One sure sign of a novice painter is the pale, tentative look their paintings possess.
It’s a good beginning to master drawing, perspective and composition.
However, when a student begins to add color, light and dark to the design, all the fine drawing in the world just fades away when a wimpy painter is holding the paintbrush.
You are the master of your tabouret and all you survey, so learn how to control and employ your paints to your best advantage.
Don’t let those tubes of rich, vibrant color intimidate you. You are the artist – or at least that’s the goal.
Painting From Darkest Dark To Lightest Light
One trap beginning painters fall into is using a medium tone for all their paints. If you’re unsure what this means, snap a photo of your latest painting. Put it in your favorite, easy-to-use photo-editing program and edit it to become a black and white picture. Now, take a look at the results. The chances are good that it’s pretty much all medium gray in tone with few real lights or darks. It looks kind of bland, doesn’t it?
If you don’t have a digital camera or a computer handy, just stand back from your painting and squint your eyes to examine your painting. You’ll get the same sort of idea by the fuzzy representation you see. If it all just blends together, you definitely need to work on your lights and darks.
Don’t start yelling that you intend to have a quiet, soothing painting. Even the most bucolic, serene landscape still boasts real lights and darks. The painting may not be dramatic, but the subtle lights and shadows are still there making the work a professional one.
Using The Gray Scale
If you’d like to pick up an inexpensive and handy little device for keeping track of where your paint lies in the gray scale, you can spend just a few dollars for an artist’s gray scale
The few dollars this costs may be a good investment if local color continues to distract you from using lights and darks to their full advantage.
How To Refine Your Skills In Painting Tonal Values
To go over the terms for those of you who don’t know or may have forgotten, the tone is the range from white to black. Using red, white and black as an example, you can have the palest pink, brightest pure red or the deepest red-black. You can do this with any color. The tone is how light or how dark the color is. The color, on the other hand, is also known as the hue, and has nothing to do with how light or dark it is.
Just like every other part of becoming an artist, giving your painting a full range of tonal values takes practice. This is easiest to do with a simple still life. Use a geometric shape like a box or other regularly sided shape. As you get a handle on this concept, add variety to your shapes, or paint a spherical object.
Create A Simple Still Life
Scrounge around for a plain, geometric shape. You’re not concerned here with color or texture. If it’s a plain storage or shipping box, that’s a bonus. You won’t be sidetracked by the local color of the piece.
Set up your arrangement with a white background. Use an old sheet or towel, or splurge on a couple pieces of white poster board. Position a light above and to the side of the still life, so you have very definite contrasts and shadows in your setup. If you can darken the area by setting the scene up in an open fronted cardboard box, you will only have one light source. This will give you very deep shadows to contrast with the lightest areas of the scene.
Use only white and black paint for your palette. This painting is a monochromatic study, and you are only concerned with the variance of light and dark tones in your still life. Go ahead and paint your still life. Try to match the lights and darks as closely as you can. Sharp edges of the objects should be painted as such, while shadows will have blurred edges.
Use the digital camera as you go to see how well you’re doing. If you’re going low-tech, stand back occasionally and squint to see if you’re on track. As you do more of these practice pieces, you’ll find it easier to see the differences in shades of gray.
Remember, these are practice pieces. You don’t need to spend a lot of time refining them. The idea of this exercise is learning to see and portray levels of light and dark in your painting. We’re not going for show quality here.
Many of the old masters used a tonal value underpainting to begin their work. Not only does this give you a sense of your composition, but it lays the groundwork for designing your areas of lights and darks. Just like the overall composition, the placement of light and dark zones is often important to move the viewer’s eyes through the painting.
Use these practice pieces to learn how to see beyond local color and incorporate light and dark into your painting. You’ll see a real improvement in your work, and you’ll probably be hearing a lot of compliments on how far you’re progressing.
