You need to be especially careful when painting half tones. The color of the half tone plane is not less saturated than the color of the light and shade planes. It is easy to make these half tones too gray. When you blend any two colors, you end up with a less saturated color. This means that you must not blend the light and shadow colors to get your half tones. You must instead add a third color spot that is somewhere in between the light and shadow plane colors in terms of hue. This will maintain saturation in your half tones. In this still life painting, look at the blue flower closest to you. The left side is red violet, the right side is blue, and the tone between is blue violet.

In this course unit

In this unit you will learn what happens to the hue and saturation of colors on objects when light falls on them. Mastering these effects produces paintings that have truly beautiful color and three dimensional objects. Complete mastery of these skills is what separates the great masters from good artists. You may have heard about rules such as cool light, warm shadows or vice versa. These rules are simplistic and do not give you the full picture. This unit will help to clarify some of the more difficult aspects of this subject and make the rules much more clear.

In this course you will learn:

• what happens to both the hue and saturation of colors when light falls across a form
• how to deal with the color of half tones
• how to deal with colored light sources – not just the two common sources such as yellow sunlight or north daylight. This is useful when you are dealing with effects such as sunsets, or unusual indoor lighting conditions
• when to use color and when to use value to turn a form and make objects appear three dimensional, and why
• a model, based on the Munsell color wheel, that you can use to predict hue and saturation changes for objects of any hue, under any lighting condition

Total number of assignments: 11

Total number of pages: 24