Diffused Light
featuring Laura Robb
Natural diffused light is something Laura has experience testing out. Laura has always searched for a way to work under natural light whenever possible. She hasn’t always had a nice studio built specifically to do that. Basically, all you need is a window where the sun is NOT streaming in. If you have direct light, it creates a lot of shadows and it is going to move all the time. The shadows will move across your still life or palette and it’s not a great condition to work in. People have so many ways they mythologize north light, but it is really just the windows that you have the least opportunity for the sun to come in. If you were in Australia, you would want south windows. But, any window that you have a consistent diffused light will make painting pleasant. That way, you wont have any cast shadows and you will have consistent light while looking at a still life arrangement.
That beautiful, cool, diffused light is very pleasant to work with and is easy to be productive under. With photographers, this is the same concept. They use the diffused boxes so they do not get hard edges or shadows. It can be better with diffused light because, with direct light, the shadows change so quickly. Anybody that works with natural light gets very attuned to what is going on as far as dawn and dusk and how long they have to work. It takes a lot of practice. The winter is about as short as it gets to maintain natural light. Laura sometimes likes the shorter window of time as it makes her speed up her work and pay more attention. She doesn’t tend to overwork things as much because she can’t afford to. Not only are the flowers going to fade, but the light does too. You have to make the brushstrokes count when using natural light.
It is always good to paint from life, which is why Laura uses living flowers for her still life arrangements (shown above). Laura got hooked working from life a long time ago. She felt like she was missing so many subtle colors when painting from photographs. Even with advances in photography, there would be subtle color changes she would not have noticed without painting from life. Live flowers are not always still and static, they tend to move around. But, sometimes they move into positions Laura likes better. It could even be as simple as a slightly different angle. With a photo, you are pretty much stuck with whatever shapes are in that photo because you would not know what it would like if the flower moved. Painting from life, landscape or figure, things move and shift. It’s part of the process, excitement, and learning curve. It can often times become more of an advantage to not have things so static.
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