SENSE OF PLACE
Light & Dark - Depicting Characters
"There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones."
- Paul Cézanne -
SPENDING SACRED ME-TIME
WRITING PROMPTS
INHERENT JOY
Nikos Kazantzakis says that 'the real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness'.
Accepting darkness as the natural and necessary counterpart of light in the cosmic dance is not always easy.
Happiness is a temporary emotion that will come and go depending on our circumstances. Joy isn’t a simple emotion — it’s eternal and remains no matter what we go through.
Joy transcends, it is a practice and a behaviour, deliberate and intentional. Happiness reacts and comes and goes along its way. While happiness happens to us and depends on external facts, joy is a choice we purposefully make. It's a feeling, but also an attitude toward life.
Life is inclusive and designed to be a joy of creation. Our inherent joy then becomes a blessing to our everyday life - a joy that shines light into the possible darkness, and where ultimately neither light nor dark counts, but the experience we have and the way we react and relate to everything.
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Make a list of what constitutes joy for you.
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When was the last time you felt joyful?
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How can you create greater joy in your life?
4. What was a darkness you experienced? How did you feel?
5. What helped you get out of it, turn away from it, transform it?
6. Can you now, in retrospect, feel the blessing of that dark experience/period? At least, how do you feel towards it now?
7. How might this experience have influenced your character? Who were you then, who are you now? What do you value about both?
8. If you were to tell your story, what would be particularly important to you, are there any new insights about yourself? What would you give your former self today? What colours emerge in you emotionally for both selves? Don't think too much, don't get too complicated, a simple exercise, in keywords, wether written, verbal or in thought...
SPENDING TIME IN THE STUDIO
Mindful Exercise
CONTOUR LINE DRAWING
The portrayal of characters refers to how authors depict or present individuals within a story. It involves describing their physical appearance, personality traits, emotions, beliefs, actions, and relationships. To 'depict a character' refers to the process of representing a specific individual or figure in an artwork, often focusing on their personality, appearance, or role within a narrative. It goes beyond simply painting a person and involves capturing the essence of that individual through various artistic choices (such as expression, pose, style, composition, lighting).
The uniqueness of a portrayal lies in its ability to bring them to life as characters, infusing layers of emotion, individuality and depth.
'Character' in art refers to the illusion that the person in the artwork is a human person - be it that the person depicted for the painting is based on someone real or fictional.
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Create a figure without lifting your pencil from the paper. Don't overthink it, just do it.
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What type of image did you create?
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How did it feel to draw in this unique manner?
- How was the quality of the drawing affected by not lifting the pencil off the paper?
This is a colour card 'Magenta'.
Please don't mind the numbers, they are irrelevant for this example, just focus on the colours.
It shows the different possible combinations for colours from the perspective of a colour wheel.
Complementory Colours: pairs of colours that are positioned on opposite ends of the colour wheel.
Split-Complementory Colours: one primary hue and two hues adjacent to that primary colour's complement.
Analogous Colours: three hues, all positioned next to each other on the colour wheel.
Triadic Colours: three colours evenly spaced on the colour wheel.
Square Colours: four colours spaced evenly around the colour wheel.
Monochromatic Colours: different tints, tones, and shades of one colour family only.
Tetradic Colours/ Rectangular Colours: four individual colours or hues - a base colour and three more colours, all equidistant from the base colour on the colour wheel. It is also called the 'double-complementary colour scheme' because it is made up of two complementary colour pairs.
For example: Complementory Colours Red-Green & Complementory Orange-Blue build a tetradic/rectangular combination.
As this is a bold colour contrast combination, it is actually one of the hardest colour schemes to pull off effectively.
VALUES and CHROMAS are achieved by adding White, Gray or Black to any Colour.
Colour + White = TINT.
Colour + Gray = TONE.
Colour + Black = SHADE.
A pure colour is called a HUE.
The different values (lightness or darkness) depend on the intensity and proportions of the use of the Hues, Tints, Tones, and Shades.
Chroma refers to the saturation of a specific shade, tint or tone.
GRAYSCALE & VALUE IN ART
GRAYSCALE refers to an image or artwork that is composed solely of shades of gray, ranging from black to white (no other colors).
It's essentially monochrome and build of a continuous range of gray tones.
This technique allows artists to focus on values (light and dark) and contrast, rather than color, to create depth, dimension, and form in their work.
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VALUE refers to the lightness or darkness of a color or tone.
It's a fundamental element of art (alongside line, shape, form, color, texture, and space) and helps create a sense of depth, form, and mood within a piece.
It can evoke different emotional responses from the viewer.
FOCAL POINT:
Finding the focus in your painting, a focal point is the easiest way to awake interest in your work, or in what you want the viewer to notice first. It directs and commands the viewer's curiosity or mental concentration, and should help the viewer to understand why you wanted to capture the scene.
By using lines you lead the viewer's eye.
Make the focal point the darkest or lightest part of your work so that the surroundings take a supporting role.
Use highly saturated colour in contrast to a neutral background (or the other way round). Adding one or two points of saturated colour make your focal point pop out.
And then, keep the warmest and coolest colours together.
Placing the focal point approximately one-third across or down the canvas. Depending on the subject of the painting you could also place it in the last third, bottom third or top third.
The artist Robert Burridge shows a really simple way to access your paintings with using only 4 colours (from the outer circle).
Take a colour wheel and choose your dominant colour, for example primary red.
The focal point colour is opposite the dominant color, in this case secondary green.
To kick up that focal point color, add a small amount of two 'spice colours' and place them close to the focal point colour in the painting.
The two spice colours in our example are primary yellow and primary blue.
When you move it to another colour, secondary purple as dominant colour for example, then the focal point colour would be primary yellow, the two spice colours would be secondary orange and secondary green.
More alive and very interesting the painting will become when you use various shades, tones and tints of the colours - and of course, even rules are there to break.
Mindful Exercise
Chiaroscuro
Using light and dark in paintings to depict character often highlights the use of contrasting elements to create emotional or psychological depths. They can emphasize the interplay between darkness and light, suggesting that light can be revealed or enhanced by darkness, and vice versa.
CHIAROSCURO means 'light-dark' in Italian and is an artistic technique using strong contrasts between light and shadow to create a sense of depths and volume. The way light falls on a subject or scene can subtly (or dramatically) convey the environment. In grayscale (black and white) or even with color, using chiaroscuro is a way to visually convey a sense of place through the interplay of light and shadow.
Kazuō Okakura suggests that our emotions are the pigments and our inner life the canvas on which we paint the experience of joy and sadness, using chiaroscuro.
Joy within ourselves, regardless of external circumstances can be seen similar to how artists use chiaroscuro to create illusion of light and shadow even in a dark room - chiaroscuro as a tool to heighten emotional experience.
With the following exercises we can explore our emotions and deepen our connection to our inner world.
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Start with a simple subject (a figure, a landscape, an object) and focus on how light interacts with it, creating shadows. Explore what emotions or stories might come up.
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Create abstract (various forms like circles, triangles...) pieces where light and shadow represent different emotions. Dark areas can symbolize fear, anxiety, or sadness, while light areas can represent joy, hope, or relief. How do possible emotions within you interact.
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Take photographs focusing on light and shadow in natural environments (a basket with fruits, a vase with flowers, the books on your nightstand...). This can be a way to explore your surroundings and your emotional state/ your emotional state within your surroundings.
- Write about the emotions you feel when experiencing light and shadow. Connect the visual experience to your feelings and experiences by expressing them in words - afterwards randomly choose a few words at random and create shadow and light effects with the letters using calligraphy techniques.
