Light and Shade in Watercolour E-Book

Hazel Soan

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 92

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Bestselling artist and author explains how to use light and shade in watercolour painting to add lifelike detail and create engaging artworks. Mastering light and shadow is the key to successful watercolour paintings and in this book you can learn how to paint like an expert. The book is packed with Hazel Soan's colourful and varied paintings, as well as step-by-step exercises and handy hints. Beginning with how to see the values of light and shade through the eyes of an artist, the book then shows how watercolour is the perfect medium to represent light and shade. Learn how to balance light and shade through compositional design and how to establish the shadow of individual components within the composition. Hazel demonstrates clever techniques such as conserving white paper to show highlights, how to mix the right tonal values and how to balance detail in your painting. Finally, the book looks at using light and shade to create atmospheric effects, tonal patterns to look out for and how to bring it all together to create fantastic artworks.

Leseprobe

Light andShade inWatercolour

Corner of Shadows, 38 x 28cm (15 x 11in)

Light andShade inWatercolour

Hazel Soan

Dedication:

To the many people who bring light into my life.

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Cathy Gosling and my wonderful publishers for believing in my ideas; to Kristy Richardson, my editor, for making the passage to print so smooth; to Tokiko Morishima for her splendid design; to my family for their support and to my readers for making it all worthwhile.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

It’s all about light and shade

1 FIRST YOU HAVE TO SEE

How to see the values of light and shade through an artist’s eyes

2 THEN YOU CAN PAINT

Why the medium of watercolour is adept at representing light and shade

3 TAME THE ABSTRACT PATTERN

Balancing the light and shade through compositional design

4 COMPOSE PLEASING RATIOS

Establishing the light and shadow of individual components within a composition

5 CONSERVE THE LIGHT

Methods and techniques for conserving the white paper

6 PRIME YOUR VALUES

Mixing the right tonal values

7 EMBRACE LOST AND FOUND TECHNIQUES

Balancing detail and suggestion

8 EVOKE ATMOSPHERE

The power of light and shade to create atmospheric effects

9 FIND PATTERNS

Patterns of light and shade to look out for in specific subjects

AND FINALLY

Bring it all together to create engaging paintings

Index

‘Adrift in the Aegean’, Ramparts, Monemvasia, 30 x 28cm (12 x 11in)

Introduction

It’s all about light and shade

With the light from white paper reflected back through transparent, see-through films of paint, watercolour is ideally suited to convey light and shade and create paintings full of illumination.

Light is the main character in this book, but without its twin – shade – we cannot show the light, nor paint the form. It is shade that makes the light visible and thus, in painting, light and shade link to become one – and a whole language that painters use to turn patterns and shapes on a flat surface into evocative representations of the three-dimensional world.

The Significance of Light and Shade

Art critics often praise artists for ‘painting the light’, but in watercolour painting, where white paper represents the light, the artist can only make light appear by painting the shade. The chief challenge of watercolour painting is therefore not to ‘paint’ the light but to ‘retain’ the light. A watercolour is created by covering enough of the paper with brushmarks to suggest the visible world, but not so much as to lose the light reflected back from the paper through the translucent films of paint.

To make light visible you must paint the shade.

Listening in the Stillness, 25 x 30cm (10 x 12in)

The light in this watercolour is represented by the patches of unpainted paper and lightly tinted areas.

The Language of Light and Shade

‘Light and shade’ in painting refers to more than the difference observed between sunlight and shadow – it is about every tonal relationship between things, whatever the light source or intensity. To see your way across a room or down a parade of steps, your eyes perceive subtle differences in tone to discern depth and distance; so too in watercolour. Light and shade are inseparable, referred to by the collective terms, ‘tone’ and ‘value’. These terms describe the quality of a colour, or hue, as modified by degrees of light and shade. The terms are interchangeable, and sometimes linked as ‘tonal value’.

Close Encounter, 56 x 71cm (22 x 28in)

This painting exhibits an obvious balance between light and shade, weighted in almost equal proportions between the light of the white paper, the mid-tone background area, and the deeper shade of the approaching elephant.

This Book

Creating a watercolour follows a journey that starts with the eyes, filters through the mind, the heart, the gut and the soul, carries along the arm to the hand, into the brush and onto the palette, ferries to the paper and then returns back to the eyes. The chapters in this book trace a similar route, following the train of thought into practice, establishing first how to see the tonal values exhibited by light and shade, then how to assess and value them, and finally how to respond by turning their pattern into meaningful paintings.

Sketch of a camel trader, 25 x 20cm (10 x 8in)

Sketchbooks are made for watercolour observations. Here, the light and shade playing over the surface of the white tunic and the saffron turban begins the process of assessing whether a colour should be painted lighter or darker than the adjacent feature or background.

