Injecting Dramatic Lighting into your Paintings

In a painting in any medium, treatment of light is a vital consideration. While the landscape photographer has to work with available light, artists can manipulate it to their advantage, changing it, intensifying it, rendering a much softer, atmospheric light or create a dramatic sense of light and dark, and so much more. It pays to study how the top artists have treated the light in their compositions when you visit an important exhibition or collection.

Brancaster Staithe

Brancaster Staithe

This scene on the Norfolk coast shows part of the composition bathed in late afternoon sunlight, as it throws the emphasis on the central building, the two figures and the boats. I achieved hard edges on the buildings set against a dark sky by using masking fluid, rubbing it off once the background washes had dried, and then painting in the details on the buildings and the rest of the scene, completing everything apart from the shadows in the foreground. At that point I often trundle off for a coffee, or if it’s late I’ll finish for the day. This allows the washes to dry completely – in fact I’ll often get on with another painting at that point.

With the whole painting completely dry I wash clean water right across the foreground, taking it up into the lower sky area. Make sure that you take the water some distance beyond where you intend to create the soft edge, as water has a habit of creeping further than you might think. I then apply a mixture of French ultramarine and cadmium red over the shadow area, including the darkened left-hand buildings and the far right-hand hedgerow. This wash blends nicely into the wet paper, creating soft-edged shadows, with the area I wished to highlight being left untouched. If you are a little wary of this technique try it out firstly on old paintings that have not worked well, so that if things really do go wrong it won’t matter.

Painting sparkling water and shafts of sunlight

Our new exhibition starts at Art Matters in the White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby on Saturday 30th March, and continues until the 28th April. You can view the paintings on their website Jenny’s work is in pastel and mine in watercolour, and we will be there from 11 am to 4 pm on 30th March. The painting below is one of the watercolours I am exhibiting, although it does not show the whole picture.

Dinas Fach, Pembrokeshire

The scene shows sunbeams falling over Dinas Fach on the Pembrokeshire coast. To create the ragged edges to the clouds I stroked the blue-grey sky colour on with the side of a large round brush, rather than using the point. The shafts of sunlight were left until the very end of the painting, when everything was dry: I simply put two pieces of thin card together, slightly apart with the lower sections splayed out slightly more than the top parts, and then with a soft sponge soaked in clean water I stroked downwards over the lower sky and the craggy headland. I then did the same with the second shaft. It’s important to ensure that all the shafts of light come from the exact same spot, even if as in this case, the sun itself is hidden behind cloud.

Sparkling water can give a lovely inviting appeal to a scene, and this was achieved by spattering masking fluid over the area with a toothbrush, masking out those parts that I wanted to avoid spraying. I did add a few more little spots of masking fluid with a fine brush afterwards, where these were needed. When the masking fluid was dry I then painted over it with the sea colour, eventually removing the grey-coloured masking fluid to reveal the sparkling area. Shafts of sunlight work well with sparkling water, and you can add this to your sea, lake or river scenes when you wish to beef them up a bit.

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Painting wet pavements

Welcome to the new site for my blog. The delay in writing a new post since the last on my old blogger site has been because of the changeover to our brand-new site, master-minded by the amazing Jenny Keal. She’s not only my dear partner-in-paint, and a great pastellist, but she has been working at great odds to get it all working. I hope you get a seamless transfer from old to new, without any hitches, though knowing the computer world, I somehow doubt it will be entirely dreamlike!

We had another lot of snow last night – beautiful large flakes that floated down gently, but by morning most of it had gone. So instead of snow I’ll cover rain today. Light rain falling on a hard surface, perhaps with a hint of background light can be a delight to paint, and trying to capture the effects of this can be very rewarding.

Wet Pavement    This watercolour, which is part of a composition, shows a wet day in Hackney, on a part-cobbled surface. Most of the painting, including the general colour on the ground, the figures, lampost and wall, were painted first, and when all this was dry I described with a weaker application of paint the reflections. While they were still wet I punctuated them by dragging a damp flat brush horizontally through the reflections. After allowing all this to dry I then lay a wash of pure water across the foreground to reduce the strength of the reflections and at the same time soften their edges. Note that in doing this I avoided the lamp post, wall and legs of the walkers. This method is an alternative to the wet-into-wet technique, which some may well find easier to handle. The full painting is in my book Skies, Light & Atmosphere, which can be obtained from our website, and has an accompanying DVD of the same title – the special offer on these two items is available solely from ourselves.

New Website

Our new website is now up and running.

Come and explore the new website, we have spent two months working on it and we hope you like the new features and the new look.

There are new galleries of paintings for you to browse through, under David and Jenny’s drop down menus. David has four new collections of paintings for you to enjoy.

The shop has been rebuilt with modern features. There are still one or two issues to sort out but you can shop with confidence in the security of the site. We will be adding more items as they become available.

We have imported your account details from the old site but you will need to create a new password. To do this please visit Our Shop, Click on ‘Log In’ on the top right under the shopping basket, enter your email address and ask for a new password by clicking on ‘Forgot your Password?’ An email will be send to you to confirm that you want a new password. Click on the link in the email and a new password will be sent to you in a second email. You can change this to one you prefer once you are logged in with the password you have been sent, just go to your account and My Personal Information.

I am sorry that this is complicated but the new site would not accept passwords from the old site, nor the order history.

Enjoy browsing the new site. Please let us know if you find any broken links and we will attend to it.

 

Making the most of complementary colours

Evening light

Evening Light

Most of us have heard of complementary colours, but what are they, and how can we make the most of them in our paintings, whether we paint in watercolour, pastel, oils, acrylics or perhaps a mixture of sand and sheep droppings? Complementary colours are those that stand precisely opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as red and green; blue and orange or yellow and purple. One of the most exciting ways of exploiting this is to juxtapose the complementaries  as shown above.

In this watercolour showing part of the composition the autumn tints of warm yellow and orange come directly up against the warm blue of the background. Being complementary colours they are extremely effective in creating an attractive and dramatic colour relationship. This effect can be accentuated or reduced by intensifying or reducing the colour strength.

Note also that away from the blue background the colours are closer related – analogous colours that will be found within a small segment of the colour wheel. This suggests a calmer feeling, and an interesting foil to the more dramatic juxtapositioning of the complementaries.

This painting is reproduced in my Skies, Light & Atmosphere book, which is aimed at artists who wish to put a little extra into their landscape painting, and you can find details of a special offer in our shop. Our new website is almost ready to run, and we apologise to those of you who have had problems accessing the old one which is starting to creak a little.