Color Study from Photo

 

3/13/25 Prismacolors in Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook (photo reference)

After a couple of attempts at trying to study color temperature indoors (once inside a café and once at Suzzallo Library), I’ve been itchin’ to try it outdoors. Artificial lighting coming from all directions mixed up with natural window lighting makes a challenging exercise even more confusing.

I can’t be bothered with waiting for the weather to accommodate me, so I resorted to a photo reference (see below). My color temp analysis: The backlit trees are slightly warmer than their shadows. The background light is relatively cool. The warmest areas are the sunlit grass and foliage.

Still leaning on a simple complementary palette, I chose a dark purple and the yellowest yellow-green I could find. Initially I tried lavender for the cool light, but I abandoned it for a pale blue. The mixing pyramid shows the three hues I settled on.

In the past, before I became aware of color temperature, I probably would have treated this more as a value study (even if I used color) by making the trees and their cast shadows the same hue and leaving the lighted background areas paper-white. If I were doing this on location, even if I had noted to myself, “The background light is relatively cool,” I probably wouldn’t have colored the background at all, simply to save time. But thinking like a painter in the comfort of my (new!) studio, I wanted to cover every speck of paper with color, even if very pale.

I do like the subtle differentiation between the trees and their shadows, especially because the yellow-green gives the dark purple trees a slight shimmer of warmth, like an underpainting.

Reference photo taken at high noon in November.

I know it will be more challenging to do this kind of analysis on location before sketching. Will I eventually get faster as I integrate the learning? I hope so. I also don’t want it to be a mechanical exercise (as it is now while I practice). I want the results to reflect what I’ve learned by being more expressive and dynamic and less literally descriptive (“trees are green; sky is blue”).

At heart, I will probably always be a realistic sketcher; it goes against my nature to choose random, crazy colors just to be less descriptive (like those rainbow faces I made in class). My goal here is to make color choices that make sense and seem “real” without simply trying to replicate what I see. I think this sketch is moving in that direction. What do you think?