Roadmap Or Hike To a Painting™

Jemez Aglow: Morning is a wonderful time of day, in any season, and it is ideal for exploring the balance between light and shadow, and how it drives your application of color and value, or what I call “painting into the shadows”. My mentor, Master Painter Bill Gallen emphasizes that “you can see as well into shadow as you can into light”.  We use value and color temperature shifts to hint at the contours, and shapes, that exist within any area of shadow.  These subtle shifts help viewers recognize the variety in your subject, hold the eye and create interest.  The challenge of course, is to capture these moments as the morning light changes quickly, so we must focused as dynamics change in rapid order.  Early morning adds a wrinkle because painting toward the sun creates to much glare.  In the Jemez picture and painting above, you can see that the sun coming up in the East was bright.  However, as I turned West, the mountains were glowing, and that light and shadow across the plain made for a truly inspiring composition.