6 PAINT contre-jour
A subject against the light provides a test in colour mixing, says Tom Hughes
THE BENEFITS
Painting a back-lit structure at dawn can be a fun exercise to improve your understanding of colour temperature and mixing of accurate hues.
THE PROCESS
I have always been fascinated with how white objects appear in shade and the doors and window frames on these beach huts are a great example. Dawn is so interesting because, before the sun has risen, the sky has a warm glow in front of you and a deep blue hue behind you. In fact, photographers often refer to this period of twilight before sunrise as “the blue hour”.
It’s that cool blue that acts as the secondary light source which lights up the shadow side of a structure, cooling all the colours in the paint work and turning whites into pale blues. If the sun has risen just above the horizon, the light is so completely dazzling it can be hard to convey with paint, so this pre-sunrise, soft light is a far more subtle and manageable scene to work with.
You can try working from life for this exercise, but you will have to paint small and work incredibly fast. You may only have 15 minutes to capture a few colour notes before everything changes. To paint brief, “blue hour” moments like this, I prefer to rely on photo reference. I shoot using my camera’s RAW format, expose for the sky, and then increase the exposure of the shadow areas in photo editing software. Doing this gives me an image that very closely resembles what I remember seeing on location. Most cameras will otherwise see everything as near-black apart from the sky, so you must not skip this step.
Mix sky colours first, keeping the mixes as clean as possible to preserve the chroma – no black or brown should be used at all at this stage. Once the sky is in place, paint in your darkest darks which then will give you the high and low tonal reference points for the mixes on the hut. Notice how your assumptions for the temperature of the “white” areas maybe be significantly off – they are often darker and bluer than you expect. Work slowly and don’t be afraid to over paint areas a few times. The more of the painting you block in, the more you can spot errors and correct accordingly. If you get it right, your light blue mixes should perfectly resemble a white door – magic! www.tomhughespainting.co.uk