White on White Still Life
White-on-white paintings are not necessarily without colorful hues.
These paintings reflect all colors and shimmer with vivid iridescence
like color refractions thrown from a prism.
Mixing with white makes a color lighter, it also removes a colors
vibrancy and brightness. The challenge is this: to mix whites using a
de-saturated palette of values and intensities of colors, in order to
make a color with less intensity or less saturation., Mixing pairs of
complementary colors together will de-saturate brighter colors into
subtle grays.
Technically, pure white pigment is the absence of color.
You cannot mix colors to create white.
White is the absence of color.
White pigment reflects all the colors of the visible light spectrum! That
means in order to paint convincing whites we must be able to paint the
subtle color shifts and value changes of complementary color mixes. To
keep the whites in a painting from looking like austere shades of cold
gray, train your eyes to see the whole spectrum of colors in the white
objects in the still life.
An object in your composition should reflect all colors in order to read
as white, those colors must be carefully weighed so as to appear to
be reflected equally. Adding too much of one color shifts a viewer’s
perception of white to that of the overweighted color.
Guidelines
Draw the objects set up in the still life to the best of your ability on
a 9”x 12” piece of illustration board. Sketch out a composition, lightly
in pencil.
Include a background, middle ground and foreground in your picture.
Decide where the light source is coming from and mix up light and
dark values. Remember the blank illustration board is already white, you
can only add colors to it, that are low in intensity to make an object
look white.
Paint all large shapes first by blocking them in, then paint medium size
shapes in, and then lastly paint in small details.
Remember the color properties of hue, saturation and value. Colors
next to each other can appear to change. When you paint in a color,
adjust other colors around it so they are in relation to each other.
Mix your colors with other colors, DO NOT use colors straight out
of the tube. Go easy on black; use it VERY sparingly and for darkening
other colors, don’t use for shadows.
Convincing whites are actually quite colorful.Your white subject matter
will reflect the colors of the objects that surround it. See if you can
capture reflected color in the white objects. One of the simplest ways
to achieve luminous and carefully balanced whites while differentiating
objects is to mix several sets of complementary colors into white paint.
Use a different set of complements (such as red and green, yellow and
purple or blue and orange) to form the shadows and contours of each
white object you are painting.
Experiment with the paint color and texture, amount of water and
brush strokes. Pay attention to what the paint is doing and how it looks.
Sketch lightly,
then paint light,
de-saturated
hues and values,
to create the
illusion of white
objects.