12 SKETCH evening light

Kim Scouller says pick up your pastels and try to capture the changing conditions

THE BENEFITS

During the darker days of the year, evening light is fleeting, making this a challenge that will sharpen your wits. Drawing in pastel encourages a quick, intuitive response to the changes too, while a focus on colour temperature can help you add depth to a picture too.

THE PROCESS

Winter and spring are perhaps the best seasons for sketching evening light. A photograph never seems to do it justice, so the act of drawing or painting a setting sun in a way that captures your experience is a fun challenge.

Due to the limited time, a minimal selection of colours will allow you to work quickly without losing precious minutes. When I’m working in pastel, I quickly choose the ones I want to use, perhaps starting with three colours – a dark, a mid- and a light tone – then I build a few other colours around my initial choice.

Having a range of tones helps to produce a feeling of depth in the drawing. In the example on the right, my initial selection was three tones of purple and blue – a light blue for the sky, a purple blue for my mid-tone shadows, and a grey blue for my darkest shadows.

I added in warm colours to represent the glow from the sun with an orangey yellow and a lighter warm yellow for the flared sunlight. This combination of purple and yellow has the extra benefit of them being complementary to each other thus creating a visually exciting contrast.

You could try playing with other colour combinations too – take a look at Claude Monet’s “Haystack” paintings for inspiration. It can be useful to know that warmer colours tend to be closer to the light source and cooler colours further away. This helps to explain why I’ve made the sky cooler at the outer edges of the composition. www.kimscouller.com