Day for Night (Plus All the Whites)

10/23/21 Through my studio window

Last winter I had a ton of fun using black paper to sketch night scenes. I’ve also enjoyed using it for life drawing and part of my pandemic hand series. Just recently I saw Kumi Matsukawa share some sketches she had made on black paper, and I was reminded of its challenging fun. It was time to pull out my black Stillman & Birn Nova sketchbook again.

“Day for night” is a cinematic term that means filming in daylight to look like it’s night. I thought about that term as I sketched this scene from my studio in the middle of a dark, wet, dreary afternoon. It was daylight, but when I squinted through my (somewhat dirty) window to see the values, the overcast sky was the only brightness – everything else looked equally darkish. The cool white houses were actually darker than the sky, but in trying to make them show against the warm white sky, they came off looking brighter. My sketch looks more like night than day.

Since I needed something geeky to do to fill the rest of the rainy afternoon, I took inventory of all the white and near-white pencils in my major colored pencil collections (defined as the ones I use most frequently). Some pencil manufacturers include many variations of white that are barely discernible from each other. It’s like looking through house paint chips! It’s also interesting to see the differences in opacity. (All swatches were made with three layers of pigment.)

As you might guess, I’ve had other thoughts on white pencils, both non-soluble and water-soluble.