Underpaintings Gil Elvgren's Technique

At the end of my last painting session, I was very pleased with the progress of my Elvgren reproduction piece…. But when the sun came out the next morning, and that natural light hit my canvas- oh boy, I was NOT happy!

The artificial light I was painting under the day before had added a LOT of yellow, and had made my paint look much warmer than it was… which meant that I used a lot of cool, grayed-out colors. In the morning light, my “glowing” pinup was very cold… and looked possibly dead. Ugh. Rookie mistake. 

After kicking myself for being so foolish, I set to work. In order to get those warm, glowing skin-tones that Elvgren is famous for, I decided to do 2 things:

1) Get out my “daylight corrected” light bulbs- if I can’t paint under NATURAL LIGHT I’ll at least do the next best thing!

2) Change some of the paint colors in my palette- I gotta thaw this thing out! 

So the big question is: What colors SHOULD I be using? 

I have many books about Elvgren and his work… and while there are interesting tidbits about his setup, the most I could find out about his color palette was that he painted with 32 colors….. But what colors were they?

And that’s when I did what everyone “in this day and age” does- I turned to the internet for answers. And, without too much effort, I came upon a very cool blog called “Underpaintings” by Matthew D. Innis.

Although I wasn’t able to get the quick answer I wanted regarding Elvgren’s Palette, I did find his post about Elvgren insightful, and the suggestions in the “comments” section were also rather helpful.

When you have some time, I highly recommend checking out his whole blog:

http://underpaintings.blogspot.com/

“A forum posted by Matthew D. Innis which celebrates excellence in Representational Art - past, present, and future.”

As for me, I don’t think I’ll be expanding my palette to 32 colors just yet… BUT, I’m off to experiment with some paints I haven’t used before. I’ll let y’all know how it turns out :-)