Two Trees (Geeky Light and Color Talk)

 

5/31/26 Maple Leaf neighborhood, 1:22 p.m.

Most plein air painters will tell you that the worst light of the day are the hours around high noon; they favor early morning and late afternoon for both the color and the angle of light.

The sketch at top of post was made at around 1:30 p.m. PDT. Call me contrary, but I think it’s interesting and more challenging to take on that disdained high-noon light. Instead of a convenient crescent of shadow from a lower sun that shows a tree’s form, each cluster of foliage on each branch has both a highlight and a shadow.

About two hours later on the second leg of my walk, I sketched another tree, this time with the less challenging, classic crescent of shadow (below). This close to the summer solstice, the “late-afternoon” sun is hardly low in the sky, but it’s still interesting to see how much difference it makes.

5/31/26 Maple Leaf neighborhood, 3:33 p.m.

Green notes: I’m still experimenting with the same set of greens I refreshed my palette with a few weeks ago. For the most part, it’s working out, though it feels a bit conventional. I haven’t figured out how to shake up that part yet. I am pleased, however, with the two main greens that I’ve been using for trees: Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Spring Green (470) for the sunlit side and Derwent Inktense Iron Green (1310) for the shaded side. Initially I had chosen Iron Green, which is very cool and dark, for conifers (it’s the green I used most in the sketch I showed yesterday). When warmed up with Spring Green, though, it works well for the shaded parts of all kinds of trees.

Blue notes: Whenever I’m using a limited palette of three to five colors (which is nearly always), I think very carefully about what to do about a clear sky. I want to make it blue, but if I haven’t used that blue anywhere else in the sketch, it feels tacked onto the palette. It’s a dilemma that I didn’t know how to resolve until I heard Eleanor Doughty articulate the solution in her Domestika course (which I took a few years ago):

If she brings in a color from outside the limited range she has established for a sketch, she tries to use it in at least one more spot so the color won’t be random. It’s a sound principle for a cohesive palette, and now I follow it whenever I can.

For years, my favorite Seattle blue-sky color was Caran d’Ache Middle Cobalt Blue (660). However, that bright, warm blue has little use except as sky. With that in mind, I recently went through all my water-soluble blues to see if I could find one that would make a good sunny sky when watered down but is also dark enough to play double-duty as a shadow hue. Currently I’m trying Caran d’Ache Blue (what – no fancy name?) (260). For the street shadows in the late-afternoon sketch above, I mixed that blue with the Derwent Iron Green used in the trees, and I think they hold the palette together nicely.

That orange shining through on the late-afternoon tree trunk? Although not very apparent, I also used it very subtly in the trees to the left of the cars. Catching that bit of light was my proudest moment in that sketch!