Category Archives: Color & Technique

Rendering noon at the shore

Breakwater (detail)
With the tons of light, short shadows, blue sky, and lack of atmospheric ambiguity to resolve, high-noon scenes seem to read pretty easily, but that is what can make them tricky.

Two intuitions work against painters. The first is the dynamic range. Midday seems like it should produce a really wide range of values (strongest lights/darkest shadows) but it doesn’t. The range at noon is actually compressed. So much light bounces off sand, water, every white surface, etc. that shadows fill in. A shadow on wet sand at noon probably goes more blue than dark, and probably isn’t as as dark as the one a painter thinking “shadow” will make it. These usually have a cool middle value, maybe a slight violet lean from the sky. If a shadow is simply painted dark it may not register as an authentic noon shadow.

The second has to do with the color. You would expect strong sun to make local color more vivid and read more clearly but the opposite happens. Extreme light bleaches everything it hits directly. Direct sun on foam is straight-up white. Direct sun on light sand is a warm off-white. What I try to focus on is the effect extreme light has on surfaces and not the surfaces themselves. Painters trained on observation-first color sometimes preserve local color when they shouldn’t, and the picture reads as bright but not necessarily noon.

There are more things to think about, like the fact that clear, low-information skies are still doing something. At clear midday, the deepest saturated blue is straight overhead and fades lighter toward the horizon, so there’s more line-of-sight atmosphere. The horizon has a distinct contrast. If sky and sea meet at the same value, the picture flattens out, which isn’t what happens when its noon and clear.

Sparkle on the water isn’t evenly spread out. Hits of real noon sunlight usually concentrate in a triangular area while the rest of the surface has a much narrower value band. If the sparkles are everywhere then the picture reads as generally bright but not as noon.

Pictures with high luminosity benefit from an isolated small near-black shape. A picture with no dark anchor and a lot of bright light reads as washed out instead of bright. The dark can be small: the shadow under a hull or a piece of driftwood, a figure against the water, whatever. Chroma should be concentrated, not global (if everything is saturated, nothing is). Warm-cool contrasts can can get that done through a single element rather than a warm spread across the whole picture.

All that said, some of the most convincing midday beach paintings aren’t strictly accurate to midday light. They compress it, warm it, or drift toward late morning, because true noon is harsh, hard to look at for very long, and can get compositionally spare if painted as it really appears. Accurate isn’t always the same as interesting, and sometimes you have to decide which one you actually want. These days I’ve had more of a documentarian approach, which does make the finished product feel less designed and painterly, but hopefully convincing as to an actual time and place.

Categories: Color & Technique

On Air and Distance

11:07 a.m. (detail)
Atmospheric perspective isn’t too hard when the scene cooperates. Stack up elevations one after the other, paint the farthest one a pale blue-violet and the closest one in full color, and you have depth regardless of what else is happening on the canvas. Whenever the terrain has features, depth is easier to show.

Fields, open water, and similar flat expanses don’t always offer much in that area. No overlapping silhouettes to grade from cool to warm, no middle distance hills to help transition. Instead it’s a a strip of ground, a band of water or grass and a sky; three or four horizontal zones all subject to the same atmospheric haze and none providing much spatial information on their own. It is very easy for everything just to flatten out into stripes. It’s good to remember that the further you look out, the more air you’re looking through that filters the view and affects perception of value, color and detail.


Whenever I’m having to show distance over an expanse I try to work out the values first. Air scatters light, so contrast degrades with distance. Darks generally will lighten faster than the lights darken, and looking a mile or so out, what was a strong dark-against-light pattern up close narrows down to a band of middle values. But this is not always the case with water - I took a documentarian approach with the excerpt at right, where the middle distance blue band actually was the darkest area that day, while having less discernible detail than the closer blue band. Depending on what you’re after, there are times when painting what is actually there should be prioritized over alignment to the usual rules. 


On flat ground, foreground darks should usually be the darkest darks in the picture and foreground lights pretty much the lightest. At a regular eye-level viewing height, the middle ground range compresses to a little more than half of the foreground’s spread. The background compresses it again, often to a very narrow band. Determine value ranges for those areas before mixing anything. Color will do the rest; the standard rule of “warm forward, cool back” is true often enough to use and wrong often enough to be careful with. That approach has more to do with saturation and temperature shift: distant areas are less saturated than the corresponding near areas and will shift toward whatever the sky is doing. Usually that’s cool but sometimes it isn’t - on your typical humid Gulf morning the distant water may be warmer than the foreground sand.


