For days I’ve been banging my head against the wall because my contrast just isn’t there! I’m working through a large landscape, which I shot at night, of dark storm clouds over even darker trees.
It’s one of those pictures where the magic is in the subtle contrast of dark colors that create a mood of turbulence and anticipation. But as I’ve laid my color in and worked through the darks to the lights, the contrast is just all wrong. For a week I’ve been fighting with this picture. But then I had an epiphany moment. I had been mixing my black as a mixture of permanent alizarin crimson and French ultramarine with a small addition of cadmium yellow. Finally out of frustration, I forced myself to step back to the beginning and revisit my entire palate. And that’s when I finally saw it. My black wasn’t really black and that threw everything off.
I should have listened to Mark Carder and used a 60/40 mix of burnt umber and French ultramarine, but I was impatient. When I went back with that, it was dead on. I think my original mistake was that I’d over mixed the French ultramarine and so I thought my black was too purply, but if it was, it was only just too. So rather than adding a little more red, I used yellow and ended up with a shade of black that matched the ghostly trees set against the black background and from that point forward, the dominos fell. Everything was off.
It is so true that your eyes play tricks on you and so my lesson for myself and my advice for you (if you care) is to check and re-check your color. Over and over again. If there were an easier way for me to learn patience, I would do it! I’m not sure where this picture is going from here, but at least now, my black is black.