Guides for the Journey

Practical research assignments act as guides on the journey to increase your expertise. Confidence is key: if it does go wrong (and it probably will), remember it is only paper – expensive paper but only paper – and, for better or for worse, the best way to learn to paint in watercolour is to cover lots of paper!

Encouraging words and mottos run through my head while I am painting (many are scribbled on my studio walls) so I offer some of these among the pages and whisper the occasional ‘aside’ to provoke thoughts while painting or boost your confidence. The penultimate chapter offers tips on finding and representing the message of ‘light and shade’ residing within specific subjects, such as figures, wildlife and architecture. Of course, by then you may not need them … Enjoy the journey – it is an exciting one!

Pushkar Camel Fair, 25 x 28cm (10 x 11in)

I made several watercolours and many sketches at the Pushkar Camel Fair in India before I felt I had rendered the atmosphere successfully in this one. Familiarity with the subject emboldened a looser rendition.

Standing Out From the Crowd, 76 x 76cm (30 x 30in)

CHAPTER 1

First You Have To See

How to see the values of light and shade through an artist’s eyes

Light makes things visible, and only with light can matter be seen and observed. The different wavelengths of visible light are represented in the colours of the spectrum, and, depending on the wavelengths absorbed and reflected by the matter around us, together with the amount and intensity of the light received, we perceive a whole range of colours and shades. As light and shade swap places during the rotation of the Earth, the change in angle and direction of the light determines that the colours of everything ‘under the sun’ are subject to constant variation. No colour or shade is therefore absolute.

Colour is Double-edged

Colour is made up of hue and tone (or value). Hue refers to the name of the colour – yellow, orange, red, blue, etc. Tone/value is the lightness or darkness of the colour as it is modified by light or the lack of it.

Because colours change according to the amount of light they receive, they are therefore inseparable from their value, which means the word ‘colour’ is really a composite word including both hue and tone.

To mix a specific colour for a painting the artist has to assess both the type of hue and the value of the tone. Lit colours are referred to as ‘tints’, and shaded colours as ‘shades’. A few hues have common names for their tints and shades, other hues use the prefixes ‘pale’ and ‘dark’.

Other hues use prefixes: pale blue and dark blue, pale orange and dark orange, pale yellow and dark yellow.

Depth Perception

The eye evaluates patterns of light and shade in order to perceive forms and judge distance. So too in painting – the light and shade of the colours becomes the code by which we can represent three-dimensional forms and suggest space on the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane. If representation is the intent, tone is more important than hue in the colour equation. Gauging tonal values is therefore crucial to the success of representational painting and carries greater significance than matching hues.

The art of seeing is the ability to judge/assess the tonal value of a hue in order to mix the correct colour for the painting.

Venice Rising, 28 x 38cm (11 x 15in)

This virtually monochromatic view of Venice shows how clearly tonal values can suggests space and distance in a painting. Indigo is diluted to a pale hue for the distant buildings and used neat and dark in the foreground features.

Convincing Lies

Representational painting is really a deception, an illusion of space and depth within the bounds of a small flat surface. This collusion is fashioned by patterns of light and shade. The abstract pattern made by the play of light and shadow over the subject is the key to projecting the illusion, and therefore the key to making a successful painting. Instead of seeing individual physical items as separate features, the artist looks for the tonal values that link things together to make the pattern, using the light and shade which transcends the physical boundaries. A practical example could be a shadow cast from a tree with a person sitting in the shade beside it, these two items are no longer separate elements but combine to become one shape in the painting.

Les Beaux, 18 x 28cm (7 x 11in)

Think of light and shade as a code, shared with the viewer, so they can interpret the colourful patterns on the paper as places and things from the physical world. Within a few simple washes here, a rocky landscape, a pine tree, a distant castle and a winding road are readily decoded.

Seeking Shade

There are two kinds of shade that impact painting: the shadow on the side of an object or form where it is turned away from the light source, and a cast shadow, which is produced by an obstruction of the light source. Although shadows are areas of reduced light they rarely come in black – the colour that represents the absence of light – but are modified by light reflected from objects in the vicinity or exhibit colouring opposite to the colour of the light source.

Truly Indian Yellow, Udaipur, India, 28 x 25cm (11 x 10in)

The shadow on the side where the temple pergola is turned away from the morning sun is not as dark in tone as the cast shadow below the walking platform.

Seeking Shade, 30 x 40cm (12 x 16in)

Nearly all the springbok are standing in the cast shade from the acacia tree; only the rump of the antelope immediately to the left of the tree trunk exhibits shade caused by a facet turned away from a direct light source. The tree foliage is also subject to shade from direct light.

The Source of Light

As the Earth turns, shadows move, so you always need to be aware of the direction of the light source, and how the angle will alter as the day progresses. Awareness of the direction and angle of light is vital in establishing credible values in the painting. Projecting how shadows will shift during a plein-air