Art Journal 033: Contrast

I’ve been thinking for a while on how I can approach the subject of color theory as an artist who works primarily in black & white. I know how to work in color as well, and I choose to work in monochrome for the benefits it gives, but no matter what your artistic intentions are you operate under the same governing rules of creating illusions of depth and form.  So this week I’m going to explain the number one most foundational element of painting- or any form of visual art at all- and that is Contrast.

In its most basic terms contrast is the relation of one color to the colors immediately around it.  Contrast is what makes a pencil mark on a piece of white paper appear dark and what makes that same mark appear invisible on the pavement  Contrast is what makes things stand out or pop, and is fundamental in creating the illusion of depth and space that makes a picture look like the thing you’re trying to draw.  Most people think about contrast in terms of light and dark, but there’s actually multiple ways to create contrast, which can give your pictures multiple layers of form and depth if you control these aspects carefully. I’ve drawn a couple examples of contrast in action which I’ll go over quickly, but first I’d like to teach you how to read contrast.

One of the most common mistakes a young painter makes is they’re afraid of making their darks too dark in relation to their lights.  We look at the individual shades of color we’ve chosen in isolation from the context around them, and they seem dark, but when we paint them into our shadows they appear too light.  It may seem like our eyes are deceiving us, but there is a very useful technique for reading your value contrasts correctly and it’s incredibly easy: you just squint your eyes!  Squinting compresses the value ranges our eyes see into fewer, broader, simpler concentrations, making it much easier to tell if our darks are dark enough or if they’re blending into our midtones or our highlights.  As an example you can try at home I picked out six shades of grey and placed them in sequence- as a whole they seem like one consistent transition from light to dark, but when we squint our eyes the six shades will compress into three distinct ranges- a highlight, a midtone and a shadow range!  Squinting is extremely effective and should be in any artist’s toolbox, or even a non-artmaking fan of art can use the squint test to better read a painter’s intentions in building their contrasts, and is a fantastic lens to see classical paintings or other fine art exhibits through!  This is how I determine if my lights and shadows have working contrast, or if my subjects are getting lost in the background.  Just squint your eyes!  It’s that easy!

When I’m working in color there are three aspects of contrast that I keep in mind, which can work individually but work best when combined together.  The first, aspect, which is the most widely-recognized aspect, is Value contrast, which is when something is lighter or darker in comparison to another thing.  My comic is almost entirely painted in value contrast in black & white- this gives me the greatest range of values to model light and shadow with, since nothing is brighter than white and nothing is darker than black.  Working in hueless value contrast also makes everything in a world look uniform and builds a sense that everything belongs together, because the same sort of lighting and color affects everything equally.  As a rule, when defining depth and form something being “darker” pushes it further away from the camera, and something being “lighter” brings it forward. Our eye reads light as close and dark as far, and while playing with light sources opens up whole other cans of worms this is a good basis of understanding how to make something look three dimensional with value contrast.

When I was younger my dad used to remark about how black & white film always looked more expressive than color film, and that’s always stuck with me.  The reason I think he would notice this is because of the broad range of values between black and white, and the uniformity of those values, it really brings out the contours and edges in a person’s expression.  In my own work I’ll often take advantage of the blending properties of low-contrast values to give a wall a brushstroked painted texture, or add a little bit of grime to the floor- when you squint the impurities would blend in with the local value of the surface but under normal observation it’s plainly obvious.  Value contrast is probably the most important aspect of painted contrast because it draws directly from how light and shadow works, which itself is fundamental to how we’re able to see the world at all.  

Value alone is well and good if you’re working in black & white, but the moment you start working in color you have a new dimension of contrast to work in.  Instead of “light grey” and “dark grey”, let’s assume we’re working in just pinks.  You can create contrast in light pinks and dark pinks, but you can also control Saturation Contrast.  How bright or how dull a color is- or how pure or grey that color is, depending on how you want to look at it- is another aspect of painting colors for us to control.  In my example illustrations above I tried to illustrate this point with a saturated and desaturated shade of the same grey, where if you squint your eyes they’d blend a little bit as the “same” color.  Saturation contrast is probably the most subtle of the three major aspects of contrast but it’s a fantastic supplementary element, adding little warbles to a color field to make it feel more weathered and earthly.  Desaturating our shadow colors is a useful way of controling saturation contrast- since less light reaches a shadow area it would appear a little less bright than the surfaces being directly struck by a primary light source.  Used in combination with value contrast, you can add an additional layer of emphasis to your lights and shadows.  As you can see in the above examples, saturation contrast on its own isn’t terribly powerful, but it’s fantastic in a supporting role.

Now, following our hypothetical chain of examples from black & white values to saturated monochromes, the third major aspect of contrast is Hue Contrast, or the way specific colors contrast with one another.  Understanding hue contrast takes a bit of knowing how the color wheel works: take a primary color; now, take the other two primary colors and mix them together, and that is your contrasting color.  Red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple- when you place these colors side by side they make one another appear brighter by contrast.  If you take a color and then pick the two colors on either side of them- like blue, green and purple- those two adjacent colors are called analogous colors.  Analogous colors work great as soft contrast, like the slight shifts in value mentioned above.  Hue contrast is incredibly versatile and complicated, and it’s probably one of the hardest aspects to master.  In general a warmer hue will appear closer than a cooler one, similar to how value contrast works.  The interplay of colors is probably worth a whole separate article, but it’s the third of the three major aspects of contrast.

The key to mastering contrast in full color is to find ways to incorporate all of these aspects into your color choices.  A great example comes from portrait painting: when you’re painting a face under a single light source you’ll have your shadows and highlights in value contrast, and your highlights will tend to be more saturated colors than your shadows, to reflect the warmth of the light hitting them.  Human flesh is generally shades of yellow, ochre and orange, so if your facial highlights are warm gold or brown tones, the contrasting color to that range is the purples!  A tinge of purple in your shadows will go a long way towards warming the flesh and giving your portrait.  This is just an example, of course, and there are many ways to play with these three aspects, but it’s healthy to build an understanding of how they all fit together to create contrast.  I try to use them all in my work, and in my black & white comic work I make attempts to simulate all three types of contrast in just the one aspect.  It’s hard, but it’s probably my favorite thing about painting my comics!

One last thing I wanted to add for fun was an example of abstract visual qualities creating contrast!  Whether its patterns, textures or whatever, any disruption of pattern can create a sense of contrast.  In this bottom example I used a blur filter in Photoshop to control the level of gaussian blur on a bunch of halftone dots to recreate my example illustrations.  The blurred dots fall into the background and the more-unblurred dots step into the foreground.  I kept the blur contrast fairly shallow to try and preserve the fact that the dots are blurred and not a sheet of grey tone, but I think it reads just the same.  I used to use blur filters in my earlier comics to contrast a background with the central foreground character in order to force the reader’s perspective into one plane or another; in later comics I tend to do this without blur filters, but the principle is the same.  Contrast is the foundation of the visual arts and its a wide platform to build all kinds of illusions from!