Come scegliere il colore giusto per il fondo di un dipinto a olio

The preparation of the background is not important because it isolates the colors from the gray canvas on which we are going to apply the color, but the colored preparation is essential to give a precise imprint to our painting, to take advantage of its characteristics depending on the color that we are going to put on it, above this preparation and to have an increasingly larger and more satisfying body of color. This is essential for any type of painting. What I present in this session is a small painting, 30 cm by 40 cm, and in the first time a preparation was made the day before the painting itself, but only one day, so that the color does not reach the drawing of the painting completely dry. We will see how important it will be for the color to have a greater grip and a greater body. I just have to ask you to put a like to the video if you found it to your liking, and if you found it to your liking, share it on your social profiles and comment below the description. And don't forget, if you haven't already, to subscribe to the channel. I just have to wish you a good vision, a good day to everyone. See you soon. Yellow of Cadmium Lemon, Red of Mars, Land of Natural Shadow and Red of Venice. These are the four colors that make up the mixture that I am going to use as the basis of the painting that I am going to make today. The painting that I am going to make today is a landscape painting, so it is a landscape where the main shades will be blue and green, especially blue, which will take a very relevant part of the sky in the context of the painting, and then a third of the painting below will be the landscape, so it will be a view from above and a vision, a deep view of the countryside. So let's say it's an excuse. The video is an excuse to show you the characteristics and peculiarities of this preparation. It is precisely the preparation, I would dare to say, that is the protagonist of our painting, even when it will no longer be seen, or almost, as we will see later. The protagonist for two fundamental characteristics that make it essential. The first of these reasons is related to the color, to the chromatic choice of this red, which is a warm red, which is a brick red, a red that allows me to spread a preparation that can enhance the blue colors, the blue and green colors that I will put on the painting. And then we will see how I will not completely cover the preparation of the painting, so that this continues to come out every now and then, at some point, to maintain and enhance, to give even more vibration to the same. Now you will see that when I finish the preparation, obviously I told you that the color should not be too strong, because it should not be put too much on the body, it is quite dense, but now with a cardboard I am going to remove all the color in exuberance, which I do not need in a decisive way for the painting, so I pass the brush over it and pull everything so that it is absolutely amalgamated. Once I have done this operation, I let it dry for a day, but not more, because here comes the second important feature of this preparation. Letting it dry for just one day, the painting is not completely dry, but it gives the possibility to the color to be spread in such a way that with the brush we feel that the color must be pulled with a little force. It is as if the preparation underneath clings to the brush and does not let it slip away. This is important because the color above maintains that body and that necessary density, which is essential for a painting of this type, for what I want to obtain on this painting. I am looking for the right position because it is not easy to not have a reflection on the painting, on the light, especially with the means that are available to me at the moment. I hope to have other means, a more sophisticated camera, in order to be able to give you absolutely better images. However, what is important is the procedure. At this moment I have drawn the lines that I need to establish the limit and what are the main structures. As you can see, there is a transverse cloud that is placed more or less in the middle of the painting and a line at the bottom that delimits the part of the sky, where I will then draw the land and the countryside. Now I leave the space free and with a red background, where I will then go to paint, I will go to place the lighter color to define the clouds. So, at first, I make this stretch of blue in this way and, as you can see, you can also notice it from here. You see that the color does not slide, it always remains with its corporeality, which is really important. I invite you to try this, because it is decisive, especially if you make a body painting and also a painting on a prepared background, which is obviously almost dry. What I am giving, of course, is blue cobalt together with titanium white. You see, this body on the right is a cloudy body, where I will then place the white. Now I will leave this red line at the bottom to be able to draw the other part of the sky. The white that I am giving for the preparation of the clouds is not completely white, it is titanium white with a small part of light yellow ocher, a small part that gives it that not very cold tone that allows me, even here, to be able to restore a materiality that, even if I paint a painting so small and with little color, this shade of white mixed with this light yellow ocher gives me the possibility of having this chromatic density. I anticipate an inconvenience that, on the one hand, was a misfortune, but on the other hand it was interesting because it gave me the opportunity to rethink and show you something that otherwise I would not have shown you. Now I paint all the part related to the first preparation of the clouds. Then, after this, I finish with a second preparation of the clouds, and then also the central cloud, and then, clearly, I finish a second spread of the clouds of the entire upper part of the painting. This part here, the file of this part here, is damaged, so I did not have the opportunity to recover it. So what did I do? I repeated part of the painting, a piece, a detail of the painting, and I propose it to you without the same painting, without having prepared the background with this red that we used to prepare the painting, but it was prepared with a neutral color, a gray, blue, light blue, and it was prepared in a very subtle way, leaving only a small patina, without giving much body to the color. And so you will see the difference that we find, which is clearly found between a painting on a preparation, I repeat, like this, in which the underlying color remains attached to the brush, even though we paint with the color on top, while with a preparation, with a non-preparation, as in the painting that I will do to show you how it would have gone otherwise, the color slides, and so I can't get that body that I