob a few years ago when I was trying to figure out how to bring more brightness and energy to my painting, and I think the orange underpainting does the job.
“After the Storm,” 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 8×8 inches.
I’ve been collecting so many photos of such things that I’ve made an album on my iPhone and called it “Detritus.” It’s got worn tape, badly pressure-washed places, and generally “gunky” places around town that have this weird, dirty beauty to them.
This is a theme that’s been showing up in my paintings the past dozen years or so.
(The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine Songtrack CD stays in the changer in my wife’s minivan. So it’s on heavy rotation on the way to and from school, church, Chick-fil-A, the grandparents’, anywhere else we might go. The kids love it and listen to it all the time.)
Saint Patrick is the primary patron saint of Ireland, who was a missionary there in the second half of the fifth century. There is a lot of legend and lore surrounding him, most notably that he drove snakes out of Ireland and that he used the Shamrock to illustrate the concept of the Trinity to Irish pagans. As a teenager he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and forced to work as a shepherd but he eventually escaped back to Britain. Later he went back to Ireland as a missionary, and that turned out to be his life’s work.
I didn’t start painting until I was about 20 years old. I had drawn since I was 2, and played around with watercolors and acrylics a time or two, but it didn’t really “take” for me.
I managed to ghetto-rig a Flip UltraHD video camera to the ceiling, and with iMovie, I sped up the video so that many hours of painting clocks in at a hair over nine minutes.
Two years ago, I set out on an ambitious project.