Day 10: Balancing Light & Shadow

Day 10: Balancing Light & Shadow

Wandering around contemplating the always present question of what to paint, I saw this sink and thought, “perfect!”

There are loads of artists who have done some amazing sink paintings and I thought I would have a go for myself. It looked straightforward with those big shapes and the light against dark.

The Garden Sink
Watercolor on Paper
10 x 7″
$115 | Available

 

Purchase

Silly me, really I thought that this would be relatively easy. Why did I even let myself have that thought?

In watercolor I have a general plan before I start. Some of that plan is in the drawing. I draw out the general layout for the shadow shapes and where they will fall, especially with this one because the light moved so fast that the shadows had changed completely before I even finished drawing.

My general plan was to leave the sink white and to paint everything else in color. This seemed like a surefire plan since the sink really is white.

But when I got to painting I realized it was just off balance, it was too much white too much in the middle of the paper and I had to change course.

Unfortunately it is difficult to see in the scan of this watercolor, but I ended up leaving the light on the ground white and giving a warm white/yellowish wash to the sink, which seemed to make it fit and sit back in to the space.

What I was drawn to in painting this was the repeating diagonals of the shadows, they were so strong and dynamic that I thought those powerful dark diagonals would balance out the big white shape.

My hypothesis did not work, but I adjusted and kept going. You can probably tell that I really loved all those dark blues, greens and purples in the shadows, that was where all the color was for this painting.