Weekly Theme: Shadows
With a week of beautiful fall weather ahead of us, it is a great time to work on adding shadows to our sketches. The strong sunshine forecast this week should offer us great opportunities to work outdoors and see how shadows affect our drawings. The fall colors on the trees will add interesting color infused light to the scenery.
What are the conditions of shadows? What colors are they? What mood do they render in the drawing? How does the rendering changes when you add the shadows?
Start with something small, like a fire hydrant.
How many colors are there? How does the shadow fall across the object? How does it follow the ins and outs of the curves?
Move on to a house. How do the colors change as the sun moves across the building?
Take a look at a landscape in a park or a tree on your street. What does the light and shadow do to define the shape of the trees? How do you capture it? What colors do you use?
Experiment with mixing colors to use in shadows. They are not just grey, black or purple. They are dynamic and complex. There are many videos and on line tips on this subject. Shari Blaukopf, one of the Urban Sketchers instructors has a course just on this subject. https://shariblaukopf.com/instructional-video/. Even watching the promo video will give you ideas on how to capture shadows in your sketches.
This is a great excuse to get out and have fun. Cold weather is coming, enjoy this week's warm and sunny days.
