Comments on: Blacks

By: David

David — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:09:24 +0000

Sam,

I heard the same thing from an art teacher when I was a kid. It's amazing how much bad information you can get from professional instructors.

By: Sam Sanford

Sam Sanford — Thu, 31 May 2007 03:51:32 +0000

My first painting teacher told me that "black does not exist in nature," and I believed him, in spite of the fact that I had seen black paint and other black things with my own eyes. He convinced us that if we thought we saw black, we just weren't looking correctly. I was twelve years old. It took me a decade to unlearn that ridiculous lesson.

By: David

David — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:53:35 +0000

Angel,

It's certainly the case that completely neutral shadows would be pretty boring. But Rembrandt's darks are hardly boring, and he used a lot of black.

I often use mixtures of other colors for my darks. But ivory black, for example, is simply a very dark, low-chroma, blue-purple. It's just a color like any other, with potential uses and misuses. It is a half value step darker than almost any mixture, which is useful in obtaining a full value range in chiaroscuro painting.

And more and more, I'm finding that low-chroma grays, made with black and a warm color such as burnt umber, are the best way to reduce the chroma of any other color. The more commonly-taught method—using mixing complements—is much less predictable. My sense is that many artists today do a good job of managing temperature, but don't control chroma very well.

By: angel

angel — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:11:28 +0000

While I agree that there's a black-phobia going on in the art world, it does pay off to make your blacks either warm or cold, and pre-tubed blacks are usually neutral or cold leaning. When you mix, say, Ultramarine with Bt Sienna, or Bt.Umber, or use any other recipes, you get more intense, and more harmonious blacks, especially for shadows. Of course, we are just trying to see the magic in a marriage of colours, otherwise the colours would look flat and lifeless. While there are so many black objects that could stay well, just black, when an artist tries and depicts the environment in which it occurs, accounting for its light/temperature, that is what makes a painting so realistic and so much more interesting. And then there's a lean factor. So I guess the fear comes from a misuse of the colour, that's all.