Feminina Oscura

This painting is one of my first attempts at using acrylic glazes over underpainting. This is an old technique developed with the advent of oils. It allows the pigment to sit in the medium and the light to pass through it, bouncing back from the canvas to the eye. The technique creates a more luminous color and allows the artist to create sublte manipulations in tone without sacrificing the intensity of color.

Doing the underpainting helps the artist think through the composition and tone first, before developing the color scheme. In some ways it is less spontaneous and more analytical. In fact, this is why I am using it right now. It helps me to refine my understanding of the relationship between tone, color and form -- the age old puzzle pieces of the visual artist