Painting Light and Shadow Shapes - 2

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Painting Light and Shadow Shapes - 2

This week’s video has me painting again in light and shadow shapes using two values to investigate shape making. Shapes are one of the core building blocks of painting, and creating paintings with only two values, concentrating on making only light and shadow is a great exercise in learning about shapes.

As in last week’s post, my main goal in doing this type of painting is to try and create a single, connected, continuous shadow shape and a single, connected, continuous light shape. In essence I am trying to paint two shapes with one value per shape. That sounds easy, right? It’s not - not at all. It takes thought and planning to develop the shapes before hand, so that when you get to the surface you have some idea of what you’re doing.

As you can see in the video, I have a value study on the wall to my right. It is a black and white print of the watercolor painting below done in 2008. I always loved the composition and the light and shadow shapes, so I decided to give it a go in acrylics, simplifying the previous composition down to it’s most basic elements, without distracting details.

In today’s demo, I first drew the composition onto the 300lb Fabriano Artistico watercolor paper (the paper is coated with gesso). My color intent was to use an analogous color combination of yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red and red violet. The yellow and yellow-orange representing the light and the balance representing the shadow. I tried to compose the shapes so that they were interesting and linked together, interlocking with neighboring shapes.

I used the following Golden Heavy Body Acrylic Paint colors:

  • Benzimidazolone Yellow Light

  • Diarylide Yellow

  • Yellow Ochre

  • Pyrrole Orange

  • Titan Buff

  • Cadmium Red Medium Hue

  • Medium Magenta

  • Quinacridone Magenta

  • Light Violet

  • Neutral Gray 6

  • Titanium White

I mixed the Neutral Gray 6 with all of the colors on the palette, thus reducing the intensity of the colors. I could have done the same thing using the complements of each. I start by putting in the colors of the “Light”, followed by the “Shadow.”

The rest is in the video. I think it’s fun to see the image gradually develop until you finally see some building shapes come into focus. I tried to keep it loose and vary the edges of the shapes a bit.

If any of you are interested in getting better at developing the shapes in your paintings (and who isn’t, right?) then I highly recommend this exercise. Make it about the shapes, not about making the scene look realistic. Try to distance the painting as far as possible from reality. Have fun with it!

If you'd like to learn about abstract painting and making your own authentic work, then please join me for a painting workshop: (You can view a list of workshops HERE)

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As always, thanks for your support!

David

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