Painting White Objects

 

Credit Grabber

4x6" oil on canvas panel

For sale via DailyPaintworks

 

DailyPaintworks organise a monthly challenge for their artists. It's a simple art prompt, but entries are typically seen more than regular works and so it's an opportunity to both try something new and showcase your skills.

The prompt for this one was "high key". As in, "paint something with predominantly bright values". Easy, right?

Only I got too clever for my own good. I decided to not only paint something bright, but to paint something white. Several white somethings in fact. Against a white background. What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out, quite a lot. See, when you paint something white, you use white, right? Noooooo siree, turns out ya don't! So let's have a look at my failures before I managed the decent one at the start of this post!

Wobbly Orange - 6x8" oil on canvas panel - Not for sale because horrible 

With this one I fell into 3 traps at once:

First of all, I used mostly white. There's not a lot of color variation, not much warm/cool balance going on. It's a bit dead.

Second, I made most of the values, even the shadows, quite bright. Probably because I was so focused on making a bright painting. But there goes the contrast and with it the composition.

Third, as usual, I didn't stop when I should've and overworked it. The result is fussy and not very interesting. I think I managed to make the wobbly shapes even worse.

                        

Cups In Dead Grey - 4x4" oil on canvas panel - not for sale because even more horrible

The next day I came back and decided to do a quick study. I figured that values were my problem - I hadn't used a decent range and my brights were so bright that the highlights didn't show. So off I went and used... grey. Light grey. Dark grey. Mid grey. That splodge of blue you see at the bottom? That was my last brush stroke when I finally realised I'd forgotten to use color.

Which brings us to what we've learned. When painting white objects, you've got a problem: Your paint can't possibly capture the "natural" range of the colors you see. Titanium white will get you the white of those cups, but what about the highlights?

 

So here's the rules I used for my final painting, and it turned out pretty well I think!

- For your brightest values (except highlights), pick a value as bright as possible but dark enough that pure white highlights will still show up.

- Make sure to use really dark values too, but sparingly. The only really dark values I applied with a tiny brush so they wouldn't feel heavy. Without these dark values as anchor points, the whole painting feels washed out.

- Pick a warm and cool white to light your scene. In my case I used warm whites for the key light (coming from the top right) and for any bounce light. Cool white I used for all form shadows on the porcelain, and for drop shadows. I basically treated the scene as if it was outdoors.

- Cheat. White is boring so add some color. I added a tomato for interest.

For funsies here's some reference photos of my setup. You'll see that a lot of the colors I had to invent. Feel free to use these for your own paintings!: