Painting surprise

Detail of workshop demo

The first portion of each of my online classes at The Winslow Art Center is devoted to looking at and discussing the homework that my students have posted during the previous week. It’s low stress and anonymous but always helpful for the whole class and for me, too.

We tend to run into similar issues in a painting: how to keep colour lively, how to suggest detail without fussing, how to create the illusion of form… there are many more and they’re often universal. In our weekly homework roundup, we see paintings from many different hands and aesthetics and figure out what’s working and what could be strengthened. Yesterday’s critique had a painting that reminded me that there is more than one way to accomplish this strengthening.

Ethereal work by one of my students

This painter created a lovely, soft explosion of colour and light but asked how she could make her form shadow stronger and more dramatic without sacrificing that gorgeous colour.

I put the piece into Procreate and tested a couple of options. The first is the most obvious: darken the shadow side with a variety of dark reds and purples:

darker form shadow

This definitely adds drama and a spotlit effect but it also loses some of the airiness of the original.

Next I tried to alter the background and left the bouquet untouched. I darkened and defined the cast shadow behind the flowers:

Darker cast shadow. **Ignore that weird little shadow shape in the bottom centre. My finger must have slipped during digital drawing.

This was fascinating and unexpected. The more distinct cast shadow made me perceive the bouquet’s shadow side as darker and richer. It was a what the heck? moment.

Scroll up and down between them and see how your brain takes a brief second to adjust and then calls the second version darker and richer in the shadow side of the bouquet. If you’re like me, you can actually perceive the form shadow darkening as you look at it.

Original

darkened cast shadow

I’ve been pondering why my brain insists on doing this and think it might be because like calls to like in a painting. Humans look for patterns and similarities and, by creating a strong dark, I’ve made my brain look for another one. Finding a mid-value dark, it decided to group it with its new friend and then convinced me that I was seeing not one isolated dark area, but a coherent pair.

Or my lifetime’s experience of looking tells me that cast shadows that are so dark and sharply defined are the result of strong light source. A light that strong also creates dark form shadows, so my brain decided to make that mid-value shadow darker to be consistent with this knowledge.

Or it’s magic.

If you know the neuroscience behind this magic, please comment and explain it to me.

If you’d like to join one of my upcoming workshops and find that I don’t have any posted on the Winslow site, call me a procrastinator and please be patient. I’m currently working on the announcements for 2 new, online workshops and they’ll be posted here and on the Winslow site within the next couple of days.

Happy painting!