The Color of Light: An Artist's Blog

I'm constantly surprised at how much my palette changes when I work on a dark surface. A color in my hand seems to magically transform to a much different color on the surface (hello simultaneous contrast!). Overall I find my palette becomes much lower key than usual on a dark surface to achieve the result I'm after, mainly because colors appear much lighter on a dark surface than they would on a lighter one. 

When I came up for the idea for The keeper I knew I wanted to work on a dark surface because it would do a lot of the work for me with all the dark drama in the background. So I decided to pull out a 24x18 inch dark UArt panel, mainly because I have a ton of it and wanted to use it up as lately I've been much more keen on La Carte or Pastelmat. But I'm so glad I did. 

The effects on dark UArt can be so lovely. Dreamy, smudgy marks that layer beautifully made me remember how much I enjoy this sanded paper. Instead of reaching for it to "use it up", in the future I think I'll be reaching for it more because I enjoy the results I can achieve with it. 

As I began this piece you can see that the tone of UArt dark is not a true black. It's more of a charcoal. I like this because I can add darker darks as accents. I was working from a reference photo and decided to take some creative license on the composition. You can see that the branch in the middle of the piece was added in with the simple mark up tool on my iPhone. After I had started the painting I wasn't sure I liked that branch just ended (apparently it had broken off) and thought it would help the viewer move around the piece if it was strategically lengthened. 

As with most of my work, even on a dark surface I generally work from dark to light, although I like to get all the values in at the very beginning to give myself a value roadmap - hence the light sky at the top even in this early stage. It's also good to get my most chromatic color in right away.

I really enjoyed working on this piece. If you haven't worked on a dark surface before give it a try!