by robertsloan2

Created on: March 06, 2009

I've been a part time to full time professional artist since my twenties, ranging from science fiction and fantasy art sold at conventions to commissioned portraits, street art in New Orleans, ACEO trading cards on eBay and fine art in galleries. I've used nearly every two dimensional medium available with the exceptions of encaustic, egg tempera, casein and gold leafing. I can and have used medieval inks on parchment, just had to resort to Shell Gold (real gold powder made up into watercolor with gum arabic) when I ruined $25 worth of gold leaf trying to do an authentic medieval scroll for a Society for Creative Anachronism lord. My current passion is oil pastels since I began writing a new website -

www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com - and that is my latest round of daytime drawing.

Why oil pastels, also charcoal, soft pastels, acrylics and watercolor are so great for daytime drawing is that you need to get the basic shapes down fast. Working from artificial light, the shadow shapes won't change and your angle of light is consistent.

Doing that by natural daylight either means hoping the weather's stable and sunny for days in a row and always working on your painting at exactly ten thirty in the morning till nearly eleven for days on end, or getting the shapes down within a half hour to an hour and then trusting your sketch. That is the biggest problem any artist has to solve for working from natural light.

Not only the angle of the light but its color will change. Your latitude will affect it. When I lived down in New Orleans, the sunlight was yellower, warmer and richer. Also the sky had a deeper blue and the year-round greenery reflected into everything - the world in the South is more colorful due to latitude. This is some of what makes New Mexico and Southwest Art such a color-drenched genre. Shadows will show more blue reflections of the sky and highlights will have a warm cast. Northern light is cooler and whiter, everything may have a slightly cool cast.

Early morning and late afternoon sun also shifts toward reddish or yellowish. This is great. It can give a wonderful color-rich feel to your painting. So for any serious painting there are several things I do before settling in to work on it for days - always at the same time of day.

One is to snap a quick digital photo of the subject with its shadows. This is a guide to shadow shapes and light angles. It's also good for remembering details when I reach the stage in the painting where I'm putting

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