Artist insight

Charlie Pickard shares his expert tips for creating powerful shadows with colour, including perfecting your skin tones

Shadows are one of the most underrated areas of an image by students. The first mistake often made is an over-insistence on creating dull, black shadows. However, shadows are often some of the most exciting and chromatic parts of an image. If handled properly, they can be a powerful tool for controlling the mood of our work and truly placing a character into an environment.

Much of this over-insistence on black can be traced back to the one overriding idea many people have about shadows: that they are dark. Our artworks will always be an expression of our knowledge of a subject, so if we can improve our knowledge of how shadows work, we can improve our depictions of them and access some of the strength of expression contained within.

"If we can improve our knowledge about how shadows work, we can improve our depictions of them"

However, shadows are also often a source of confusion, and the level of variety can feel quite overwhelming at times. Adding to this, there are a few slightly inaccurate ideas floating around that confuse the topic, and many students give up on trying to understand shadows.

The following are a few ideas and strategies that I’ve found accurate, but also simple enough to easily be understood and applied.

1 PICTURE THE MOON

The first element we need to engage with is the idea that the shadow in its simplest form has no colour or value at all. It’s perfectly black if only an object and a light source are present and nothing else. The shadow is defined as the area the light can’t reach, so it makes sense that in this simple setup they would be perfectly dark.