The Color of Light: An Artist's Blog

Chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and dark in a scene, has been employed by artists for centuries as one of the most successful ways to create drama. I've always been drawn to scenes with strong contrasts.  Rembrandt, da Vinci, and Vermeer are well known from employing the technique. 

When I saw this photo of my friend Vickie's cat I immediately asked if I could paint it. I loved the dramatic rim lighting on the cat's fur and knew it would read well as a painting. First I mounted a piece of dark Uart to some foam core board, because the paper was quite curled - an issue Uart can have if there's a lot of humidity in the air. Then I sketched in the drawing and using a mixture of warm and cool neutrals built up the piece dark to light. 

I enjoyed painting this and will be on the lookout for more opportunities to employ chiaroscuro in my paintings!

It's fun to experiment with different methods to keep things interesting, so I decided to work on a fairly new surface to me and employ a technique I don't often use - a watercolor underpainting. Part of the reason I don't use it is because water tends to buckle or warp a lot of pastel papers. 

But I really thought some vibrant watercolor would lend itself well to this painting since it has so much green in it. I decided to mount a piece of Pastel Premiere paper in the color Italian Clay to a piece of foam core board. I used Scotch 568 mounting adhesive for the mounting process. It's just a big double sided tape really. It works pretty good but it did stick to the paper it comes on instead of my foam board in a couple places, and I then had to spot correct with some double sided tape I had on hand. I like Crescent adhesive mounting board better because it doesn't have this problem and the adhesive is already on the board. 

However you do it, mounting paper will eliminate the buckling problem.

After getting my initial drawing down, I laid in some very vibrant watercolor for my underpainting. It was interesting to see how vibrant the underpainting stayed even on a toned ground like the Italian Clay. I tried to keep the values of the underpainting similar to what I wanted the values in the final piece to be. That way I could allow some of the underpainting to show through and it would still read logically, as well as create a vibrant depth when the underpainting and final pastel layers played together. 

In a landscape such as this one I tend to work top to bottom and back to front, mainly because I don't want a lot of pastel drift clinging to the bottom of the piece. It can be blown off but I don't want to deal with it.  I also  like to put a mark down for my darkest dark and lightest light right at the beginning to give myself a value map to work with. Then I know I won't go lighter or darker than those marks. 

This piece was fun and I really loved working on the mounted paper with watercolor. Little bits of the warm underpainting show through and create life and depth in the piece. I'll be doing this a lot more in the future. 

1. The initial drawing  

2. The watercolor underpainting

 3. Laying in the dry pastel 

I love working on a toned ground. It not only adds depth to a painting, it does a lot of the work. A great example is this piece I recently completed. It's a view of my house in the morning, looking down from a grove of trees in the front yard. 

I decided to try out a new paper I'd never used before, Pastel Premiere. While it is quite abrasive and ate up my pastels, I really enjoyed how it grabbed the pigment. And I loved in particular the vibrant red tone of this paper. I allowed areas of the red color to shine through in the final piece, expecially in the area of interest - the house. 

It works to have those bits of red shining though in areas (see the the upper window and around the garage doors) because while it is not the local color  the actual color of the object), it is a similar value. So I was able to let a bit of that unexpected red peek through while still keeping the value structure believable.