Great article from Dan Johnson.
The five rules he discusses:
- Always paint from dark to light.
- Never use black paint.
- Warm light, cool shadows (and vice versa)
- The rule of thirds
- Warm colours advance, cool colours recede
Tickle your whites, and avoid 100% black
When I’m doing paintings, when I get to the highlights, especially if it’s a warm object that needs a highlight, the whiter it goes, the intensity doesn’t seem to be quite as bright. So I will usually tickle it with a little bit of green and blue, or a touch of magenta and blue, in the white, just to kind of feel it vibrate a little bit, to see if it’ll separate as a highlight….
Something I always try to avoid is going 100% white or 100% black. You just kind of lose colour completely, or you go flat, or it clips.
Mike Hernandez on the Plein Air Podcast
In the service of others
I have found that sometimes it can be helpful to remove oneself from the creative process, and do work in the service of others.
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue #137
Copy of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver 1872–78
This is a copy of another painting I found in Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent Van Gogh to Emily Carr. I’m not quite sure why this one is called Nocturne in Blue and Silver. Unlike many of Whistler’s other nocturnes, I couldn’t see any blue in this one.
Copy of Ferdinand Hodler’s Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the morning light
I was inspired by Katie Turner’s post on studying the masters to do another copy. I found this painting in the book Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent van Gogh to Emily Carr.
Looking at the reproduction on WikiArt, there’s a much greater shift from cool to warm in the colour (from right to left) compared to the image in the book. So I didn’t quite capture that. I also struggled to achieve the fantastic brushwork and scumbling on (cheap) paper. And I didn’t use quite the right blue either. (I just used ultramarine.) Having said that, I’m pretty happy with how it came out.
I agree with Katie that studying and copying masters (whether true “old” ones or just great painters that you admire) is beneficial—and fun.
