Laying down an Acrylic Imprimatura
How to simply lay down the 'first stain' of paint on the canvas or panel for your value studies.
Acrylic is useful for imprimatura as it dries very fast. If you are an oil purist and do not wish to involve acrylic in your process, its fine to use oil. If using oil, an iron and manganese bearing earth or iron oxide are recommended for their stability.
It is not recommended to use a modern carbon-molecule based chemical dye such as alizerin or quinacridone for instance, because they may oxidise and break down with time, which would have large consequences for the integrity of the painting. Earth tones such as raw umber, burnt umber, raw sienna, burnt sienna etc are very stable. Venetian red or mars violet may also be chosen. These all have evidence in tradition.
Higher chroma hues such as cadmium red or ultramarine blue do not have a long provenance but can be experimented with. They will impact the painting because higher chroma (i.e more colorful) choices will strongly impact the color-space of the painting. Whereas semi-neutrals (aka, browns a greys) are milder and thus easier to ‘assert’ color glazes upon later, without having to strongly interact with an intense base-color.
For the first exercise, a raw umber or other earth pigment applied leanly has much to recommend it. If it was good enough for Leonardo Da Vinci then its good enough for us 🙂
How to simply lay down the ‘first stain’ of paint on the canvas or panel for your value studies.