Shadows and Values with Christie
In this live tutorial Christie Renee Hawkins walks viewers through painting a tree while focusing on how to handle shadows, highlights, and overall value. She begins by emphasizing the importance of deciding a light source before adding any shadows or highlights. Using a limited palette of burnt umber, nutmeg, white, pale yellow, and later green, red, and other colors, she demonstrates how to block in the tree’s shape, apply darker tones on the side opposite the light, and add lighter tones where the light hits. Christie stresses that shadows don’t have to be created with black; instead she mixes complementary colors (e.g., red into green) to achieve darker values, and uses yellow and white for highlights. She shows practical brush choices from her Amazon affiliate store, explains how to mix colors directly on the canvas, and offers tips for checking value by converting photos to black‑and‑white. Throughout, she reminds viewers to step back or view their work from a distance to judge contrast, citing Monet and Van Gogh as examples of works that resolve when viewed from afar. The tutorial concludes with encouragement to experiment with a color wheel, create custom darks, and treat color mixing as a problem‑solving skill rather than relying on pre‑mixed paints.
Chapters
Hey everybody, how's everyone doing today? So today we are going to talk about shadows. How many of you feel like that is an area of concern that you're not sure where to put them in your paintings? So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to use to teach you this. And you know, it's different depending on the subject matter, but I still want to give you a general idea. So I was thinking about a jar, but then I did jars with you guys the other day, so I didn't want to do that again. And then I was talking about how I find inspiration for things, and so this is one of my older calendars. I don't know if you can see that. And then I was looking at this tree on here, and I thought a tree would be a great way to show you guys what I'm talking about because we can add some shadows into the trees and we can add some shadow onto the ground. Does that make sense? So who wants to learn how to make a tree? That sound good with you guys? I'm gonna get some paint here. And Linda says she has the same problem with highlights. So here is The thing that I want you guys to remember when you are doing either one of them, the first thing you have to decide in your painting, if you're not going off of like a piece or a photo or something where it's decided for you and you're coming up with your own, your own composition, you want to decide where your light source is coming from. So That is the most important thing. Let me grab my brush. I think I want to use this guy. And this brush set is— I love these new brushes. I've been using them like nonstop. This is from my Addie's Art Set in my Amazon store, but all of my favorite supplies are in my Amazon store. And that's an affiliate store for me. So I get a little small piece, a tiny percentage off of your sales, but it's awesome because I can put all my favorite stuff in one spot for you guys. So I'm just getting some basic colors here. I've got like a burnt umber. This is nutmeg, white, and like a pale yellow. And the reason I have some pale yellow in there is again just to add another dimension to it, you can use yellows as highlights too. It doesn't always just have to be a lighter shade of whatever color you are working with. But I love these brushes because the bristles are nice and stiff and it just gives you a little bit more control. So I'm using like a number 4 round right now. Can you guys see this okay? So I don't know if it'll help you guys to kind of see this. See if I can get this propped up here. No, maybe it's not gonna work for me. I don't think I have anything to hold it. Aha! So that helps a little, right? Kind of gives you a little bit of an idea of what I'm going off of. So we're just going to start down here at the bottom. This is going to be my base, and I'm just doing just a basic mixture of my browns right now. And again, I'm not worried about making this perfectly realistic or anything. We're just going to start kind of getting a basic tree shape down here. When you are making a tree, I do want you to notice what I'm doing right now. Notice how I did not start on one side over here and then jump over and decide the other side. I kind of just went thicker as I went along, and that way you don't end up with a tree way, way bigger than what you meant. So hopefully that makes sense. So anyways, I wanted you to kind of see how I did that, and then we've got— they kind of separate about right here. and this one already— can you see that is a little bit lighter in the background? These are darker because they're on the back. The sun is coming from that other side, so this side of our tree is getting the shadow. So I'm going to go with some lighter brown and even grab a little bit of my yellow for this back area. And I'm still gonna pull something across here, but I'm just getting this light color on here first. Okay, and coming up here, and ours is going to be a little shorter than that tree on the painting or the picture. So we'll just kind of pull it up like this, and then it's got some branches that kind of just pull across here. Okay, so this side, this is a little bit lighter up here, so I'm going to pull some, a little bit of that light yellow into my brown. Just to change that color a little bit. Oh, you know what else I need on here is black. That's not black. Here it is. So I'm grabbing a little black with my brown now, and I've got this area right here where I want this tree to kind of overlap. So it's a little bit darker right here, and then it's going to cut across. And this kind of goes up. Again, we're going to make ours just a little bit different here. This is a gnarly little tree with lots of