get now with this preparation here. Obviously, another thing that I am sorry not to show, but that I will try to show you, is to show you the two things, the palette and the painting that I am doing, because I understand how important it is to see how the colors are mixed. But in this particular video, what interested me the most was to make you reflect on the importance of preparation, not only from a chromatic point of view, but precisely from a point of view of the material result of the brush and the conduction of the painting itself on the canvas. Now I am finishing the first preparation related to the blending of the various shades of blue cobalt mixed with white. There was a moment like this, in which I used a little bit, just a tip of yellow ochre that I mixed together with white, as I did above, in the clouds, at the top. However, this is in a minor tone, in fact I mean, the light ones, as you can see, are various, variable and varied, but not intense, precisely because the first blending must be a half way. As you can see, this is the color as it was spread on the canvas, and it is the result of the second blending of the color. Now, below, I am doing a preparation with the red blue cobalt of Mars and a little bit of yellow of cadmium, but let's focus for a moment on the painting that I am doing above. You will immediately notice when I put the color on the sky, because I put, in the part where you see orange, I put a strip of preparation of this painting that we have below, but it is not dry, so it is practically wet on wet. However, you can already see how the color below cannot be absorbed by the preparation, so the result becomes completely different, it is difficult to be able to spread, precisely because it slips, it is as if it were slipping. You can see that I have not used any kind of diluent above, but you can see how this preparation, you see how the color cannot have a body, and this gives it to itself, the corporeality gives it to itself, precisely this type of preparation that I did below, under the painting. Even the white itself, put on a white, where under the white there is no such preparation, cannot have a body. I know, I repeat myself a lot and I always say almost the same things about this painting, but the attention must be concentrated on this fact, because then the rendering, the rendering of the tones, the rendering of the atmosphere, the rendering of the clouds, is also linked to the possibility of having this ductility and this modeling of the matter, which in a situation like this I cannot obtain. It is a feeling that I feel when I paint, but you also see it as a result, especially when we go to see the painting more closely, because I tried to do, indeed, I also propose some close-ups, so then you can see how the result is, and this also gives me the possibility to put on the white that I gave, further white, and therefore perhaps without the yellow with which I gave the preparation under the light ones, and to be able to have that consistency that otherwise it would not have. So even wet on wet, with a preparation like the one we did, we have the possibility to refine and define the light ones in a consistent way. In such a small painting, because it is 30x40, the brushstroke, almost more than a very large painting, has a very important value, and when we give it and make a mistake, or put a dark one where it should not be, because then we realize, it immediately jumps to the eye. So the practice on small formats is important because it disciplines you to pay attention to the whole painting as a whole. Every small detail, every small brushstroke, is reflected on the whole painting. The suggestions of the landscape, of this type of landscape, are many as far as I am concerned, because it is a landscape that I frequent a lot, since I was present in the countryside, in the Basso Monferrato, for all my childhood, for all my adolescence, so I had a way to study it in a deep way, and therefore to accumulate a remarkable series of sketches that allow me to draw to evoke this type of depth. Now, here, blue cobalt, yellow with more or less white. Then, for the lights, we will see what other color I used. The thing that interests me is that it is very strange, or that I am the one who notices it. When I have set the sky in a certain way, and I am quite satisfied with what I see, even if the satisfaction is not relative to the moment, and therefore it can also be subject to revision, I always find myself building the landscape below and synthesizing it more and more. The more the landscape above the sky and the clouds is fulfilled, the more the landscape below, I personally find pleasure in defining it in a very synthetic way, which does not mean stylized. It means that a summary of the plans is made and some of them are taken away in favor of a greater reading of themselves. I also really like to draw the variety of shadows that the clouds make on the surrounding painting. As you can see now, this dark that I am putting, where I do not deny that I have also put, with blue cobalt and cadmium yellow, a little bit of natural earthshade. This dark suggests me the shadow of the clouds and therefore this space that I always look for, both in the drawings and in the paintings, to invent a space, to invent a possible place, whether it is abstract, figurative or surreal, this does not matter to me, but to build a space perceived as a space, as a place where you can enter. So the sign, and we always return to the same point, the sign has a fundamental importance, because it builds the space and seeing the sign that gradually forms gives a different connotation to the whole painting. And even to me, now that I look at it, it often makes me say, that thing you could stop, or you could do it differently, and sometimes I resume a painting and I modify it not so much for the final result, but because when I see a video then I realize that at that moment, at that point, I took a path that I should not have taken, which then led me in a direction that did not give me the result I hoped for. And so very often I resume, even if I don't make videos, I resume just to see myself again and to understand how I came to a certain type of solution. Here, for example, I need a correspondence between those two clouds that pass through the painting from left to right and this dark line that goes down a little, here you see that now I stretch, it goes down on the left and then rises on the right. And this correspondence, I wouldn't want to make it heavier and so I'll probably decide to start putting a little orange to be able to illuminate a little the underlying part. The brushstrokes, an interesting tool, I need it just for better, I need it just because I want to see the brushstrokes up close. When, I repeat, when you have the opportunity, go and get closer to the paintings. Maybe I will, because I have many, I have taken many, make a video on Van