Saturated color straight from the tube is great. Color adds to the expressiveness of a painting or it attracts attention to a work as the saturated color pops into someones view easily.
Though this does not always tell the full story we wish to communicate. Sometimes painting with saturated colors straight from the tube can cause the colors to compete with each other, creating confusion within a scene.
When painting realistically, we will need to change the value level or the lightness and darkness of the color to relate the local area of the image to the scene as well.
Shades and tints are one way to adjust the lightness and darkness of of a color. Today, we are going to look at these. We will look at what shades and tints are, how they work, and we will look at some reasons why we might want to use them.
What Are Shades and Tints
Shade is the term used to describe a color that has been mixed with black to darken the color. This can be useful when painting an area in shadow. For example, if painting a blue couch that has a single light source coming from one side, parts of the couch will be in shadow. To change the value level of those areas of the couch in shadow we can add black to the blue to lower the level of perceived light in that area and darken the couch.
Tint is the term used to describe a color that has been mixed with white to lighten the color. Tints are useful when working in the light areas of a subject. Using the blue couch again, some of the light areas of the couch will receive more light than others. This will cause the value levels to change within the light area. Mixing white with the blue used for the couch is one way to lighten those areas to look like more light is reaching those spots.
Both shades and tints can be used to reduce the saturation or intensity of color without any consideration for the effects of light as well. An example of this might be when painting for a Christmas card illustration we may decide we want a deep dark red in the illustration rather than a bright red. We can add black to our primary red to get the desired shade.
(To see a discussion on the levels of lights and dark go to the
value scale post.)
Let's look at tints first.