The 3 Keys To Make Your Oil Paintings Glow
To start, achieving the right shades in your colors is the first step. Next, making sure your colors are vibrant enough is crucial. Lastly, accurately depicting reflected light is the third important factor. Let's dive into these aspects.
Beginning with 'values,' they represent how light or dark a color is. To make something in your artwork appear bright and radiant, it needs to have the right amount of shadows. For example, even the shaded parts of a pumpkin should look somewhat dark, although not as dark as the background. Even the side of the pumpkin exposed to sunlight should have a noticeable level of darkness. It's important to strike a balance here. Making the lit areas too bright too soon leaves little room for adding more brightness later.
Think about this in the context of a landscape painting. I wanted to make a house in the background look like it was bathed in sunlight, making it the focal point. To achieve this, I had to make the surrounding trees darker, even though they were also in the sun. When capturing the sunlight on those trees, I had to be careful not to make them too bright, so the house would stand out. A useful technique is to start by establishing the darkest shade in your composition and use it as a reference for comparing other levels of brightness.
Moving on to color saturation - how vibrant the colors are is crucial. Even when you look at the artwork in grayscale, it should still have a bright quality. This means that the intensity of colors matters a lot. While it's easy to get vibrant colors straight from the paint tube, the real challenge is toning down those vibrant colors effectively. Here's an important tip: it's not always necessary to use complementary colors to neutralize or dull down hues when mixing them. This rule applies unless you deliberately want to reduce vibrancy for a specific purpose.
For example, the outer part of the pumpkin, whether in shadow or sunlight, has a somewhat muted orange, subtly mixed with its complementary color, blue. However, the inner parts of the pumpkin that are directly exposed to light have a rich and intense palette. This strong contrast enhances the bright and captivating effect. You can see a similar effect in a still-life composition, where the fruits might appear dull in grayscale but shine with vibrancy through a careful balance of muted and vivid colors.
In practice, it's a good idea to have mostly desaturated colors in your palette. This approach allows the few instances of vibrant colors to really stand out and grab the viewer's attention. Think of it as a crescendo in your painting, where the quieter moments make the crescendo itself even more impactful.
Finally, let's talk about capturing reflected light in a nuanced way. The subtle interplay of light on nearby surfaces adds to the illusion of radiance. For example, when I apply an orange paint on a wet table surface to show the subtle glow from the pumpkin, it requires skill to create soft transitions to indicate where the light is coming from. Emphasizing the edge of a smaller pumpkin with this gentle glow also enhances the overall radiant effect, highlighting the importance of even small details in conveying light in your artwork.
In conclusion,
Creating art that exudes a radiant impact involves mastering values, finding the right balance of color saturation, and skillfully portraying reflected light. These elements must work together like pieces of a complex puzzle. Patience is key, and holding off on adding the brightest highlights until the right moment ensures a powerful and captivating outcome."