Light and Shadow: Complementaries Instead of Black

Most coloured-pencil sketches go wrong at the same point: the subject works, the colours are right – and then the shadow arrives as a grey patch and makes the sheet look dull. That's not down to your mark-making, it's down to your colour choice. Shadows are light that's composed differently, not light that's missing. In this lesson you'll learn to build shadows so that they hold the picture together instead of deadening it.

Shadows are never black and never grey

Go outside and look at a shaded house wall, ideally in sunshine. You won't see a grey tone, you'll see a colour: bluish on yellow render, violet on red brick, almost turquoise on an ochre wall. The reason is simple – the shadow area gets no direct sunlight, only light from the sky, and that light is blue.

This gives you a formula you can apply to any subject: shadow colour is the local colour plus its complementary plus a little blue. The local colour is what the object shows in the light – ochre on a rendered wall, for example. The complementary sits opposite on the colour wheel and takes the brilliance out of the local colour without dirtying it: violet goes with yellow and ochre, blue with orange, green with red. The blue on top makes the shadow look like sky light rather than grime. For an ochre wall that means, concretely: ochre, a hint of violet, indigo over the top.

Warm sunny side, cool shadow side

Think of every surface in your subject as the answer to a single question: does the sun reach here or not? Where the sun reaches, mix in warmth – a light yellow, an ochre, on roofs also a warm orange. Where the sun doesn't reach, go cool: blue, blue-violet, indigo. This shift from warm to cool does more for spatial depth than any amount of darkening. A building already looks three-dimensional when one side is yellowish and the other bluish, even if both are equally light.

Shadow shape first, local colours second

The order is decisive. Don't work object by object; take indigo and lay in the entire shadow shape as one single connected area – lightly, holding the pencil flat, barely any pressure. The shadow at the corner of the house, the cast shadow on the pavement, the darkness under the canopy, the shaded side of the car: all the same tone, all one shape.

Then you lay the local colours over the top, straight across the boundary between light and shadow. The wall gets its ochre, the pavement its grey-brown, the sheet metal its red – in the light just as in the shadow. Because the indigo shows through underneath, everything hangs together in the end and you automatically have unified light in the picture. This one move solves more problems than any amount of detail work.

Reflected light: the ground sends colour back

Shadows aren't equally dark everywhere. Close to the ground, a shadowed wall receives light bounced back from the pavement, the gravel or the asphalt – and in the colour of that ground. So in the lower part of the shadow area, add a hint of the ground colour from below: warm grey for asphalt, a sandy tone for gravel, a delicate green for grass. Very lightly, just a suggestion. This makes the surface feel aired out rather than bricked up, and the base zone of a building detaches itself from the ground.

Contrast at the focal point, edges soft and light

Your strongest darks belong in one place: the focal point. That might be the window next to the entrance, the person under the canopy, the corner where light and shadow meet. There you can increase the pressure and let the edge between light and dark stay crisp.

Everything further from the focal point becomes softer and lighter. Ease off the pressure, let edges fray, leave paper bare. A sheet that is hard in one place and open at the edges reads immediately as a picture with light in it. A sheet with equally strong contrast everywhere reads as a pattern.

Dark without black

Take the black pencil out of your set and leave it at home. Black lays down as a closed, greasy layer on the paper, drags along every colour beneath it and can hardly be worked over. Build your darks instead from indigo plus burnt sienna: indigo first, then sienna over it, and indigo again if needed. More indigo gives a cool night-dark, more sienna a warm brown-black – so you decide what temperature your deepest point has. And because both colours stay transparent, you can still add something over the top later.

Exercise

In sunshine, find a house corner where you can see both sides at once – one in light, one in shadow. Set yourself 20 minutes. Draw the corner with a few lines, then lay in the whole shadow shape lightly with indigo, wall and cast shadow on the ground in one go. Build the sunny side warm in two layers: local colour, then yellow or ochre over it. Build the shadow side cool in three layers: local colour, complementary, indigo once more. At the bottom of the shadow area, add a hint of the ground colour. Finally, strengthen the contrast in exactly one place with indigo and burnt sienna – and deliberately leave the rest open.