So you can tell them apart

Here's a painting of mine from a number of years ago. It was painted pretty much in its entirety on location at Owls head light, near Rockland Maine.

I wanted to talk a little about color saturation tonight. here's another one of those ploys like the one I spoke of last night. Its not the answer to all of the problems of obtaining light, but its another tactic to keep in mind, another arrow for your quiver.The ideas I have been discussing the last few posts have been about ways of differentiating your lights and your shadows.

• I paint the lights in a high value and the shadows in a low value, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I paint the lights with one pigment and the shadows with a different pigment, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I paint the lights grave and the shadows highly colored, so you can tell them apart,
• or I will paint the lights highly colored and the shadows grave, so you can tell them apart
• sometimes I will paint the lights warm and the shadows cool, so you can tell them apart
• sometimes I will paint the lights cool and the shadows warm, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I will paint my lights opaque and my shadows transparent, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I paint the lights with hard edges and the shadows with soft edges, so you can tell them apart
  
• sometimes I use cool reflected light in the lights and hot reflected light in the shadow, so you can tell them apart
  

The point of all of that was to drive home the idea that the lights and the shadows are different worlds. You need to use what ever means you can to differentiate the two. One of the characteristics of a painting that has light is that the shadows and the lights are markedly different.

There are common mistakes that kill the effect of light, some of them are

• forming the shadow note by using the color of the light, or the local color plus black. It is to prevent beginners from committing this ART FELONY that teachers remove black from their students palettes.

The errors below all have the same cause at their root.

• over stating the reflected light, so they become as bright as the darkest note in the lights.
• overstating the modeling in the lights causing an "overmodeled" look and sometimes putting a value in the lights that is as dark as the lightest note over in the shadow side.
• too much detail in the shadow, shadow "eats" detail
• edges poorly handled, generally, uniformly too hard.

All pf the group of sins above have as their cause an error in observation. They come from painting "piecemeal". That is what happens when you paint each section of a painting the way it looks when you look directly, and only at it. An object appears differently in the larger context of its environment than it does when you scrutinize it. The better way is to paint each area the way it looks when you observe the entire scene in front of you. That's is an enormous concept.

Seeing piecemeal is an almost universal fault in weak painting. Ives Gammell, my teacher would talk about the "big look" of nature. I have heard it described in another way also,by a portrait painter who said "paint the hands the way they look when you look at the head, paint the head the way it looks when you look at the hands".
All of that sounds pretty simple, but actually doing it can take a fair amount of practice.

A painting that is "seen" piecemeal is a collection of small pictures placed one next to the other rather than a single large unit. This absolutely, and totally kills unity of effect.

UNITY OF EFFECT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT QUALITY A PICTURE CAN HAVE.

If you are thinking about getting a neck tattoo, you just couldn't do better than that.

A painting should be one single image on the canvas, rather than a number of smaller images all clamoring for our attention.