XIV (cont): I burnish even more random colors onto the roof and gutter to muddy them up and keep them from competing with the statements.
XV:
http://i.imgur.com/8VzXILJ.jpg For further reference, here’s a photography chart of how different light sources will affect your colors. The shorthand version – Shadow is the absence of light, and when your eyes see shadows, they make little afterimages. They’ll seem oddly full of or drained of energy depending on the light source. (The reason Cubism had the overlapping planes and Expressionism had such huge shadows? The artists were adjusting to electric light, where flat planes overlap from multiple bulbs and shadows have higher energy.)
Sunlight (natural light), moonlight and LED light has a lot of blue and ultraviolet in it. The afterimage in the shadow will therefore be reddish. Filament lightbulbs, and more so fire and oil and gas lamps, are on the lower end of the spectrum. They throw red light (in general, the hotter the light source to the touch, the less light it radiates) and so their shadows appear bluish, electric and charged with energy. Flourescent light, and flickering light, for reasons unknown to man, casts a shadow the merest pinge towards olive green. This is art, so I exaggerate the green in my shadows.
So if you compare Meesh’s shadows to Griffsnuff’s, you’ll see that he sets his stuff inside with bright light, and she sets her stuff in the great outdoors. ‘Tis these effects.
As the poet wrote, “’Yes,’ I answered you last night,/ ‘No,’ this morning, Sir, I say / Colors seen by candlelight/ will not look the same by day.” Really wish I knew who wrote that, but take it to heart.
I dab tinges of green into the shadows and streak turquoise onto the wall, with thin layers of pink and cream orange to set it off.
I mix that night sky color out of the tubes of black, cobalt gray, a pinch of scarlet, purple and aquamarine. I brush several layers of the night sky into the sky region, going lighter in the areas I want a smoke trail so I don’t have too big of a stain. (Stains are your best friends when you know how to mess with them.) I burnish further blacks around the lower edge of the painting, since moonlight reflects the more bluish tint. (If a suburban scene, I’d have a reddish cast near the bottom and a greenish cast on the bottom if highway.)
XVI: I use the rigger to draw ugly, random streaks of blue across the trail of the smoke, to contrast with the inevitable white. When I wash this off later, the stain will have the hard edge of smoke.
XVII: I establish the angle of the light source from the lips of the bulb (I’ve already indicated a shadow into the corrugated metal). Brushing the night sky away to give space for the smoke, I later will paint this in with the night sky indigo color saturated with richer ultramarine, as the light will (not really but it looks cool) shine onto the diffused smoke, adding more saturation to the area (in reality it’ll just be lighter). I eventually do a thin layer of this.
XVIII: I use some white in its most pliable form, straight from the tube, in multiple thin layers suspended in water, to get the texture of the diffuse smoke of the background. Smoke, in shape form, doesn’t make much sense, as it’s both heavier and lighter than air. The heat makes it rise and the weight makes it fall – the air current will lift it and the force of the breath will change it, and each level has inertia from the previous.
The little mushroom shape atop the cig during times of stale air is one of my favorite textures, as is that rippled set of jags from out the mouth. It’s a pain to make a composition out of these without it looking stylized.
So there we go! I draw over the last bits with white.
Tutorial done! Sorry for the obnoxious '90s letters, I couldn't resist. I'll post the original tomorrow. I need sleep.