A few weeks ago Carrie asked me if I could write something about painting shadows.
I thought about it for a while - “what can I write about shadows that’s interesting and helpful and would condense into this blog space?”
As an idea started to form I primed some pages in my sketchbooks with white gesso.
Warm shadows.
It’s not uncommon to think of shadows when painting them as cooler kinds of colours than the parts that aren’t in the shadows - so when using colours in painting we might add black to the colour being used to make an illusion of a shadow, but even though black works it can easily end up looking dirty and dull, especially with skin tones.
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…a few days later I’m ready to put my blog idea into practice… but first I need to clean up from a bit of abstract experimentation .
expressive abstract is so much fun and gives an opportunity to explore different aspects of the painting process without an end in mind, and it reveals a little bit about the inner workings of one’s mind too, I think.
Shadows:
My idea is to paint shadows of the same subject in different temperatures to compare them. I’m going to paint some noses and ears, using oils, with viridian green in my pallet because I’ve been meaning to play around with that again since my last exploration. I also bought myself a glass pallet so I want to use that for the first time too.
warm pallet
with Viridian green being the coolest colour on my pallet, and the warm Cad red medium as my red the pallet is warm, so my shadows are going to be warm. The coolest colours I can get are the high key greys and the very dark combo of mostly green and a touch of red, so my mid tones are all warm with the highest and lowest tones the coolest.
note: my glass pallet is awesome, I can scrape of the paint, even when dried with a glass scraping blade. Amazing!!
study 1.
This limited pallet works quite nicely for these reddish skin shadows in the ears I think, and the light pink tones would probably work for a nose - I’ll try that next.
Study 2.
Trying to be cooler in the shadows of this nose using the same pallet without gong too dark means I need to make soft greys rather than strong greens, browns or reds - so putting a little green into the light pink gives me a coolish grey shadow that’s not too dark.
now I’m going to try blue instead of green in my pallet to see what the cooler colour does to it.
study 3.
changing Viridian green for Ultramarine blue allows me to get more purple(ish) shadows than the warm shadows that green makes they are still warm shadows though, and where it gets cooler it gets greyer not necessarily darker.
It’s not a huge difference in temperature - both pallets make warm shadows which work with skin.
To get subtle tones in the shadow side it’s more about temperature than tone, so the tone is a similar key but the temperature (colour, more grey for cool and more red for warm) adds depth to the shadows.
So now I’m wondering if I need to cool my red down (Cad red mid is a very warm red) to see what happens to my shadows with a cooler red on the pallet.
What I will note though is that I’m not using black paint to make shadows, I’m using the three primaries and white to get the variations in tone and temperature, and some of these tones are very subtle.
adding a cool red, Alizarin Crimson, to my pallet I seemed to have warmed the whole thing up even more - this might be because I started with a reddish underpainting.
I really like the warm shadows - in-fact the warmer I go the more I like it.
For a little bit more I record the process of the Alizarin portrait, I hope it helps.