Details. Foreground grass has edges. Middle ground grass has clumps with maybe a few edges. Far background grass is a tone, not a texture. Foreground breakers have crisp white edges; the middle distance has softer shapes; near the horizon has a thin lighter or darker band at most. It is about information per square inch as much as brushwork; the foreground has the most, the background the least.


The principles are the same whether the medium is oil or acrylic, but the execution may be different. Because oil takes hours to dry you can lay in a sky, drag the top edge of a distant treeline up into it while both are wet, and the colors blend nicely. A thin transparent cool “glazing” layer over a dried area cuts saturation and cools temperature with one application (a thin ultramarine tint is pretty good at pushing a middle ground further back).


With acrylic, by the time you want to blend two passages together, the first may have already set. Retarder or open medium extends the window, but not the way oil does. Acrylic glazing mediums let you build the same recession faster but each glaze sits as a separate film rather than interacting with the layer below, so the depth comes from three or four stacked transparencies. I don’t always have the patience for that and wind up dragging a slightly opaque, lighter cool color over dried darker passages with a dry brush, which replicates how haze actually sits in front of distant objects.


There is a counterargument as to whether flat-terrain landscapes should read deep. There are strong paintings of beaches and fields that compress distance rather than amplifying it - atmospheric effects are observed but used to flatten and unify rather than drive the eye back. The principles don’t change though; if the painting needs to be quiet, the atmosphere should do less. Either way, it helps to think of the air, as well as the terrain, as the subject.

Categories: Color & Technique

The Colors with No Name

An interesting thing I read lately was in a Van Gogh letter written in July of 1882, five years before he went to Arles and started putting down the blaring yellows everybody knows him for. He was writing to his brother Theo and talking about color:

Absolute black doesn’t in fact occur. Like white, however, it’s present in almost every colour and forms the endless variety of greys - distinct in tone and strength. So that in nature one in fact sees nothing but these tones or strengths.

The last sentence is bold. In nature one in fact sees nothing but these tones or strengths. Not red, not blue, not green-grays, but mixed, broken, in-between tones that don’t have names. He goes on to list a few of them (red-gray, yellow-gray, blue-gray, green-gray, orange-gray, violet-gray) and then basically shrugs, saying the variations are infinite and there’s no way to catalog them. The point seems to be that named colors are a convenient shorthand but not really what you’re looking at when you look at anything. What we see is the unnamed middle.

Van Gogh said the colorist is somebody who can look at a color in nature and analyze it - say, this green-gray is mostly yellow with a little black and almost no blue - and then mix it. The solution isn’t having a tube for every situation but knowing how to interpret a color’s makeup. He says that understanding the three primaries plus black and white is worth more than seventy pre-mixed shades, because more than seventy tones can be made from the fundamentals and none of the pre-mixed ones are going to match what you’re looking at anyway.


He comes back to the idea in another letter three years later when talking about painting a head, and he describes seeing it as “a harmony of reddish brown, violet, yellow, all broken - I’ll put a violet and a yellow and a reddish brown on my palette, and break them into each other.” Breaking them into each other is the working method. Put down complements or near-complements and mix them partially but not all the way to gray. What results is a broken tone, a color that started as one thing, ran into another, and landed somewhere in between.

The technical idea of broken tone is straightforward: when you mix two complementary colors in unequal proportions, they partially neutralize each other and you end up with a gray with a bias. Put that broken tone next to a pure version of either parent, and the pure one will really stand out. Put two broken tones of different bias next to each other, and they have more of a quiet interaction instead of fighting with each other.


This is why a canvas with only pure colors can feel garish and somehow flat at the same time. Every color is at maximum volume, so nothing is actually loud. Simple tints and shades of these do not add real depth, but if you introduce a range of broken tones the pure colors finally have somewhere to stand out from. The unnamed middle is doing the structural work and the named colors get the attention.


You can see it in Van Gogh’s own paintings, though you would think he completely abandoned grays for saturation when he moved to France. The Potato Eaters (1885) is almost entirely broken tones - reddish-browns, greyed yellows, violet-leaning shadows, etc. Almost no pure color anywhere but it’s not muddy. Tones are clearly distinct from each other because each one is deliberately made and placed in relation to the ones around it. Three years later he’s in Arles painting chrome yellow sunflowers and the red-green clamor of The Night Café and it looks like the work of a different painter. But if you squint at that painting, the strong colors recede and what holds the thing together is a substructure of in-between tones. The Arles saturation didn’t replace the gray years, the gray years made the Arles saturation possible.


