Exercise : Monochrome studies.
Thursday, 28 April 2016
When you have finished both studies of the winter tree, assess the strengths and limitations of each approach. Note down how you think you could exploit these affects again. Both transparent and opaque methods are often used side by side in the same painting.
Strength |
Limitations |
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Light Ground |
Natural way of working light-dark. Gives more control of tone. Tends to look more REAL. Gives a moody visual effect. I can see how Mark Rothko Research liked to use this effect to visualise different levels of consciousness as the paint layers show though to show hidden depths.
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Variations in tone tend to be extreme. Lighter picture overall.
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Dark Ground |
Looks like a night time composition. Darker overall effect. The light tone is hindered by the dark undertone. I scraped the light wash away to reveal the dark ground again and this gave texture to the plain wash. |
Variations of tone harder to control as less light able to counteract with the dark ground. Uses more white paint to give a lighter tone. Variations in tone are limited and the white looks like snow in the dark. Even if you dilute the colour more the dark ground will not allow the light to shin though so it’s always will be a dark tone. |
One effect is Ghostly and the other is rather dark and meaningful.
http://www.museartanddesign.com/paints-opaque-vs-transparent/
Opaque paints are more reflective (not to be confused with “shiny”). They cover and hide what’s under them. Transparent (or translucent) paints allow more light to pass through them. They are ‘see through’. Learning about and observing the opacity or transparency of paints enables artists to have greater command over techniques like glazing, layering, optical colour mixing, or avoiding pentimento, a bothersome effect where paint becomes more transparent as it dries, revealing what’s underneath.
Paints are rarely perfectly opaque or transparent. Most paints fall somewhere between completely opaque and completely transparent. The term semi-transparent describes paints that show a balance of opacity and transparency. When paints consist of a mixture of pigments, opaque pigments will usually override transparent ones and the mixture will be opaque. This interaction is important to consider on your pallete since a transparent pigment, even if it seems very strong and dark (like phthalo green, for example) will be dramatically altered by adding even small amounts of an opaque pigment such as titanium white.
In the above video He shows his theory where transparent colours on a light ground are much more vibrant and the variations of tone are more controlled and drying times are quicker.
In a composition where the foreground maybe a darker colour than the background for example shaded and lighter areas, then the above exercise of using a light ground and a dark ground would help to exploit this composition. Any composition where a strong contrast is needed would benefit from the above exercise. Some thing to come back to in Part 4 of the course due to the section on Landscapes.