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Day 12 - Light & Color

Random word of the day - "Union"

It's time– Time to move on from rendering basic shapes to colors. Today I'm reviewing another part of the workshop notes I took, which involve value, hue, saturation, and where they exist on basic shapes.


Here's another warning


If you have no interest or experience in painting from life, I suggest you skip the following notes. Don't read it or you'll get bored and confused. I don't want to lose you!!  Just go ahead and scroll down to my horrible exercise-paintings.

If you are interested, however, and my notes end up confusing you in any way, go ahead and send me a message or ask a question in the comments.
I'll gladly help.



Joan Miro said:
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
What a beautiful comparison. And now, on with the notes!

  • The most beautiful greys are the ones produced by mixing opposite (complementary) colors. Also if you ever want to desaturate a color while painting (blue for example), just mix in a tiny bit of it's opposite (that would be orange) to get that effect.
     
  • In real-life, there is never a color that is truly free of saturation. There is so much color in everything, even black, white and grays.
      
  • If you want to direct the eye using grays, a subtle way to do that is by using complementary grays (for example, an orange-gray against a blue-gray).
  • On objects (perhaps more so on simpler ones rather than complex), the true "base" color of that object is the most saturated one. It is only located where a light plane changes into a shadow plane (on the edge of the light plane just before the core shadow).
     
  • The light and shadow planes are of course both lower in saturation, but the light one is higher in value, and dark one lower.
     
  • Everything outside is affected by the color of the sky, because everything is lit by the sky's ambient (reflected) light. Areas/objects in the shadow are more affected because they are mostly lit by ambient light, in contrast to areas/objects that are in direct sunlight (which is stronger).
     
  • So, anything in the sun or direct light will be colored by the light-source, while anything in the shadow will be colored by reflected light.
     
  • Rendering simple shapes in color
    • Paint background
    • Paint silhouette using base (most saturated) color
    • Light and shadow planes
    • Cast shadow and occlusion
    • Variation within planes
    • Core shadow
    • Re-apply base color if needed (the saturated core)
    • Reflected light/colors
    • Highlight
    • Saturated rim around highlight
    • Rim-light
    • Soften edges
       
  • You don't always have to follow these rules— Changes in color temperature can be used outside their natural scope if you need to convey a certain message (when value/composition aren't doing enough).


My maybe not so horrible exercises

The first thing I did was check how trained my "eye" was in terms of seeing what color a "color" really is. All I had to do was grab a photo off the internet, use the eyedropper tool to choose some of the photo's colors, and then use the color-picker to manually re-produce the colors I picked. I have to keep trying until I get an exact match. The three things to think about when doing this are value, hue and saturation. 

Color comparison exercise

The large circles are the original colors picked from the photo using the eyedropper tool, and the smaller circles around each are my attempts at matching. I managed to re-produce most of the colors in 1-3 tries, but had trouble with the purple and green. I'm so proud!

Not so proud of this one though D:


Today's Sense-of-Achievement To-Do List was:

  • Studies
    • Morning drawing warm-ups  
    • Review Imaginism Workshop notes 
      • Focal Points
      • Colors
      • More colors & Values
         

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