2/19/2008 7:53:28 AM
I treated myself to the purchase of theater gel over the holidays and this is my first attempt at working with it. Theater gel is a sheet of colored transparent material that you place between the light source and the subject. It casts very dramatic colors and causes the shadows to become equally rich and exciting. I enjoy it because it gives me a chance to experiment with unusually saturated colors rather than extremes of value.
This is from a two hour painting session with a wiggly model. I hope to finish it soon.
Armed with a full spectrum clip on light and plenty of layers of clothing a friend and I ventured out for our first attempt at painting landscape plein air at night. What a fun challenge! For this particular scene a normally red barn became a dull ghoulish green under the blare of the spot light. All the colors changes became very subtle and grayed. The values played havoc with my range of paints. For those of you that are Spinal Tap fans, I needed the paints to go to 11. The spot light was so light in order to make it glow I had to make the lit wall of the barn dark which pushed my darks to an extreme that was difficult to match with my paints. I did find that by keeping the darks transparent and shifting the color temperature within those darks I could approximate the wall and beams as they receded into shadow. One big bonus for night time plien air painting of an artifically lit scene is that the light never changes, or, lucky for me, no one turned them off during my painting session.
