What coloured ground should you use?

First of all, what is a ground?

Simply, it’s the first layer that the rest of your painting sits on.

Second, why can’t you just paint on white?

Well, you can! Lots of artists go straight in on a white canvas, or an raw canvas, and paint happily away like that.

However, you’ll find a lot of artists start off with a base layer. Here are a few reasons why:

1) to “lift” the other colours on top. If you are mainly going to paint greens in a landscape, painting a warm colour underneath seems to vibrate with the green and help bring the colours alive. Artists can use burnt umber, fluoro pink, red, orange and yellow. Some even do a split colour - where the top is warm and the bottom is cool.

2) it unifies a painting. Starting off with the same colour all over can help all your colours gel together.

3) it can help you see the lights and darks. If you start with a mid-tone, you’re more likely to get your lights and darks correct. Starting with a white background can mean you don’t see the relationships between the colours so well. However, leaving the paper white is how watercolourists work, so might be worth considering having a white ground if you also work from light to dark.

4) a mid-tone covers the canvas. If you paint thinly, and hate the white of the canvas showing through unexpectedly, a coloured ground can help you make it looks more finished and professional.

5) it gets you started. Having a colour (or many colours) already down helps avoid the blank canvas scenario, akin the writer’s block.

6) it stops the paint looking patchy. As acrylic paint dries, it contracts a little, and so you can often find that once you've painted your layer of colour, when you come back to look at it, little patches of white can be seen here and there. Having a ground underneath means that those patchy bits won't be white and will look more intentional.

One thing to note though, is that if you want to have a bright yellow or white on the top of a mid-tone, you’ll need to do several coats. One coat to (rule them all), I mean, one coat to lighten the base colour, and then other layers over the top. Yellows tend to be quite transparent, so glazing a yellow over a lighter colour will make it pop, instead of mixing that yellow into white (which makes a pastel yellow).

Having said all that, it’s worth trying it both ways. I’ve been working for a while on a blush pink ground, but feel it might be time to try a lighter one again. We’ll see!