Counterchange

'Three Cliffs Bay Gower' Acrylic Watercolour

Counterchange is the positioning of dark colours against light and light colours against dark.

This technique emphasises edges without them having to be ‘drawn’. If an edge is important to your painting it is not necessary to draw a line to differentiate it. Even if in your subject adjacent shapes are a different colour but the same tone, the edge between them may be defined simply by making the darker of the two objects darker still. Alternatively the lighter may be made lighter still with the same effect. Some may be tempted to draw a line – don’t, this just gives away the amateur.

Today’s illustration shows counterchange in many places. As an exercise see how many edges you can find that have been treated in this way.

When you are out in the town or the countryside look for examples where counterchange occurs naturally. Also look for opportunities to use counterchange in your own work. These need to be planned or the chances are they will not work effectively. The better the planning, the better the result.

That’s it for today. The next article will be posted on Monday. Have a good weekend and keep painting.

Take care.

Tony

P.S. This is the fifteenth article posted on this blog. I know there are visitors to this site but you seem to be shy. How about a bit of feedback. Let me know what you think.