The first session for December will be here on:
Wednesday 2nd December
at
6PM UK time (1PM Eastern, 10AM Pacific)
Modelling form from light to shadow, and particularly the half-tone, has come up quite a bit lately, so I thought it would be a nice way for us to round out the year to have a look at this in a bit more detail.
The main thing to get right, of course, is the value.
But there’s also the chroma and hue change to think about.
So I’ve put together a couple of studies for us to try our hands at this month.
The Subjects
Both are of a sphere, half painted a high neutral value and the othe rhalf painted a high chroma yellow โof the same value.
โIt’s a fun challenge, because you need to make sure that the value stays consistent across the transition from light to shadow, with only the hue and chroma changing.
But it is tricky!
What you’ll need
I’ll be demonstrating these studies on 5 x 7 inch panels, although you can work any size you like. There isn’t a tremendous amount of drawing out to do, they’re just shperes! So you can use a pair of compasses or just draw round a cup if you like.
The difficult part is modelling the form.
I’d recommend having hte followng tube paints:
- Titanium white
- An arylide yellow, if you can – Michael Harding Bright Yellow Lake or a Hansa yellow. If you don’t have either, lemon and cad yellow will get you close
- Yellow Ochre
- Transparent Red Oxide or Burnt Umber
- Raw Umber
- Ivory Black
Whether you work into a couch or not is up to you, it doesn’t really matter for a study like this – I probably will be though.
Reference Photos
If there’s time, we’ll do both of these – because the reflected light at the bottom of the sphere drastically changes the value there. We’ll start with the one with the yellow at the top.
Why this yellow? It’s the local colour of the yellow part of the apple we painted last month ๐

