GRADIENTS AND HOW TO USE THEM

JAMES GURNEY shares his top tips and demonstrates some handy methods for painting smooth gradients and applying them to practical uses

For large, smooth gradients, use a separate blender brush for each transition

We’re often asked to paint flat swatches in art school, but colours really come to life when they change gradually from one note to another. Unfortunately, smooth gradients aren’t that easy to paint. I’ll share a few different approaches and show how I apply them in specific paintings. The idea is to encourage you to try controlled experiments in the studio and then apply what you’ve learned in the field or on the job. I’ll be using watercolour, gouache, casein and acrylic, but the painting insights shown here are universal and will benefit oil and digital painters as well.

James Gurney authored Color and Light, How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist and Dinotopia. He has 450k Youtube subs, 224k on Instagram, and has published over 5k posts on the Gurneyjourney blog. jamesgurney.com

1 Make a simple watercolour gradient

Use heavy watercolour paper and a soft brush. Dampen the entire surface with water, without pooling. Tilt it to even it out. Load the brush with paint and start at the top. Pigment should travel. Add water to dilute the mixture while removing excess liquid from the brush with a rag. Tilt the paper to get pigment to flow in the direction you want. Remove excess buildup of water at the bottom of the painted rectangle with a thirsty brush, to avoid backruns. Try it with various pigments to see what they do.

2 Try stippling

This is an old-school method used for matte paintings, murals, and landscape painting. Use at least two brushes: a badger blender and a soft round brush. Dampen surface first. Loosely and thickly brush in the stripes of colours. Rapidly tap the surface with a badger hair blender or other flat-tipped soft brush. The brush will carry little dots randomly around to blend the areas. For large, smooth gradients, use a separate blender brush for each transition. A stipple gradient is easier in oil than it is in gouache, acrylic or casein because oil dries so much more gradually, allowing more working time.

3 Brushed gradient, background first

Using a ruler, or freehand, start by drawing a horizontal rectangle. Create a leaf shape within it – this can be done freehand or by using a compass or dinner plate. Next, you need to lightly dampen the paper to make it receptive. Paint a brushed gradient, starting with the background and painting the ‘leaf’ second. Change the mixture of paint as you move across an area. Remember what’s in the brush at a given time. Use a clean brush if you need pure white or pure black.

4 Foreground first, then background

Paint another leaf shape below that. Use a stipple gradient on the leaf first. Paint the background second, cutting the edge of the shape from the outside in. Materials include: pencil, compass or dinner plate 9” or 10” (22 to 25cm) in diameter, brush, ivory black and titanium white gouache, water cup, rag, ruler. If you do this exercise and the one before, it will help you practise making shapes with the foreground first, then the background and vice versa.

5 Paint leaves on an overcast day

These densely crowded fern fronds on an overcast day appealed to me for studying soft gradients of light and shadow. The local colour was fairly uniform on the ferns. As a result, the changes in value were the result of changes in the angle of the forms in relation to the sky, and also the degree to which they were overshadowed or occluded by fronds above them. Look for a similar grouping of leaves or ferns, and as you analyse the changes in tone, paint it with transparent gradients or brushed or stippled opaque gradients.

6 Parallel gradients

When two colour sets move together in the same direction, I call it a parallel gradient, such as in this banded cylinder. The red and blue bands and the white cylinder all move from light/warm to dark/cool. Draw the cylinder on watercolour paper freehand or use a large ellipse template. Draw the edges of the bands going around the cylinder. Paint the base tone of the cylinder quickly, blending the gradient from light to shadow. Then paint the red band and the blue band, changing the colour from light to shadow in the same way that you did for the ‘white’ base colour.

7 Create an in-brush gradient

An in-brush gradient takes place within the width of a single brush. Use a 1” soft, flat brush for this exercise. Use two additional brushes, one for each of the colours you’ll be blending. Mix the two colours and place them adjacent on the palette. Using the large brush, pick up one colour with one side and the other colour with the other side of the brush. Pull the stroke slowly, letting the gradient happen between the two colours. Turn the brush in your fingertips as needed. Always remember which colour was on which side of the brush.

8 Paint cloud shadows in a landscape

Start by painting a bird’s eye view of clouds moving over a landscape, casting soft-edged shadows on the ground below. Inside the patches of light, everything is a little warmer and higher in value. That shift happens both to the green grass and the lighter grey road. Try to paint the transitional gradients as simply as possible, using large brushes and moving quickly. Use an in-brush gradient if you can. On a cloudy day the patches of light transition smoothly into shadow.

Paint the base tone, blending the gradient from light to shadow