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I painted a dog, which was white, but did have a few areas of darker fur. My idea was to use paynes gray and just put brush strokes.
It’s like reading the directions on how to put something together, after you did it on your own and realized there was an issue.
So, now I’m asking how you all handle whites. Whites in beards, hair, fur, etc.
Thanks in advance, I know you all will have so many great answers.
Sorry, somehow this posted twice. Can’t find where to delete one here.
I painted a dog, which was white, but did have a few areas of darker fur. My idea was to use paynes gray and just put brush strokes.
It’s like reading the directions on how to put something together, after you did it on your own and realized there was an issue.
So, now I’m asking how you all handle whites. Whites in beards, hair, fur, etc.
Thanks in advance, I know you all will have so many great answers.
White reflects the colors around it, and you’ll never see a truly pure white for that reason. All the colors of the subject and the background are therefore reflected in the whites.
What you need to do is really look at the white areas and see the color, rather than believing what you know. We’re taught that white is an absence of color and tend to ignore the fact that it isn’t. The color is usually very pale – a tint, so if you have a blue background, you will see a very pale tinge of blue in the white. If there are other colors around, say red flowers, the blue might turn into a purple tinge in some areas, or you might have distinct areas of blue and red tinges.
In the painting below, my Siamese cat has two local colors – white with lavender-ish points. I reserved the white of the paper for the highlights and used the local color of the points (sort of a lavender) for the shadows.
Note how little of the white of the paper that I used. The amount of white changes according to the lighting you are trying to portray.
I thinned my lavender mix with water to vary how dark it was. In the darker shadowed areas, I used the reflected color of the background.
Using local and reflected colors can get very complex, and it’s well worth studying, but there is an easier method. You can make executive decisions, and simply choose the color that you want in your whites rather than depending on the real thing.
I’m showing one of my fineliner pen drawings here because I think it shows what I’m talking about more clearly than any my watercolors.
I felt the local color – ‘liver’ brown – of this Springer Spaniel would make for an ugly white. So I chose to put him on a blue blanket, and used two shades of blue for my tints. For the darkest shadows, I simply used the black pen. Black is trickier for watercolor. If I had painted this, I would have used Payne’s Gray in a pinch, or mixed blue and brown to get an almost black.
If you weren’t showing any background except a shadow, you would want your shadow to be a darker version of the colors in your white.
Clear as mud? I hoped I’ve helped somewhat.
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