UPCOMING!:

• I hope you can join us TODAY-Saturday- at 2 p.m. Eastern for our monthly YouTube Live Chat.  The topic is Locating the Light Source.  

• And speaking of light, my new book, The Art of Notan, will be released in six days on Friday, March 28.  I will have the announcement on all our websites, but you can go straight to Amazon.com and find it once it is released.  It will be available to bookstores and libraries a little later.

I've been a bit devious making the light/shadow theme of the month coincide with the release of my book, but I don't feel a bit guilty about that. To keep the theme going, I'm digging into the archives from three years ago and polishing what a reminder of how what light does to color.  

When we buy a new car, folks ask "what color is it?". The lay person will identify color by a single hue, but the aware artist sees the fluctuation of hue--how it changes on a single image depending on the location of its light source. 

I found a photo of a new red Honda and sampled colors in various areas of it. Here are the results I found. 

Next, I did the same sort of sampling with a photo of a red tomato. 

In both examples, notice how the hue changes according to where it lives in shadow or not in shadow areas. Add to that other colors it might be reflecting from its environment. Sages advise us that we see what we look for. If we're looking for red tomato, we will limit what we see.  But if we are looking for changes in color, that's what we will see. 

When we are limited in what we see, we are limited in how we create a painting.  When we develop an awareness of seeing the characteristics of color, we use that awareness while we are painting.  That's how it works! 

TRY THIS:

 •  Find such an image of a single local color-- a lemon from your fridge or a squash or bell pepper or anything with one local color-- then place it under a single light source.  (Or find a photo.)

•  Examine areas not in shadow for how many changes in color you see.  Make sample splotches of each of them with paint or on your computer. 

•  Examine areas in shadow and do the same thing. 

•  Now, paint a study of that image using those color variations you discovered.

Light and Shadow: The one thing that lets our eyes see.
Visual Movement: What our eyes do when images are visible.
Seeing Beyond the Image: The possibilities beyond just describing what our eyes see.
Freeing the Artist Within (Curiosity): Finding our individual interpretation to what our eyes are seeing. 
Composing:  Finding ways to put together all that we discover.
Drawing:  Searching the potential of images.
The Craft:  Continually forging our skills to visually communicate what we continue to discover with our eyes, mind and soul.

And the eighth:

The Art:  The results when all the above are working together.