Your choice of paints should depend on your style and subject matter. Figure painters need to be able to mix a range of flesh tones, and landscape painters need to mix greens easily.

Although I continually experiment with new paints, my basic palette looks like the follow chart. Keep in mind that I do a lot of figure painting, and my palette is chosen accordingly.

Items in bold are always on my palette. Brand abbreviations are as follows:

• D/S = Daniel Smith
• D/V = da Vinci
• M/G = M. Graham
• W/N = Winsor & Newton

Here is an example of a quick sketch that uses burnt umber, cadmium red light, raw sienna, and ultramarine blue. There may also be some perylene maroon in the shadows.

African American Skin Tone

Here is another example that uses:

• Winsor & Newton Burnt Umber
• Winsor & Newton Raw Sienna
• M. Graham Cadmium Red Light
• M. Graham Cadmium Orange
• Winsor & Newton Ultramarine Blue

Another Example of Dark Skin Tones

In this example, there is more raw sienna than usual because the light was warm.

A further discussion of skin tones is available.

If I have to paint a large dark passage, I will often set out my paints in mixing cups instead of grabbing paint from a palette well. I will use one cup for each single pigment and then let the colors combine on the page.

I squeeze out lots of paint, roughly the same amount I would use if I were squeezing out toothpaste to go on a toothbrush. Then, I add enough water to bring the paint to the consistency of heavy cream. As I am painting the darks, I try never to rinse my brush until I finish the passage.

As a general rule, mixed combinations of paints work better than lamp black for going dark in watercolor. The main reason for this, I think, has more to do with grays than with blacks. Even the blackest black will usually have some sort of transition around the edges to a lighter color. If we make our blacks with lamp black, then that transition will be a completely neutral gray. We very rarely see a truly neutral gray in nature. Even a neutral gray object will likely be tinted by the color of the light. When we create our darks from a combination of colors, then the transition to lighter values will tend to contain some color and hence mimic the effect of light, creating a more convincing illusion.

The best combination of dark paints you choose will depend on what other paints you are using. Some combinations work better for figure work and earth palettes. Other combinations work better for landscape work. When I am pick a combination, I usually start with a paint that I am using elsewhere in the painting and then add a second paint to make my dark. For example, if I am already using ultramarine blue in my painting, then I will most likely pick a dark that contains ultramarine blue. Here are some of my favorite combinations:

Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue

Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue

Although not the darkest combination you can choose, burnt sienna and ultramarine blue is versatile and easy to work with. You can shift it toward either the cool or warm side, and if you make a mistake it’s easy to scrub it out. As an added bonus, the granulation of the ultramarine blue combines with the smoothness of the ultramarine blue to create a lyrical texture.

If you are looking for a dark gray instead of a true black, this is the way to go. And if you want to explore the ultimate limited palette, it is possible to create a handsome painting with just these two pigments.

Burnt Umber and Ultramarine Blue

Burnt Umber and Ultramarine Blue

Burnt umber and ultramarine blue is similar to burnt sienna and ultramarine blue, except that it allows you to go darker. The burnt umber can be a little bit more opaque and difficult to handle than burnt sienna. I find it especially difficult to control wet-in-wet, as most brands tend to spread uncontrollably. If the burnt sienna/ultramarine blue isn’t dark enough for you, though, then burnt umber and ultramarine blue will give you a couple of extra steps of value.

Perylene Maroon and Phthalo Green

Perylene Maroon and Phthao Green

This combination will create a healthy black that approaches the darkness of lamp black. As you lighten this combination, the resulting grays will range from a brown to an unsaturated green to a neutral gray. It is especially useful in landscape painting for capturing deep greens in shadow.

As a general rule, it is best to avoid this combination in figure work. Phthalo green is one of the strongest pigments you can use, and it can get out of control in a hurry. Once you put phthalo green on your palette, the smallest dab can work its way into every paint mixture. It is simply too easy to turn a lovely flesh tone into a deathly and jaundiced green by accident.

Perylene Maroon and Perylene Green

Perylene Maroon and Perylene Green

This combination is similar to perylene maroon and phthalo green except, that perylene green is far less assertive than phthalo green. The blacks are virtually indistinguishable from lamp black.

Burnt Sienna and Phthalo Blue Green Shade or Phthalo Turquoise

This is a great combination for landscape work. You can mix a terrific forest green. Although it is not the darkest combination for a dark green, it is incredibly useful.

Quinacridone Orange and Phthalo Blue

Quinacridone Orange and Phthalo Blue

Admittedly, I don’t use this combination frequently. Quinacridone orange, which I usually purchase as M. Graham’s Quinacridone Rust, and phthalo blue are not everyday colors for me. Consequently, I usually pick other combinations first. All the same, you can mix a great dark with it.

The image at left uses M. Graham Quinacridone Rust and Winsor & Newton Phthalo Blue (Blue Shade)

Brands I use:

M. Graham, Daniel Smith, Winsor & Newton, daVinci

The daVinci version is slightly more saturated than the other brands.

