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Building an Underpainting
In addition to being a good brush for sketching, the Real Round works well for quickly laying down broad areas. For the background of your painting, choose a color that will complement your subject. I chose a subtle complementary color scheme in this piece, as the turquoise blue-greens of the background complement—they’re across the color wheel from—the reds, pinks, and purples I used on the flower.
Using the Real Round, rough in the background using broad brushstrokes. (My brush size varied between 15 and 50 pixels.) Figure 8 shows the background underpainting partially completed.
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Figure 8 Laying in the background of the painting, using colors that will complement the subject.
Next, I laid in base colors for the flower. To lay in the base colors for your subject, open the Brush Selector and choose the Real Oils Short variant of Oils. As with the background, don’t focus on detail as this stage. Carefully observing the subject, the forms, and the lighting, block in the shapes and base colors. Use the Mixer and Color panels as your paint palettes to pick up color, and use the Real Oils Short to apply the paint. Vary the size of the brush as you work. (To block in the smaller areas of the petals in my painting, I reduced the brush size to about 10 pixels.) Figure 9 shows the base colors laid in on my flower.
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Figure 9 Using the Real Oils Short variant of Oils to paint the base colors on the flower.