Complementary underpainting Theory

The way I decided to go about learning how to paint better, was to look further afield than just miniature forums and sites for more or less the same thing repeated like NMM tutorials. And while I was searching the four corners of the WWW, I came across a very interesting blog post called The Theory behind creating complementary underpaintings in color pencil. And after reading this I felt this was something I have not read about anywhere related to our hobby the only post or tutorial close is a dragon from start to finish and when I mentioned it to very good painters they already knew, but I must of been out this information was passed on so I thought in the nature of what we are here for I will tell you about it the best I can.



The idea of Complementary basecoating is just what you may think, using the complementary color as a basecoat for what desired color. But you may be thinking what's the point or how is that meant to help, but to understand you have to have some understanding of color theory, now I am not going to go into the HUGE subject of color theory as I do not understand it all, but with any luck we can all understand contrasting color and how this can help to paint a better miniature.

Ok, now the main use of using complementary color together in a painting is to draw our attention to a certain area or focal point of the painting, drawing, miniature and so on.

Here is an excellent example of the use of complementary color used together on a miniature painted by Martin Footit and won Gold in the open category. 

 but when you use the complementary color underneath the main color you wish to have you are able to create a hole new depth to your painting depending on how much or little you layer the basecoat before adding your choice color plan.

Ok to start off with, you need to decide what the color is going to be, and in my example later I will be using red as my main color and as we can all see on the color wheel (if you don't have one) the complementary color is green the same as the Golden demon winner picture above.

Ok to start off with I am using reaper series HD blood red and Leaf green, and to begin with I did a very thin layer of leaf green.

And from there I built up the green in areas that I wanted to have more of a shadow and as this is a sort of show and tell I done it in places where there would not normally be a shadow.

It is now that I started to layer over the Blood red.

Ok, this might be where you are thinking that this is going to look bad, but this was only the first coat.

As you can see the more that you layer the green changes how the red looks.

And now you can see the effect that you can make with the use of Complementary underpainting.

And in this I used leaf green because it is a darker green and there for I could use it to do the shading on the cape, there is alot I don't know about this this subject as i am only new to it but I definitely can see the use and benefits of it. 

Warning
When picking the complementary colors you must remember that paints are not always the color they say if when I was playing with this method I used a green that had blue in it and completely change the effect. So try and keep to a color that is more or less as you would see it on the wheel if you want to try and replicate the same results. But that does not mean that you should not experiment and see what you can come up with. 

I hope this was helpful I am hoping to do more post like this in the future similar to this and what i find on the internet.

I would like to thank Carrie Lewis for the original post The Theory behind creating complementary underpaintings in color pencil which inspired me to make this post.