ELI5: What Is Underpainting?

Underpainting is a simple, first layer of paint that an artist puts on a canvas to plan where the light, shadows, and shapes will go before adding the real colors.

Think of underpainting like getting dressed in the morning or building something fun:

• Putting on an undershirt: Before you put on your bright, fancy party shirt, you might wear a plain undershirt. Nobody focuses on the undershirt, but it keeps you warm and helps your top shirt sit just right.
• Coloring in a coloring book: When you use a coloring book, the thick black lines are already there to show you where the shapes are, making it easy to fill in the spaces. In underpainting, the artist paints their own soft lines and shadows first, creating their own coloring book page on a blank canvas.
• Building with LEGO bricks: If you want to build a giant red castle, you might use plain gray bricks on the inside to make the shape strong, and then cover the outside with shiny red bricks so it looks pretty.

This first layer helps them in three big ways:

• It stops the canvas from being scary and completely white.


• It shows where the sunny, bright spots and the dark, shady spots belong.


• It makes the final picture look deeper and more realistic, because that hidden bottom layer softly glows through the top colors.