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Last week I started our discussion on desaturation…
And I let Copic off the hook. Even though I constantly complain that they don’t make enough desaturated colors, I totally understand why.
Read the reason here if you missed it.
Over the next few weeks, let’s learn more about the types of desaturated colors Copic doesn’t make
And the one desaturation they totally rock.
There are several ways to desaturate a color…
The one everybody knows about is shading.
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Amy, Amy, Amy! I know allllll about shading. I do it all the time. I love to shade. I’m the founding president and CFO of the International Marker Shaders Association!”
Uhm, okay. Colorers love to talk about shading.
But there’s shade and then there’s a shade, shading, and shading-shading.
Confused?
You’re not alone.
On the strawberry here, we have more light coming from the left side. As your eye travels toward the right, we come to an area where the color is darker.
We call this area shade.
If we color a dimensional strawberry and use a darker marker or pencil over on the right side
We call this shading.
When you’re done, some would look at your markers and say:
“Look at all the pretty shades of red!”
Which is another use of the word shade.
Now I’m not sure which came first, the velociraptor or the egg…
But I suspect the many shades of “shade” all stem back to desaturation.
Because the most popular method for desaturating a color is to “shade”.
There are other desaturation methods but shade is the one everyone knows about, so let’s start with there.
Quick Reminder: “Desaturation” is when we contaminate a clean color.
You’ve got a nice cup of red paint and you muck it up with some other color. You know, like that annoying kid in kindergarten who didn’t rinse his paintbrush between colors?
Mike Farley, wherever you are, I still hate you.
Mike was an early pioneer of desaturation.
Anyway, childhood grudges aside, the easiest recipe for desaturation is to add black to your clean color.
The resulting colors are called shades.
Here are the “shades” of strawberry red:
We start with a clean dallop of red and add a tiny bit of black.
Then add a little more. And a little more.
With each addition of black, the color gets darker and dirtier.
This is real shading. These are shades.
Fish do not need swim lessons. Flocks of ducks and geese all make that V pattern in the sky and I’m pretty sure nobody tells the spiders to hang out in my studio…
It’s animal instinct. They just know to do certain things.
Part of being human is that we supposedly don’t have strong instincts.
Except for one thing:
Because every colorer on Facebook has tried shading with black colored pencil.
“Hey everyone, Sheila here with a great money saving tip! You can get by with just 12 dollar store colored pencils as long as one of them is black. My fun dimensional shading technique is so easy, just rub black over the top of your other colors for instant shade!”
As if everyone hasn’t already tried it.
If you ever want to see an artist cringe from head to spleen, just tell ‘em how much you love shading with black.
Why is black-shading such an artistic faux-pas?
A quick google gave me over 1 billion hits on why not.
What’s the big deal? It’s just desaturation right? It must be a valid artistic technique because here I am writing an entire article about desaturating with black.
Well… yes and no.
See, I get it. I look at that shady side of the berry and I totally understand why the color looks blackened to you.
I know it seems logical to shade with a little black there.
And many colorers get away with it.
Or at least they think they do.
Shading with black is frowned upon because of this:
Do you see it?
Do you see the problem with the colors in the blacker half?
Some of you sense a problem, a disturbance in the force— you just don’t have the words to describe it.
Why do we all feel a little unsettled as the color moves blacker?
Because black is the most selfish of all the colors.
On the left, the red swatches are bouncing all kinds of light waves toward the retinas in our eyes. Our brains feel alive and stimulated. And it’s not because it’s red; the same thing would happen with green, purple, yellow, or any clean, pure hue.
Hues are very giving colors.
They generously radiate light and life.
Not so much with black. Black gives your retinas nothing.
There’s a reason black is the color of death: black is where light goes to die.
As the shades of red turn more blackish than reddish— they feel eerie because they’re dying.
Fewer light waves, fewer bits of information for our brains to process… we know something’s there but our eyes aren’t receiving the normal amount of feedback so we feel skwoogy about it.
So yes, every artist who was born with or who has cultivated a sensitivity to color is going to cringe when you slather a coat of Lamp Black over everything.
You’re literally shading your colors to death.
You can desaturate color with black but there’s always a price to pay.
So I’m not saying “never desaturate with black” but I am saying I only do it once or twice a year and it’s always a very deliberate decision.
Be careful with black. It takes more than it gives.
Next week, we’ll look at another method of desaturation.
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My go-to shapener for travel… and actually, I have one here on my desk… is this little long point sharpener. When I talk about pencils sharp enough to kill a bear, this is the sharpener I use.
This is a two stage sharpener, the first blade removes wood, the second blade sharpens the point. I often re-sharpen just in the second hole which saves pencil in the long run.
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THIS WEEK IN COLOR
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