How I Use it:

Perylene Maroon with Phthalo Green

Perylene Maroon with Perylene Green

For Making Darks:

A deep crimson is essential to my palette, and it is most useful for creating darks. Although there are more saturated alternatives to perylene maroon, such as Winsor & Newton’s Permanent Alizarin or Daniel Smith’s Carmine, nothing beats perylene maroon for its lightfastness or ability to create a rich dark.

A deep green, used in conjunction with perylene maroon, makes an exceptional dark that approaches the darkness of lamp black. My favorite choices are Phthalocyanine Green (also known as Winsor Green) and Perylene Green. Both of these combinations dilute to a lovely, neutral gray.

Mixed greens, such as sap green or hookers green, will not go as dark as a single pigment green.

Perylene Maroon with Cadmium Red Light

For Shadows on Red:

I love to put red objects in my paintings, and M. Graham Cadmium Red Light has long been a favorite red paint. Perylene Maroon is slightly cooler than the cadmium red, and when I use the the maroon in the shadows then red appears to glow in a warm light.

The reason you should paint your background first is simple. The natural tendency in watercolor is to make the initial washes in a painting too light because you are comparing your values to the white of the paper. If you establish your background first, you can compare the values in the foreground to the already established value in the background. Reworking a background value later in the painting is generally not as noticeable as reworking the foreground.

In the following example, I worked on the background for days before I dealt with the foreground. Once the background was complete, I painted with figures in the foreground very quickly at the very end of the process.

Background Painted First

For average caucasian skin, I use Winsor & Newton Raw Sienna or Yellow Ochre (they’re quite similar), M. Graham Cadmium Red Light, and a blue, violet, or (rarely) green, The blue depends on the subject, the lighting, and the pigments I am using in the rest of the painting. Cerulean blue is probably the easiest to work with and works best for light-skinned subjects. Sometimes I use Winsor & Newton Cobalt Blue and sometimes I use Holbein Mineral Violet.

When working with fair complexions, I move toward a cooler yellow such as Winsor & Newton Cadmium Yellow Pale. As complexions get darker, I move to darker yellows and earth tones, stepping down from Raw Sienna to a brown ochre to raw umber and finally to burnt umber. An example of how to paint darker skin tones is available.

Reds get warmer as complexions get ruddier. For a young, fair-skinned model I might go with a permanent rose. I will choose a warmer red, such as cadmium red light, for skin that is darker or has been exposed to the sun. For really dark skin, I will choose anything from cadmium red light to even a cadmium orange in some circumstances.

The cool color, used mostly for shadows, is the most difficult to categorize because so much depends on the light source. For shadows I use the same yellow and red that I used in the light, and I add a cool color that neutralizes the yellow and red. The most important thing is to not use too much blue in the shadows. You basically want a darker and more neutral version of what you have in the light.

When I started painting, I always worked from life. A couple of years ago I realized that working from life, although it is a great way to work, severely restricted the types of poses I could paint. I wanted to paint movement — crowds of people, skateboarders in mid-air, dancers, and revelers. I bought a point and shoot camera. It worked well enough, but it had some drawbacks. Maybe it was a blessing when Lucy ate my camera because the old camera gave me a chance to learn what to look for in a camera for reference photographs.

SLR or Point and Shoot?

Camera snobs will tell you that you need an SLR, but I’m not convinced. An SLR is not going to magically give you a better reference photo. You can get the exposure wrong on an SLR just as much as with a point and shoot. Depth of field doesn’t make much difference because your photo is not a final product; you can always blur parts of your painting. Megapixels don’t matter; anything over about 3 megapixels is fine for a reference photo. Zoom range doesn’t matter either; some compact point and shoots have the equivalent zoom range of a 300mm SLR lens.

Here are the real advantages of an SLR:

• Speed – Even after you depress the shutter halfway to autofocus, a point and shoot camera has a delay of about 1/3 of a second between the time you press the shutter and when the camera takes the picture. With an SLR, the shutter delay is imperceptible. If you are shooting a still life or a landscape, this delay doesn’t matter. If you are photographing a crowd or a person in motion, however, 1/3 of a second is an eternity. It’s long enough for someone’s head or hand to appear between you and your subject, and it’s long enough for a fast-moving subject to completely disappear from the frame.
• Control over Lighting – If you are willing to use an external flash that is mounted off-camera, then an SLR can give you more control over lighting your subject. If you are working indoors, you should avoid using your camera’s built in flash or an external flash mounted on the camera because the direct light eliminates all the shadows and flattens the form. In a figure drawing session, you never want to sit next to the main light; in photography, you never want the main light source to be on your camera. (It’s okay to use on-camera flash in the sun because the sun will be brighter than the flash.)
• Lenses – An SLR also gives you more lens choices, which can be important for certain subjects and styles of painting. One of my favorite watercolorists, John Salminen, uses a telephoto lens to get a spatial compression that is essential to his design. Similarly, a fast, fixed lens will allow you to get pictures in low light situations without a flash. If you want to take reference photos of people in dimly lit restaurants and bars, you need a much faster lens than you can get with a point and shoot camera.