For me, applying this sort of thing has mostly meant mixing grays on purpose instead of just tinting black or raw umber. Combining complements in unequal proportions and paying attention to what bias comes out will change what your eyes do when you look at anything. The shadow on a white wall isn’t just gray. It’s probably a blue-violet-gray leaning warm, or a green-gray leaning cool, depending on what’s lighting it and what’s reflecting onto it. To this point I’ve been lucky to be able see the makeup of a color I’m trying to match in terms of the tubes of paint I have in the box. And so far I have been able to get anywhere I need to go with the fifteen or so tube colors I keep around. 


A lot of this is just basic color-mixing technique and not news to anybody who’s been painting for a while, but Van Gogh’s framing is an interesting way to think about the in-between colors and the load they carry.

Categories: Color & Technique

Unlearning with Monet

Copy of Monet’s The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (2024)
The last time I was doing any kind of representative painting I was focused on heavy realism. That was around twenty years ago (!) and it has been interesting to see how strong the tendency still is to want to wring detail out of the new stuff. I had always pushed toward photorealism with the still life compositions and felt like the surrealistic paintings also hit harder when they looked more like a photo, but this time around with straight-up landscapes, I’m feeling like high realism makes for a less interesting painting. Scrapping detail, however, is sometimes easier said than done.

So to loosen things up I switched to acrylic paint and started going a lot faster. I also went back and did a crash study on Claude Monet and other early impressionists and painted a few copies in early 2024. Unsurprisingly the Monets that helped the most in preparing for the coastal theme were some of the Saint-Adresse paintings done in and around 1867. It’s always interesting with impressionists to note what gets left out because it’s a window into what the painter sees and how they prioritize visual elements. Of course lighting drives a lot of those decisions, but the organization of color is often where the creativity lives in impressionism. To me this is the greatest value of Monet - abstracting color without tipping completely over into unnatural palettes.

Part of my unlearning has been to literally unfocus my eyes, not just to identify the light blocks, but to break down the color as well. “Paint what you see” is about 90 percent of the representative painting advice I can give, and a way to apply that advice to myself in this case is to hinder the view. I don’t know how well the tactics are working so far though - old habits die hard and I think I’m mostly painting realism with an impressionist edge. I have enjoyed revisiting Monet though and I’ve always learned something whenever I’ve copied the work of the greats.

Categories: Color & Technique

Where Olive Meets Periwinkle

Waders on a Sandbar (2026)
The unlimited ways that bodies of water can appear has been an attraction for me with these coastal paintings. Previously I had not spent a lot of time reducing something like a view of the ocean to its basic form, so this has been a good personal exercise in detaching context from a familiar environment and simply seeing the light, hues, and shapes as they are. In doing that I’ve finally started recognizing the really interesting and unexpected color combinations that appear when water, sunlight, reflection, shadow, and subsurface elements collide.

There is a particular cast to Gulf water west of Mobile Bay. It’s not altogether unique, but familiar in the northwestern Gulf Coast and different from the celebrated pthalo of the panhandle. Watching my kids out on a submerged sandbar on a sunny day, I started looking at the shallow span in between that was free of breakers but full of motion. Two absolutely distinct colors were on display - the bright periwinkle of the reflected surface and olive wavelets revealing the mixed hues of the water and sand. Seeing such different colors alternating side by side is interesting. The combination clashes happily in bright sunlight and does a lot to give the impression of movement when you paint it.

The paint color for the olive will vary depending on water depth, time of day, and what beach you’re standing on. I’ve gotten a pretty serviceable Mississippi Sound olive with a base of burnt umber, yellow ochre, and Prussian blue, maybe a cadmium yellow boost if it’s sunny. For a convincing periwinkle I’ve been mostly happy mixing a sky blue from Prussian blue and white, then adding alizarin crimson to taste and then black or raw umber to muddy it up. I was finding that starting with pink pushes the mix too much toward purple and away from how the natural color looks. I don’t know why it should matter but for some reason starting out with the light blue helps me avoid that.

Olive and periwinkle. You won’t see this combination too much between Pensacola and Apalachicola, and you probably wouldn’t pick it for your living room, but it conveys a distinct Gulf Coast vibe all the same.

Categories: Color & Technique