bumps and So if you worry about having a shaky hand, this is the kind of tree you want to paint because it's supposed to have all these crazy little bumps and grooves in it. So can you see right there already the difference in the lighting? So this part of the tree trunk versus the front part. Hopefully you guys can see that, but I want this section in the front to appear darker than that section in the back. And then over on this side, all that underneath side, I want this to have more of a shadow, so I'm gonna actually lighten this brown up a just a tiny bit. Same thing here. My light is coming from up here, so everything on the top of my branches is going to be lighter than what's at the bottom of my branches. So I'm going to grab some of this black. Again, I don't want it to just be straight black. I'm mixing it with my brown a little bit, and we're just going to start coming in and adding some of these darker areas underneath here. I'm just doing that underneath all of them, even on these ones that are higher up and they're a lighter brown. They're still going to be darker on that side of the tree. So you just kind of want to choose where your light source is coming from so that you can start adding those shadows in. We're just going to make it a little extra dark over on this side and down here. I'd say it's a pretty intense shadow, so I'm just gonna go all darker over here. I'm gonna pull a little bit of green in here. We can get some kind of a green mossy color going, but still pretty dark on that side, and this side's got more light. Coming to it. So we could even accentuate that more by pulling in some yellow over here. Maybe this ground is coming back behind that tree a little bit. So we've got this light yellow where the sun's hitting the grass, so it's a little brighter over on this side, and then as we get over here, we're going to start seeing it get darker because of the shadow of the tree. And you can decide how intense you want it. You could have it really dark like this, and that, you know, just depends on how intense your light is. If your light is very, very intense and say that's a very bright sun out, it will cast a strong shadow like that. If it's kind of cloudy out, it's not going to be that much of a difference. Yes, Linda said, so you're actually mixing on the piece. I do that a lot, so you don't have to premix your colors on your plate. Now I will show you, my plate is plenty messy and I mix a little bit, but I am definitely blending on here as well. And I'm even going to add just a little bit of green just in a couple areas up here because there's a little bit of moss on that tree. Grab some more of my yellow, and you can decide how bold you want your highlights to be too. And this is something where you guys hear me say it all the time, to either step back from your paintings or take pictures of them and then go back to it. Because when you're doing this— and I'm going to show you what I mean here— when I put this yellow line on here as my highlight, let me grab a little bit of white too. Let's come in, add it over on this other side. As well. So can you guys see that highlight from where you're at? You're a little further back, but what I want you to notice— this is probably going to fall when I do this— what I want you to notice is when you are close to it, can you see that? It's gonna seem like really bold, and like maybe that's not what you want it to look like, right? Because like, if you saw that on your canvas, would you be worried that that's just way too thick or way too bold? But then when you step back, you get that nice contrast. So again, be thinking about where, where are you going to be looking at your piece of art? Is it going to be something that you're 6 inches away from? All the time, or is it gonna be something that's hanging on your wall? So you want to think about what it's going to look like when it's on your wall. And sometimes that's hard for us when we're so close to the paintings. So I just try to get people to think about that, and I use Monet as an example because if you follow or have followed or watched or seen any of his artwork, You know that up close it's just really, really messy. Same with Van Gogh. And then when you step back from them and they're on the wall, everything comes together. So trying to break you guys from in your head telling yourselves things have to look like a photograph or that they have to look realistic. They don't, and sometimes they're more interesting when they don't. So I hope that makes sense. On how you can see. So I'm just going to use this little accident here. We're just going to pull that and make another branch and pull that back in to my tree. We'll do the same thing here and add that shadow underneath here. But hopefully this will help you with kind of the general idea of how to play with your highlights and your lowlights or your shadows. And you can do the same thing in your grassy area. One of the questions was, do you always have to like add black to have a shadow? And the answer is no to that as well. And I'm going to show you here. So in the grass, One, I've got this lighter green that I was already using. Now I've picked up some of this darker, like, grass green. So even just throwing in that other color— can you guys see the difference there? It still looks darker, right? It still looks like it's darker on this side of the tree than this side of the tree, and that's just a transition. In colors too. So if you were looking at these greens on a scale, because they're the same color, right, essentially, if you were looking at these on a scale and let's say you turned it black and white— this is another tip that you can do. You can, uh, most phones, you can edit your photos and you can turn them black and white. So that's a good thing when you're trying to get value in your paintings and you want there to be depth and contrast. Turn your photo— turn your paintings