Let There Be Light!

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

The Studio Watercolor 1895 Carl Larsson

Learning to see as an artist is perhaps a lifelong task, requiring countless hours of observation, comparison and reproduction of our real life subjects. This is a particularly critical process when it comes to analyzing and matching color, and the practice over time can’t be shortcut. If one is going to invest a great deal of time and energy in learning how to work with color and paint, it only makes sense to get the lighting in the studio correct right from the outset.

Daylight is considered to be the best light, especially north light (in the northern hemisphere). However, north light doesn’t remain perfectly constant throughout the day, only more constant than light from any other direction. So, artists often augment their natural window light with artificial light, and this is where things get complicated. There are many types of light bulbs sold as “natural” or “balanced” (e.g. like daylight), but not all of …