Advancing with Watercolor : Painting Shadows - Graded Washes

SHADOWS AND GRADATION

If someone asked you what colors are shadows? You would probably say gray without much thought. And in theory you would be right, however, for those of us who paint shadows, we need to think about the color that makes up the gray and indeed how the gray varies.

For the painter shadows are great opportunity to make interesting shapes, as well as describe a surface and the play of light. Typically as shadows move away from objects, they get lighter and softer, shadows also describe the angle to which the sun is relative to the object casting, thus low light equals long shadows. The shadows also describe the intensity of the light. If it's a very bright day, the shadows will be quite dark and hard edged. So all these things are visible when we look at nature, and figure into our painting. Before they can be effective, we need to look at how they change from beginning to end.

This is where gradation becomes useful.

Gradation means that a color or shape changes its color or tone very gradually from one edge to the other. It's a great tool for creating death on a body of water or on a country road. It's also very useful when painting shadows. In today's work, we paint very large shadow on a Rockwall, noting that the shadow changes from a lighter aspect to a darker aspect from a cooler aspect to a warmer aspect. With this knowledge, we can choose our colors more easily and blend them to our need.

This piece began in Texas where I visited the St Elenas Canyon and painted there with some other artists. The sketch you see is a single color painting that evokes the warmth and reflection of light in this part.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

I will be using a fuller palette this week - yellow ochre is the color I consider to be the mother color, cad yellow light, b Sienna, cobalt blue and ultramarine blue as well as sepia…

In the end I regain a few whites with

I use a wide selection of brushes from my 2” wide to my mop brushes and some sabelettes various sizes. Paper towels, hair dryer and spray bottle.

I use a couple of smaller scraps for painting graded washes then a larger 12 x 18 sheet for the demo

WHAT WILL WE DO

We will start with a couple of exercises in graded washes controlling the wash to get an effective gradual change to the wash - next we will look at the image and where we might use a graded wash.

Finally we move on to the dem on a larger sheet applying what we just learned