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Professional artist, Anne Olwin, brings you some of her best art lessons, tips and tricks of the trade.

Contact Anne Olwin

To Black or Not to Black

What is all the fuss about using black? Some artists love it—REALLY love it. Other artists hate it—with a passion.

Certain types of artwork require black; take cartooning, for instance. Or imagine Rembrandt, Sargent or Vermeer without it.

Aside from the fact that black just doesn’t appeal to certain individuals, the largest contention lies in the appearance of dark sections of a painting. The danger of black consists in using it to paint flat, uninteresting shadows. Every painter faces the challenge of producing exciting paintings with darks that avoid dull lifelessness.

An easy way to avoid those ugly shadows is to mix your black with differing strengths of the local color of the object.

I personally avoid the use of much black straight from the tube, preferring one of the three following methods to achieve the darks.

1. Mix ultramarine blue with transparent brown oxide or sepia. Used, thickly, it makes a dense, deep black. When thinned, it is possible to have a variety of blue-grays and brown-grays to use with the local color.

2. Mix complementary colors. Look at the local color of your object and mix in its complement to get the shadow color.

3. For paintings composed of predominately pure colors, I use an analogous color to the local one to create the dark. An example would be a deep purple to shade a red area.

One final warning for the oil painter: Watch out for Ivory Black. It cracks.

Master artist, Anne Olwin's artwork and writing have appeared in Watercolor Magic Magazine, National Gardening Magazine, and various other publications. Most recently, Creativity Press has published her Quick Reference Guides for artists.

For fabulous art resources, check out the Anne's Quick Reference Guides.