Shiva's Fire: Priming the canvas

After I finished with the dimensional paint going over the pattern, I hit the whole thing with a hair dryer to puff up the paint and then I put on a couple thin layers of blue gesso. The light blue in this picture is gesso. The dark blue is my first layer of acrylic paint over the gesso and the white is more gesso I put over the blue gesso to smooth out the texture. I built up several layers of gesso where the figure was going to go as a way to deemphasize the pattern underneath. This involved putting a layer down, letting it dry, sanding it, then putting on another layer. After these steps were complete I was finally ready to paint. You can see my reference photos on the wall.