A point and shoot camera gives you one enormous advantage: portability. You can’t take a good picture unless you have your camera with you. You can put a point and shoot camera in your pocket or your purse, and it’s always there when you need it.

What Did I Eventually Buy?

I couldn’t make up my mind, and I bought two cameras: a point and shoot and an SLR. I keep the point and shoot, a Panasonic DMC-TZ5S, with me all the time. I use the SLR, a Nikon D60, when I am on an expedition to take reference photos. I use the SLR when I know that that I am going to be shooting in less than optimum circumstances such as fast moving subjects or low light.

For example, suppose you are planning to do a 22″ x 30″ painting, and your sketchbook is 8.5×11. Enter the numbers in the form, click the “Calculate!” button, and you will see that you will need to crop your sketchbook page to 8.07 x 11 to keep the proportion the same as your full sheet.

I’m having trouble getting this to work inside the blog. If you’re interested, take a look at it on my other website.

First, some general rules:

• Values are always relative. You cannot reproduce the actual values that you see, so you have to consider each value in relation to another value on the page.
• Figure out your lightest light, your darkest dark, and your middle values before you begin painting.

A big question for me always is which value to start with. Traditional watercolor advice has always been to start with the light values and work your way to the darks. This strategy, however, produces very anemic paintings for me. I usually prefer to start with a fairly strong value. Here are some specific things that work for me. Of course, sometimes the rules contradict one another.

• Start with the background. I like to start with the sky when I can.
• Start with large areas of value. When I establish a strong middle value with a big, flat brush up front, I have a much better chance of success. When I start with one of my kolinsky rounds, I often fail to establish the big areas of the composition.
• Look for middle values that cut across other areas of value. For example, grass or trees may span a broad area of the painting. The foliage may be lighter than a shadow area and darker than another area in the light. If you establish the middle at the beginning, then you will be better able to judge the other areas of the painting.
• Start with values you can change later Often, my first value statement will be too light. It’s better if start with a simple area you can glaze later. For example, if I am doing an architectural subject, with complicated patterns of light and dark, I don’t want to have to go in later and rework all the complexity. Not only does this take a lot of time, it overworks the painting as well.

• Don’t make the shadows on white objects too dark. The shadow side of a white object is never more than 50% dark. You may have to adjust your other values accordingly.
• Cast shadows come last.

]]> http://watercolorweb.org/2008/01/14/strategies-for-managing-value-in-watercolor/feed/ 0 http://watercolorweb.org/2008/01/14/using-altitude-and-azimuth-tables-to-understand-light-shifts/ http://watercolorweb.org/2008/01/14/using-altitude-and-azimuth-tables-to-understand-light-shifts/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:09:52 +0000 Marie Matthews http://localhost/wweb/?p=59 I had noticed for several months ago that the light and shadow on an object can change very suddenly and dramatically. This phenomenon was especially noticeable around 1:30 in the afternoon. I figured that the sun must shift from the east side of the sky to the west side of the sky around 1:30. My solution was simply to plan for a lunch break around 1:30. Everything worked fine until yesterday, when I was working in the morning and experienced the same sudden shift in lighting. I decided it was time to learn more about exactly how the sun tracks across the sky.

early morning
photo

late morning
photo

Here is an example of what I encountered. I took the first photo at the beginning of the painting session, around 9:00 a.m. I took the second photo about two hours later. The switch from the lighting conditions of the first photo to the lighting of the second photo happened very suddenly a little after 10 a.m.

When I got home, I found a utility at the U. S. Naval Observatory that will calculate the altitude and azimuth of the sun at specified intervals for any location on any day. This is a very handy tool for learning how to predict shifts in outdoor lighting. Later in the day, I returned to the cemetery with compass and an azimuth table in hand and realized that the tables confirmed what I had observed while painting.

Working outdoors in the summer, there are 4 ways an object can be lighted. Assuming that a building is on a north/south axis*, the lighting changes when the azimuth of sun reaches 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees. In the winter and early spring, the sun crosses the 90 and 270 degree thresholds before sunrise or after sunset. Here are a few illustrations of these phases of light:

Sunrise to 90 degrees

The north and east sides of a building are in sunlight. In early July in Atlanta, this stage lasts from sunrise to 10:20 a.m.

90 degrees to 180 degrees

The east and south sides of a building are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 10:20 a.m. to 1:40 p.m.

180 degrees to 270 degrees

The south and west sides are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 1:40 p.m. to 5:10 p.m.

270 degrees until sunset

The west and north sides are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 5:10 p.m. until sunset.

* – Note: If the building is not on a north/south axis, it is still easy to calculate when the light will change. Simply figure out how many degrees the building is oriented from north, and then add or subtract that interval to the light shift intervals. For example, the north side of my house is actually about 26 degrees west of north. To figure out when there will be a major light shift, I subtract 26 from 90, 180, and 270 respectively, and then read the azimuth table. (return to text)

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