Light for the Artist 4

More from “Light for the Artist” by Ted Seth Jacobs:

The Insep­a­ra­bil­ity of Value and Hue. Many painters, such as the sur­re­al­ists, for exam­ple, lighten val­ues only by adding white. They treat the value scale as if it were only a light­en­ing and dark­en­ing of the same hue. This is a seri­ous mis­take for the opti­cal artist. It is an essen­tially “black-and-white” approach. The result is sim­i­lar to a col­ored draw­ing, with local col­ors washed over the value changes, and does not take into account the fact that the light is col­ored. Value and color change together, organ­i­cally. We can­not run up and down the value scale with­out con­stantly vary­ing the hue.

For exam­ple, if the light source has some kind of (unname­able!) yel­low­ish col­oration and the shadow turns cor­re­spond­ingly com­ple­men­tary, as the val­ues darken the yel­low­ness will also drop. We need to incor­po­rate this hue change into each value change. We must see each change as a col­ored value. Oth­er­wise we are essen­tially paint­ing in a mono­chrome. We also must avoid “tint­ing” value changes with the same color. For exam­ple, if the light itself is yel­low­ish, we ought not to put the same inten­sity of yel­low every­where in the light.

Also take care not to give the shadow the same kind of hue as the light. The color of the shadow can be decep­tive. For exam­ple, when the body is under a yel­low­ish light, the reflected light in the shadow may be very warm. How­ever, approach­ing the ter­mi­na­tor, where there is the least influ­ence of reflected light, the shadow may show more of its com­ple­men­tary nature. Some stu­dents notice only the very warm reflected lights and paint all the shadow warm. This makes for a warm-on-warm effect that does not cor­re­spond with opti­cal real­ity. The effect is rather heavy, or hot, and the pic­ture will not have the feel­ing of light speed­ing through it. The hue will be turgid if it is too sim­i­lar in the and the shadow.