the atelier method
CHIAROSCURO I
In the third part of our atelier-style guide to drawing and painting, Lavender Hill Studios’ Nick Bashall introduces the concept of chiaroscuro and fellow tutor Ann Witheridge presents an easy-to-follow exercise
n our two previous articles, we have been looking at the ideas of proportion, volume and gesture.
During those two workshops, there was no mention of light and dark. This is where this next article comes in. From personal experience, we all
know about the drama of dark and light – it has the power to move us. Theatre directors know this and they play upon it. Think, for example, about the stage set of an opera, about how it looks like a Caravaggio painting with its stark contrasts in tone. (It is no coincidence that Caravaggio was painting around the same time as the birth of opera.) Or imagine a lone singer in a
soft-rock musical, pausing silently on a dark stage: a single light from above washes over his bowed head and shoulders, picking out the swirling kaleidoscope of darks and greys as the dry-ice smoke rises behind him. It is a dramatic image and it is also one that is created solely by the interplay between the areas of dark and light. You hold your breadth, moved by the image. And then, the character starts to sing and you’re moved all over
What is ‘chiaroscuro’? Chiaroscuro is a word borrowed from Italian that translates literally as ‘light-dark’ or more accurately ‘light and shade’. It refers to the technique of using contrasting light and dark areas to create an illusion of depth or three-dimensions in a painting or drawing.
RIGHT Ann Witheridge, Study from life model (Grisaille in Terra Rosa), oil on canvas BELOW Scott Pohlschmidt, Marrakesh study, oil on canvas
The Atelier Method
again, this time by sound. It is the contrast that inspires us, between quiet and loud, between dark and light. Those contrasts can be at their
most visually dramatic when the lightest light meets the darkest dark. Placed together it can create a sharp line or a silhouette. There is such beauty in that contrast. Imagine a
68 Artists & Illustrators
ballet dancer, dressed all in white, silhouetted as he holds a classic yet diffi cult pose against a dark background. With the light source from the front, he appears just as a white form, outlined by the contrasting light of his body against the dark of the unlit stage. Understanding how the drama of such an image is
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