 Morning class, I'm Will Kemp from Will Kemp Art School and for this lesson we're going to look at the amazing power of a tonal ground and how it can be the one mistake so many beginners are making you don't even realise it. The first thing that you often do when you first start painting is to grab one of these, a white canvas and then to start your painting directly on top of here. For most of my paintings, I'd say about 80 to 90% I use what's called a tonal ground. So here's one that is made with yellow ochre, you can see what a bright colour it is, it's got this really lovely glow to it underneath it. This could do so many great things for your painting, it can enable your paintings to be made quicker, you can establish your tones from your darkest darks to your lightest lights really quickly, you can bring a real mood to your picture very very simply and it could be the one technique that can take your paintings from looking really amateur to really professional really easily. So I'm going to show you now how I make a yellow ochre tonal ground and some of the other colors you can use for a more subtle approach. So depending which brand of paint you're using the actual thickness of the acrylics will vary. So this is from golden paints and this is a heavy body range so when I put that out with the palette knife you can start to see it really holds its shape very well. So when you're first applying a color ground onto your canvas you don't want to apply it too thick so you don't want to apply it straight from the tube because if you do that what happens is firstly you'll use loads and loads of paint and secondly the actual other layers of acrylic that you paint on top won't actually be able to sit on top as easily you wanted to have a bit of absorption to it. So if you look at this sample here you can see how it's very very faintly applied I can still even on these parts here just about see some of the white of the actual canvas shining through. So you've just got to think of it like you're trying to stay in this canvas with the minimal amount of paint so it has a tone of color to it but it isn't too thick you still want to have that nice feeling of the texture of the canvas and the absorption still in the canvas. So to dilute acrylics you just add water to them to dilute them down well if you work a lot of the time with acrylics to speed up the process you can use what's called a fluid acrylic so this is an indian yellow from golden paints and a fluid acrylic and a fluid acrylic just comes thinner to start with so you see here that's got a lot more runny of a consistency so to match that with this I'm just going to add some more water to it and you're trying to let me put some in here so we can get going with it we're trying to get a consistency that's really a bit like milk so it's quite a watery mix here just to show you on the canvas you see how it covers it over but it's not too thick for this example I'll probably have it a little bit thicker than that not quite as watery I'll just take that off add a bit more of the acrylic paint into it and a bit more water so what I do to apply the color ground when working with the acrylics is if I'm working on a box canvas and I want to paint the edges I always paint the edges first then for applying my color ground I always usually use a decorators brush so then I'll grab some of the mixed acrylic onto the brush so it's just on the edge of the brush and then you see when I paint it on I'm just putting it on quite thinly I'm not adding loads of water to it I'm leaving the consistency as it is and I'm just like pushing it into the edges into the corners especially these corners in here so you see how it just stains the canvas that's really what we're after we're still getting some of that glow of the white from underneath but it's created this nice even tone onto the canvas that we can work on top of that's looking absolutely lovely on there so I'll just work around the edges so you can be quite rough to start with and then just go over it the same direction with your brush just so you get that nice smooth finish so if you need to mix up a bit more paint just do that at each stage so that consistency between milk and cream really that's what we're after the first part you can put on there quite roughly again and then just work the same direction watch any edges just get it nice and smooth so you don't get any real overruns and then just overlap your brush marks and now what we've got is a lovely colored ground so that is thin enough that when we put a pencil mark on or a next layers of paint they'll grab onto that canvas really easily but it's a pike enough so it covers overall the white and then we can build up our painting from here so here's an example of a painting that I've taken to the next stage so you can start to see I've got all the darks in here and then I can add the lights in here with the titanium white and start to see the pencil marks as well so I'm building up the whole picture really really simply just by building up this color ground to start with and then the other layers on top of that so this is a gray mid-tone tonal ground and this is made with a mix of raw umber and white just painted onto board for this example if I'm doing a portrait where I'm using skin tones I don't really want the yellow ochre next to it because if I put the yellow ochre next to my face it's really really hard it's really strong it's hard for me then to judge the subtleties of skin tone whereas if I've got this color which is a lot cooler I can have that as the underpainting and start to bring the skin tones on top of that so it will really help me to balance the warm and the cool and help to judge those subtleties of colors so much easier I can also again apply nice darks onto here and really strong highlights so it will help me to judge my tonal range within my painting you can make a tonal ground in any color you want you can use a pigment straight from the tube just water down or you can mix in white with it all you've got to think of is what mood or feeling you want in your painting and then to decide what color will suit that best so Turner used to make lots of different colors on his papers so one would be a burnt umber brownie color one would be a blue underpainting and then when he feels out sketching or out looking at a scene to paint he'll just go through his colors that he had with him and see which one had the general tone the general color tone to what he was looking at then they just start to work on to that color and half your works already done for you because you've got a great base to work on to and these are the concepts that I work with from my paintings and they can be so effective to get really professional results from your acrylics this is Wilkham from Wilkham Art School click above to subscribe so you don't miss out on the next lessons