Paper color

With oil painting, it's common for the painter to do an under painting first before the final image is painted. There are different types of under painting. One type is just a general wash imprimatura, basically tinting the canvas a color. Another type is a more descriptive painting, but just large shapes to define the overall value composition. There is another type that is a pretty detailed monochromatic painting of the final image, it's usually for a highly realistic painting.

In pastel, usually the painter doesn't tint the whole image with powders to tint it, because it's hard to work over that, so pastel papers come in many different colors for this purpose. There are however pastel painters who use the pastels for big shapes and then do a water wash on the whole paper, since pastel is water soluble it creates this water colour under painting. Kitty Wallis does great work using this technique.

On top of choosing a tinted paper, I also do another large shape under painting to layout the composition. Since I find drawing out the image before painting is really tedious, this method suits me really well.

In this painting I picked a gray blue paper. It was the end of spring and it turned out to work really well for this damp and wet day.

2013 04 30 - 6.5" x 8.5

I used a creamy yellow paper for this painting to give it a warm feel.

2013 04 10 - 6.5" x 8.5"

After painting many paintings using coloured paper, I wanted to go back to neutral lighter white, since I find using colour papers can sometimes be really frustrating because it's hard to render the more accurate colour if the pastel does not have very good covering powder or you want the paint to be thinner. These 2 paintings are done using the near white papers.