Where Shadows Meet Light 7×12 – 15 Min Painting Session
The painting I’m bringing you today is called Where Shadows Meet Light. It’s a 7×12, and I painted this last week.
The Foundation: Board Prep
We’re working on hardboard primed with several coats of house paint and some transparent gesso. One of the main reasons that you want to prep your board with a color other than white is so that you don’t have to worry about every little edge matching up to every other edge. When you have a tree over the sky, you have a certain amount of latitude because you have a neutral brownish tone, and that’s fine for it to peek around.
I used to paint on raw hardboard and really liked the color, but there is a lot of inherent saturation there. When I’d finish paintings on the hardboard, I’d notice sometimes more variants around the edges of things. The hardboard has more saturation and variance—when you get it wet with a little bit of liquid, it has a tendency to pop. So the primed board gives you more control.
Here’s a tip: Don’t try and be perfect before you do things. What you want to do is do things and perfect as you go. That’s been the case with my video production, my painting process, everything. I just improve as I go. I don’t let perfection impede my progress.
Composition: The Intervals
Similar to paintings with trees and paths—my favorite thing to paint—what makes this really cool is the proportions. The 7 by 12 proportion is something I really dig lately.
In the live session for this video, I go on about the intervals—the spaces between the trees. If they’re too consistent, if the width of the trees is too consistent, then a scene like this might be a little too pedestrian. You can see where I did some erasing, some moving around. I try and get the intervals between the trees looking just right, the width of the trees looking right. To me, that’s 90% of what creates the composition for this sort of painting.
The Sky Strategy
In a painting like this, I did do a little more variance in the sky than I might do sometimes. There are occasions where I’ve got a clearing on one side of the trees and some sky there—many times I’ll just do a gradation with some yellows into lighter whitish tones. We did some of that here, but I also worked in a few more grays.
Warm grays in the sky: my go-to is burnt umber mixed with Mike’s gray.
What’s Mike’s gray? It’s a mixture of ivory black with titanium white. Now, I had a question on the channel: what’s Mike’s green? Mike’s green is acrylite yellow mixed with ivory black. You could do it with cad yellow, but it’ll give you a green that’s kind of chalky because of the dark density of the particulates in the cadmium. The acrylite yellow gives you a perfectly beautiful green when mixed with black, and it’s one of the big foundations of my painting process.
A caution: if you are one of the people that likes to paint on canvas, you need to avoid zinc white at all costs. Quite a few extensive studies have been done that show it cracks—in small amounts, big amounts, it just cracks. Conservators of the future will appreciate your care and attention to that detail.
Working Back to Forward
You might think, “I feel like doing the trees first,” but as a general rule, I always work back to forward. In the sky, if there’s blue, I’ll paint that first and then paint the clouds over the top. Other than that, in skies I usually work from the top to the bottom. It just makes sense.
The Darks: Mars Black
Now we’re moving into the darks. I’m doing the darks with a mixture of Mars black, sometimes adulterated with a little burnt umber or burnt sienna. I do that because Mars black alone isn’t a pretty color. The reason I use it is it gives me the extra opacity that is completely absent from ivory black.
Ivory black is so transparent—it’s a wonderful glaze color, and you get some really neat effects with it. But I tend to like to put my shadows in fairly thinly, and the problem with ivory black is that it’s just kind of thin, which works against me. So I use Mars black to get that opacity, and then I kind of pretty it up. Sometimes I might even add a little ivory black.
Critical: Not all Mars blacks are created equal. The brand I use is Winsor Newton. I tried Classico, and it was even uglier than the Winsor Newton Mars black—not terribly opaque either. I threw it in the trash.
Mars black is very prevalent in acrylic paints; I almost never see ivory black in acrylics. I don’t know why that is, but Mars black is incredibly handy for oil painting.
The Greens: A Good Move
In the reference, this is a very sepia-toned painting, but we’re going to be bringing in some greens. That was a really good move. You can check out the reference that I used in the members area, where you’ll also find the live session with the full painting process at 4K.
I hope you got something from this. Take good care of yourself and your loved ones, and I’ll see you real soon with another video.
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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M Francis McCarthy, Your Painter in Residence