Gogh's brushstrokes because this is his use of various brushes. Even in some paintings he used 13, 14, 15, because he had this frequent use of going back to the color and giving each brush a particular color, precise to be able to add colors on the canvas without dirtying the brush, but also as a characteristic of the brushstroke. This is the intervention of the yellow ochre and a little of yellow earth with a tip of Mars virus. It will be done there and also in the lines below. I was talking about this video and then I reflected, because I'm reading this great book of which I took inspiration for a letter, for a video that I invite you to go and listen to because it talks about an unpublished Van Gogh, a non-painter Van Gogh, at the beginning of his career, when, who knows, he never thought to start painting with a brush. I put the link above so you can go and see it. He thought, he had realized his solitude, the possibility of the solitude of the painter by making himself a community, becoming a community. That's why he calls himself Van Gogh. He dreamed of this community of painters because he was aware that it was very complex to make his paintings. And in the brushstrokes, very close, you can see and understand how important the vision of the living is and the restitution of the painting of the living. Here, in a very humble way, let's say it's almost primitive, I try to synthesize, to make you read the brushstroke and to make you perceive this structure, as I repeat, that makes a brushstroke so clear that it mixes little with the one below and it is so covering. But it's really because there's preparation underneath. So the brushstrokes in the paintings, especially those of Van Gogh, which are, let's say, as far as modernity is concerned, or at least the painting of the 18th century, almost a unicum for the thickness of them. But also those of our painters. I was referring in the last video to Segantini and to Pelliccio del Volpedo. The color that becomes matter, that covers the canvas. This painting is much more synthetic in the lower part than it is more evocative in the upper part. So there's a dialogue between sky and earth. I need this blue to give it even more depth, if I ever manage to do what I'm doing. Because then the eye is the one who thinks about reconstructing the shapes, instead of reading a tree as a false plane, as the shadow of a slope, of a hill, of a forest. And then, as I said before, look at how the white, on this fresh surface, manages to be full-bodied. I'm not saying that the color underneath is already dry, but this type of preparation has a lot of advantages. It gives us the opportunity to work on a solid surface, a concrete surface, I would say. The white that we put on top, you see how it manages to be luminous, even though it is fresh. Usually, as I said before, sometimes the white goes down a little, and so the light tones need to be picked up. On white it's interesting, as in the history of art, especially in the 5th and 6th century, to despise it, there's almost a contempt for white. There's a lot of literature about this, both about white then, and about black, and what happened to black in the late 1800s. These are all aspects of the daily practice of the painter, of painting, which is interesting to develop. Maybe I'll have the chance to do it. I need a lot of white, because all the part that I'm going to touch now will take into consideration the white for the upper part, and maybe the cadmium yellow with a little bit of titanium white to give it a little more light, to make it more luminous, to give it the impression, the suggestion, that it's possible to reconstruct a background through the brushstroke. The brushstroke builds the space, and the space is used to enhance the brushstroke. I'm not talking about my brushstroke, I'm talking in general. The sign is the definitive drawing of what we think has to be realized. And this is done through these gestures, these brushstrokes that we call with this name, these brushstrokes, which are nothing more than the materialization of thought, of our partial vision, of the segment of the world that is traversed by our gaze. I'm happy with how the channel is going, and with your follow-up, and with the passion you put into watching and commenting on my videos. I'm very distracted, and I really need you to help me to dig into the various facets, the various foundations of the videos to be able, by commenting, to restore a certain dimension and correct certain types of information, as you have done and as you always do, in addition to giving me a lot of support. So I ask you to subscribe to the channel. I ask you on these bright brushes, on this light cadmium yellow, which has this small tip of titanium. Subscribe to the channel, like the video if you liked it, if you found it useful and informative, and share the video on your social networks. This is an important thing, an interesting thing, because it allows the video to be noticed, to be highlighted by YouTube according to its algorithms. You can also share it on WhatsApp, which is a fairly agile way of sharing. And then comment, of course, as you are doing, also suggesting themes on which you would like me to focus and maybe devote a particular attention. Of course, the series will continue on colors and the story of the Penna Biru will also continue. That absolutely will never be missing, also because it is truly an infinite saga. Lately, about the Penna Biru, there are some interesting news from the point of view of the inks and the pens themselves, which are worth visiting and seeing how the research proceeds. Returning to our painting, this division, this separation between an earthy color and a light color is a color that, however, restores the whole body of the brushstroke, which, I repeat, thanks to this fantastic preparation for a landscape and for blue and green electronics. I repeat, it is light cadmium yellow, red Venice, red Mars and natural earthshade. Little natural earthshade. Now I would like to show you, a little up close, what remains of this preparation, because I let this one continue to show itself. You see, this red that shows itself in the middle of the clouds and makes the whole composition vibrant, the whole painting. And it binds it together, both below and above, coming out homogeneously from everywhere. If you look closely at the painting, you will see that this preparation comes out everywhere. When you look at a painting and you say, this painting is about to finish, or it is finished, and it happens to me, but especially with these little ones, with these faster paintings, there is always something that you want to add, but in the end it is better not to add anything because it takes away the freshness, the freshness of the work. Yes, there may be some dark shades, as in this case, because it helps to be in consonance with the dark vegetation below, so it has its own reason for being.