My thoughts this week seem to have been centred around seeing accurately, both values and colours:
- Painting Highlights – Jeff Hayes posted a small painting of a clear glass against a brown background. But it’s not that simple. If you look closely, the highlights are blue. And green. And yellow. And pink. He says,
[highlights] …are very rarely simple accents of pure white. Instead, they’re complex collections of warm and cool tones, and often not just reflections either. Particularly where glass is concerned, a highlight consists of reflected light and also a refraction of that light, yeilding portions of the spectrum around the edges.
- James Gurney has a fascinating post on Color in Mountain Streams.
I’ve noticed that when you look at a stream with gray stones and clear water on a sunny day, there’s far more color beneath the surface of the water than above it.
I was particularly interested in his hypothesis of why rocks seen through shallow water appear warmer, with the colours getting cooler as the depth increases. He also refers to a series of posts from last year about water reflections ( part 1, part 2, and part 3), which I’m going to be spending some time studying.
