30 Watercolor artist | JUNE 2020
shade from trees features patches of
dark and of light, both of which have
soft edges. If you look closely at
Turkish Fountain, Hania, Crete, Greece
(opposite), you’ll notice that both are
present. Some are cast by closeup
objects, as in the palm fronds and
the pillars, and others are more soft-
edged, such as the dappling on the
conical top of the fountain and in the
left foreground. Th ese are cast by tree
foliage which is farther away. Once you
become attuned to looking for these
variations, you’ll fi nd there are endless
permutations on the shadow theme.
A diff erent sort of pattern is created
by window bars when you’re painting
indoors. One of my favorite subjects is
the interior of a greenhouse, in which
the wooden glazing bars are mirrored
in a grid-like pattern of shadows and
light. Th e Greenhouse and Peppers,
England (pages 26-27) was painted
on a clear sunny day, and it was some-
thing of a task to sort out the various
elements: the shadows on the wall, the
window at an angle and the refl ections
in it, the slope of the roof bars, as well
as all the diff erent horizontal lines,
angled because of the deep perspective.
Th ere was also a multitude of patterns
within that structure. I painted a light
terra-cotta wash over most of the brick
wall and, when it was dry, I added the
grid of shadows. When I came to paint
the brick pattern, I had to make sure
that the individual bricks on the sunny
sections of the wall were pale enough
to read as sunshine, not shadow, and
by doing so, keep the strong contrast.
Th e pepper plants are lit up in sunlight
and also throw a shadow pattern of
their own on the left-hand wall.SHADOWS IN
PERSPECTIVE
Th e laws of perspective—mainly,
that things appear smaller the farther
they recede in space—also apply to
shadows. You can often observe that
the shadows on the buildings con-
verge at their own vanishing point,
as seen in Shadows and Columns,
Venice, Italy. I mainly work by eye,
placing and checking my lines of
perspective by simply holding up
my brush to gauge the angle and
getting it clear in my mind before
committing it to paint.OPPOSITE
For Turkish Fountain, Hania, Crete,
Greece (watercolor on paper, 15x11),
I painted the more sharply defi ned
shadows, such as those from the
palm fronds, on dry paper using the
point of a brush. When I started to
paint the shadow shapes of some of
the more distant foliage, I softened
the edges with clean water to enable
the paint to bleed and blur slightly.BELOW
In Walking in Sunlight, Venice, Italy
(watercolor on paper, 13x11), the
shadows of the fi gures give us a
sense of the horizontal surface of
the path and the direction of the sun,
but most of all a feeling of warmth
and a balmy atmosphere. I added
the shadows to the right of the scene
mainly to fi ll a space and balance
the composition. Rather than invent
the shadow of a building or a tree,
I made them in the shape of fi gures,
people visible only by their shadows,
adding an air of mystery.COLOR IN SHADOWS
In paintings where the sun is very
strong, the shadows are where
the color tends to be more visible.
The sunlit areas are relatively
easy to deal with by leaving white
space in the first instance. Once
you have a strong impression of
sunlight working well in the
painting, you can then add the
slightest hint of diluted color to
the patches of sunlight.
Colors in the shade tend to be
cooler (at the blue/mauve end of
the spectrum), whereas sunshine
often adds a note of warm color to
a brightly lit surface. A pale wash
of yellow or orange will suffi ce, but
make sure you don’t darken the
tone too much, or the sense of
sunlight will be diminished.