Addendum to Landscape Painting Assignment: Making Space

Making Space

Making a painting that depicts realistic space—from very shallow space (a few inches deep) to infinite space (the sky)--demands that you understand the relatively standard and consistent way color behaves in space, though there are always exceptions.  There are several principles that should be understood to use color, or aspects of color, to create the illusion of space.  Another thing should also be understood: that color is purely relative.  Something could look very warm or intense against one color, and relatively cool or broken against another.  What are important are the color relationships, about which the following principles speak.

1.         Value contrast tends to diminish as space recedes.  The darkest darks are under the rocks in the foreground, and then tend to lighten as the space deepens, lowering the contrast between the lights and darks in the background.  However, the lights in the background don’t get much darker, though they do get duller and less intense.   

2.         The cleanest and most saturated color advances to the foreground, leaving the broken colors to recede.  That means that even the objects with not very intense local colors can be brought forward by keeping them clean, even though they aren’t very intense.  The trick is to make sure that there are no complimentary colors mixed into that less chromatic foreground.  Complimentary colors are what make muddy grays and cause whatever they are added to recede.  To make an otherwise strong color less intense but still keep it advancing, match the tone of that color with a mixture of black and white and mix in that gray.  Your color will therefore not change its hue or value, only its chroma, keeping it clean.  Conversely, to make a color recede, dirty it somewhat by mixing in its complement.

3.         Aerial perspective--As any color gets further into the distance, there is of course more atmosphere between that color and you, in effect creating an “air filter”.  As we all know, air is evaporated water, and water tends to have a blue cast.  This means that color relationships viewed through the atmospheric filter get bluer and cooler (as well as less intense) as they get further and further away.  That’s why the distant tree covered hills look decidedly blue gray against the much closer fields and trees.

4.         Layering--The layers of paint underneath profoundly affect the appearance of the top layer of paint.  The final color of the paint is never just the pigments that were mixed together for the top layer, but the sum of all the color underneath as well.  Obviously, a thin layer of yellow paint will look green if put on a black under layer, but even “opaque” paint will be affected by what’s underneath, however subtly.  Colors painted over surfaces that are darker than those colors (however slightly) will instantly cool down, causing them to recede.  This is the reason that a neutral dark wall demands several coats of white paint—the first layer always looks blue.  Conversely, colors painted over surfaces that are lighter will tend to warm up and become more luminous, causing them to advance.   Watercolors look so luminous because almost all of them have the white of the paper showing through.  You end up seeing much more than the color of the paint itself.  A painting over an imprematura cannot be matched exactly over white for this reason.

More notes about layering and luminosity

One of the many things that the Old Masters knew and used extensively was this notion of layering.   One of the beauties of paint—especially oil paint—is that it can become so intense and luminous.  Squeezing out a glob of ultramarine blue and spreading it around on white canvas will give you an immediate sense of what I mean.  That blue that you now see on the canvas cannot be mixed.  It cannot be manufactured.  Yes, that blue was made from a manufactured paint, but you are not looking at merely ultramarine blue.  Because the nature of ultramarine is so transparent, you are looking at the blue with the pure white underneath showing through.  You could squeeze color from that same tube onto a gray or black or even blue ground, but you will not be able to get a blue of even a similar intensity.  In the same way, any color with white showing through—a clean or broken color--is not simply the hue from your palette.  It’s a combination of that hue plus the white showing through.  Nor can you get the same color by putting together the hue and white by mixing—you’ll just get an opaque, much grayer color.  A combination of colors by layering is not the same as a combination by mixing.  Layering a transparent darker color over any lighter color (not just white) will almost invariably produce a more luminous color than mixing the two together.

One of the best examples is in the color raw umber.  By itself over white can produce a very rich, warm brown.  Mixing umber and white together, however makes an extremely neutral gray.  The difference is remarkable.  An example of layering over a color other than white to get a luminous color combo might be to glaze a red over yellow to get an intense orange.  You cannot mix the resulting orange even with the same pigments.  To get a rich gray you might consider layering transparent compliments instead of mixing them together.  This is a great way to create space by breaking color while keeping things rich and not muddy.

I mentioned that the Old Masters used layering and luminosity.  Examples can be seen in many of the 17^th Century Dutch landscapes.  At that time they did not have access to the many different pigments and hues that we have to work with now, in the early 21^st Century.  They might have only had red earth, green earth, Naples yellow, possibly azurite (any of the blues tended to be very expensive), black, and white.   To make up for this dearth of hue options, they had to use all the different aspects of each color to the greatest extent possible.  So in areas that you (as the painter) might want the foreground to come forward you will need to keep those areas clean and luminous.  Broken colors will, in turn, recede into space.  Some of the Dutch landscapes have used only red and green earth in the whole foreground, but by varying its transparency, color intensity, and “chromatic hygiene”(clean color) as well as flawless drawing these paintings seem to lay down beautifully.  Some even made “blue” sky from simply making a neutral gray from black and white, but since you see it against the warm luminous colors of the foreground it seems very blue.