Dappled light is that magical effect where circles or ellipses of light appear under a leafy tree.
Hi my name is James Gurney. I want to show you how to paint dappled light
and i'll use as a test case this gouache painting of an old stone building lit by dappled light.
We'll also look at the science behind dappled light: how it forms, and some examples of
how it looks on a real cube, and then we're going to look at some examples of art history
but i want to take you through this whole process so that you can paint dappled light effectively
we're in New Paltz, New York at the Hasbrouck house. this is a 1721 example of
dutch colonial architecture i'm setting up my homemade sketch easel on a camera tripod
and drawing in the basic framework of the scene
using water soluble colored pencils just to work out the basic placement of elements
look at that tree in the upper left casting the shadow on the building
and those weeds and light in the left foreground
Three colors: Azo yellow, Terra rosa which is an iron red and Cerulean blue deep plus white
watercolor and gouache that's amazing
i hope you guys have a great day thank you you too awesome productively great day thank you
people speed by us in their cars and on foot and on bicycles and we shift to a slower mode of time
i start by painting in some of the yellows and yellow greens
in that left foreground where all the weeds were there's some reds in there too in the base
and what i can do is paint around those very
hot light colors with darker colors later but it's nice to get them in early
notice i'm not cleaning my brush in between i'm just diving in from one color to another
it's okay if the colors blend a bit
and if i need a really pure color i can wash out my brush
i do have more water than just what's in that little cup in the lower left
now i can make some of the deeper blues and greens that are cast by the tree in the upper left
speeding things up a little bit i have the shadows in the left some of the darks in the window and
now i can start indicating the cast shadow with some diagonals as it travels down the building
now trying to indicate some of the textures of the weeds in the left
using a small long flat brush and just touching with the edge of it
now looking at the actual scene the cast shadow goes across a very complicated area
of thin mullions in the window i need to paint the mullions but have them go in and out of light
let's think for a second about what causes these spots of light if you look at a diagram of the
tree the high leafy canopy of the tree has spaces between the leaves which project like a pinhole
camera these circles of light onto the ground now if the angle of a wall is oblique to the
angle of the rays you'll get ellipses which is a cross section of that cone of light coming from
the top of the tree and i can actually show how that ellipse will change if i push this
cube over a little bit it'll change those ellipses to a different shape but one thing
that always is true is that the angle of the long axis of the ellipse points back toward the sun
now really what you're looking at are cast shadows of trees spread across these surfaces and so
as the leaves move these bits of light will change and if there are leaves closer to the surface
they'll be projected with sharper edges artists all through history have used
this effect: (Albert) Bierstadt and (Henryk) Siemiradsky, who's a Polish artist and Russian
artists have done a lot of this you'll find it all through history but let's go back to the painting
and i see if i can take you through the final stages of the process now i've rigged up a black
t-shirt to cut the glare from the brightly lit road and i'm using a Waterman fountain
pen with brown ink to put in some of the accents of the area underneath the door
and some of the window details and some of the dark areas below the stones of this old house
the circles of light touching the ground are actually projections of the circular
shape of the sun itself on rare days when the sun is partially eclipsed by the moon
each of these circles will seem to have a piece missing or bite out of one side
now there's a low curb at the edge of that lawn on the lower right
and i'm going to put that in with a brush
need a steady hand for this
so i show some of the dirt spilling over into the road and here's the final painting
if you're painting with opaque paints at a larger scale there's a really cool technique you can use
called in-brush gradients where you're actually painting a soft edge around each of the dappled
light ellipses using a special flat brush that's loaded with two colors of paint on each side
you turn the brush around the ellipse this is especially convincing if you carry it across
another color and have that same effect working across two different color areas i talk about this
effect of gradients and a lot of other aspects of gradients in my new video on Gumroad there's
a link in the description below where you can check out a trailer on that
video that will take your paintings to the next level so thanks and have fun with dappled light
check out my website with signed books and other goodies on the left
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on the lower left is a related video with similar content
and in the lower right is a playlist with loads of good stuff to binge on