black and white on your phone and look at it. Does everything look the same? Is it all just like the same tone, all the same grays, or do you have some areas of bright white and dark darks? And if you do, is it all in one spot and your eyes only focus on that point, or does it make you kind of jump around? So the point in me saying all of that is if you turned these greens black and white or grays, this one would be on the darker side of the scale and this one would be on the lighter side of the scale. So again, you can use that in your paintings as well by getting lighter shades, and I could even keep playing with this and come and add more yellow to it. I've got too much green in there. Let me get some of that off. And see how it just keeps getting lighter and lighter? So you don't always have to add white to your color. And then on the flip side of that— so that's adding yellow going that way, and then we've got our regular dark green, and I've got my regular dark green down here. I'm going to make this all dark on this side instead of using black to darken this. I'm gonna use red. Does anyone know why? I'll give you a second before I tell you. I'll wait for the comments to pop up here, and if they don't, I'll tell you. But I'm betting somebody on here knows why I am using red to make my green darker. No, not quite. It does have to do with the color wheel. It has to do with the placement on the color wheel. Yes, so I don't think I have my— hang on, let me see if I have it really quick. I thought I might have had it in that drawer, but I don't. So if you're looking at a color wheel, again, if you really want to learn more about art and study this instead of just, you know, painting step by step, get yourself a color wheel, get yourself a color mixing guide. They're awesome to have, and you're going to learn how to create all your own colors. But you can make neutrals, you can make darker colors of whatever color you're working with by using the opposite on the color wheel. So for green, that's red. For orange, it's blue. For yellow, it's purple. So anytime you get those, it gives you a neutral. In this case, I'm gonna use— I've got dark green, and then I'm gonna use a little bit of red. And watch what happens. The more red I add to it the darker it gets. And now you've got this really nice dark mossy green. And this is the crazy part. This is what I want to show you and explain to you guys, that you don't have to go buy every individual color. I know people like to know the exact brand and the exact name and all that stuff of what I use, but I want to get past that and and I want you guys to learn how to make your own colors. So look, these were the two colors that I used. Can you see that? This is Christmas Green and Bright Red. So you probably would not think that these two colors would make this color, right? Am I getting too much light on there? But it does. So, you know, this is just, again, why I love having a mixed media pad. This would just be something fun for you guys to do, not even talking about making a painting, but just learning about color mixing and how you can use what I'm teaching you today to add value and to add shadows to your paintings. So play with your reds and greens and see how many different colors you can get out of the same two bottles of paint. Or play with your, you know, blues and orange, or yellow and purple, whatever colors you want to play with and do this as a little challenge for yourself. But I did want to cover that. I want to explain where the shadows go. Decide your light source is number one, and number two is adding the shadows on that darker side where it's in the dark, your highlights on the top side, but also not feeling like you can only use black and white to add your highlights and lowlights. So when I was in my color theory class in college, this was my absolute favorite class, and we— I mean, it was all about color mixing, and so I'm kind of obsessed with it. We had to do a full painting. She hated it when we used black. Like, in fact, she would probably knock down our grade, a whole letter grade, if we did use black in any of our paintings. And her challenge to us was to not use that. Don't fall back on that, that you can create your own darks. From colors that you have. So maybe challenge yourself to that. Try not using black in a painting, but using different colors to create those dark values that you want. So kind of an in-depth paint lesson for you guys today, but what I want— what I hope you understand from, from what I taught you today— sorry, ignore that, it's my paper towel dispenser. Automatic. What I hope you learned from this today is that it doesn't have to be hard. That wasn't hard. So all I did was just start playing with my paints and learning what different colors do. So if that's interesting to you, get yourself a color wheel, get yourself a color mixing guide, which is just this big grid, and it will tell you if you mix cobalt blue and, you know, I don't know, whatever, red together, and then you meet those two in the middle of the grid, it'll tell you what color you're gonna get. And so you start playing with colors enough and you start figuring it out. So I mean, it's happened to me more than once at my local paint nights that if I forgot a paint color and I start to panic and I'm like, oh, what am I gonna do? Luckily I have had enough of the right other colors that I'm like, okay, it's fine. We're just gonna mix it. We're just gonna mix that color. It doesn't matter that I didn't have it, and it really doesn't. So anyways, I hope that was a fun tip for you that you can learn a little bit about values and shadows and highlights. And also a little about color mixing. So this tutorial kind of turned into something different, but it was fun, and you guys seem to think it was interesting too, so that's good. So that is what I got for you today. So I hope you guys enjoyed that. Thanks guys, bye!
