Artist insight
Anatomy master Charlie Pickard breaks down how to properly build powerful shadows in figure paintings with 10 expert tips
Shadows are often the source of most of the mistakes in students’ early artworks. If we handle them properly, they can be an incredibly powerful part of our artwork, but they can be tricky. The value differences that make them up are often some of the most subtle in nature and they are easily overdone.
Shadows have the potential to add a tremendous amount of atmosphere and graphic impact to our work and this tendency to over-render them can destroy these wonderful effects, leaving us a picture that’s broken up. It’s important we understand how to approach them in a way that doesn’t destroy this overriding unity.
What I want to do today is discuss a few common mistakes that I see often in my student’s work, and put forward a few simple changes to our approach and thinking that can help make this often challenging area so much simpler.
1 DON’T OVERDO THE REFLECTED LIGHTS
The most common early mistake all of us made at some point is to make the reflected lights far too bright. They’re never quite as bright as we think and overdoing them can lead to a broken-up look overall. Shadows will start to be confused with lights by our viewers, and at best we’ll have the sense of an extra light source shining into our shadows, which isn’t ideal.
There are quite a few reasons this mistake often happens. It can be due to illusions such as simultaneous contrast and the tendency for us to want to overexplain each detail. Reflected lights can often be completely ignored without losing much in the final art. In fact there are many artists that do exactly this, and it may leave you with a more powerful work. If we choose to include them, we have to remember to make them subtle so as not to ruin the overall effect.
2 KEEP THE SHADOW VALUES SEPARATE
The first way we can avoid this common mistake is to enforce the absolute separation of light values from shadow values. While the reflected lights may appear bright, they can never be as bright as the primary light source. This is because it’s secondhand light that has bounced off a surface and become weaker as a result. The general rule here is that the lightest dark must be darker than the darkest light. Not respecting this separation is what ultimately leads to this broken-up effect.
3 START OUT SIMPLE AND GRAPHIC
The ea
