An introduction to painting darks using water colours - By: Allan Michael Taylor

If you want to try your hand at water colour painting, one of the issues you will face will be how to render shadows or dark areas without producing a muddy mess. For a lot of people, when first faced with dark areas in their painting, will generally use black to produce the desired effect. However, it's important to make sure the shadow areas remain luminous and clean for any painting to work, relying on black alone will just not do the job!

Nonetheless, a large range of dark colours can be had using a range of pigments. Two of the darkest colours available are phthalo blue and phthalo green. Alizarin crimson, burnt sienna and ultramarine are a degree lighter with viridian and alizarin are mid-tones. All of these can be mixed to create a darks that will offer a variety of hues to suit your painting.

You need to make sure that you don't use too many different colours otherwise you'll still end up with a confused muddy mess. Using too many layers of colour indiscriminately will mean you'll loose that felling of freshness in your painting. The fewer colours you use, to get the tone you need, the better. You can get around this problem by knowing in advance the colour you want to achieve and always test it for strength before committing it to your painting. When you're ready to start, work rapidly and with conviction, anything else will seem overworked or cumbersome.

It also helps to juxtapose your dark areas with the lightest ones, this brings a high level of contrast into a picture which adds to it's drama and graphic appeal. Plus, it's the dark areas that make the light areas look bright! Try and use the dark areas to create 'lead-ins' that direct the eye through the picture.

Painting a three dimensional object on a two dimensional canvas has always been a challenge. Areas of shadow, like the lighter areas, are full of reflected colour. They are just as much a result of the things around them as the intrinsic colour of the object itself. The colours on the objects lighter side are, on the whole, warmer than the colours in the shadow areas that tend to be cooler. An orange, for example, will have shadows that tend towards blue and a red ball will have shadows that lean towards green. This is because the shadows will be made up of a certain amount of their complimentary colour. The highlight too can be different as a result of their source, a light source from a bright blue sky will produce a blueish tint, whereas an artificial light will normally be yellow in tone.

Smooth surfaces will obviously reflect a lot more than something that is textured or made from an absorbent material. Consider a white ball on a white table cloth, light will hit the top of the ball creating a lighter patch and a corresponding dark shadow on the cloth on the opposite side of the ball. Even so, the cloth itself will reflect back some of the light up and against the ball so that the side of the ball that faces the cloth will also have a lighter area where it's closest to the cloth. The shadow area on the ball is, in fact, seen between the main highlight and the reflected light of the cloth.

Painting a still life with fruit is one of the best ways to practice these theories.

About the Author

Rob Tyrrell is a professional artist specialising in pet portraits, he works mainly using oils and water colour. For more information or to view his on-line gallery please visit his web site at http://www.robtyrrell-petportraits.co.uk

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