Light brush, dark brush

Typ­i­cally, when I’m paint­ing, I’m work­ing on one par­tic­u­lar pas­sage or sec­tion. The col­ors in that pas­sage are often one hue (or a small range of hues) and one chroma (or small range of chro­mas). So in any given pas­sage, what tends most to vary from one spot to another is the value.

Usu­ally, what I do when paint­ing in oil is work with two brushes—one for the lighter sec­tions of that pas­sage and one for the darker parts. The value may have a wide range or a nar­row range, but either way it’s help­ful to have one brush for each pur­pose. That’s use­ful, I think, for two rea­sons. One is the sim­ple tech­ni­cal point that it’s easy to keep track of two brushes, load­ing, apply­ing, wip­ing, mix­ing, and re-loading. It’s a lot quicker to change the paint on a brush from a dark to a mid tone than it is to change from a dark to a light.

The other way that work­ing with a dark brush and a light brush is in terms of think­ing about light. As I’m work­ing on a pas­sage I can think about how the light is affect­ing it at a par­tic­u­lar point. If the pri­mary thing hap­pen­ing is that the sec­tion I’m work­ing on is turn­ing toward the light, then I auto­mat­i­cally grab the light brush. If it’s turn­ing away, then I grab the dark brush. I find it use­ful to think in that binary way because that’s how light works: a given point is either toward the light or away from it com­pared to nearby parts of that pas­sage. By work­ing with two brushes, I always keep that in mind.