Toning A Canvas

One of the first things you might want to do when you get a bright shiny white canvas is tone it. That takes all of the white down so that you're working from a middle ground out to your extremes of white and black. So let's talk about toning a canvas. What you may want to do and how I go about it. Hi, I'm Katie Lydiard and join me as I tone a canvas.

So when I see my white canvas here, the first thing I'm gonna think about is, what subject am I going to be painting? It could be something that I want to be a bit more dramatic. So I might want to go for maybe a black and blue type of mixture or maybe I want something a bit more autumnal. And so I'll pick up some brown and maybe some yellow ochre, maybe a touch of red in there as well. But ultimately, what I like to do is vary it throughout the entire canvas itself.

So I'll grab some mineral spirits. So it starts out pretty inky. And my go to is my raw umber here. I had some brown and splash it up there real quick and you can see that it's obviously very transparent. The white is still showing through that color, but it's not white anymore.

Of course, which is exactly what I'm going for. I'm gonna add a little green just for some variation. See how that looks. Excellent. And this is pretty much how I go about it.

I just want to keep that variation so that if any of that tone is showing through in the final painting, then I don't have to worry about the white of the canvas showing through which is kind of the whole point of this. But also it just adds that little extra layer of, of depth and interest in the painting. So keeping it very inky, very loose, there is no right or wrong answer to this. It's so easy. But again, it adds so much to the painting, even though a lot of it won't be seen, you can kind of just warm it up and you can see I'm adding whatever colors are there.

I have no rhyme or reason particularly, except to cover the canvas in some sort of tone, to get rid of that white. Some people like to do a very dark tone and then they'll paint something really bright and dramatic on top of that dark tone. Or sometimes they like to use that dark tone as an atmosphere which I think is a lot of fun to work with. But I tend to like the kind of more brown autumnal type tones in my work. So that's kind of what I'm going for right now.

Add a little bit more blue. It's starting to feel a little kind of green red here. A little brown, I'm gonna add some blue and as this dries, you will see some of these marks in the final dried tone, but it's not really going to matter much because like I said, a lot of this is gonna be covered up in the final painting. What I don't want are streaks of color because those might show through in subsequent layers of paint. So I'm gonna try and feather those out anything that's a little too harsh.

So there we go, we have a nicely toned canvas. Now, I do want this to dry at least overnight before I start painting on it. But thank you so much for joining and I hope that you try toning some of your own canvases before you start painting.