I’m taking a bunch of classes this month! Katie Woodward is an urban sketcher and the author of the Understanding Light volume of the Urban Sketcher’s Handbook series. I have previously taken her color bootcamp class. I wanted to take the Neon class because neon is a fascinating lighting subject. As a New Yorker, Katie has a lot of opportunity to observe neon.
Main Takeaways
Painting neon is very layer-based, so it goes along well with my recent lessons about glazing. We used three types of layers, though sometimes multiple of each type:
- First layer – Mid-tone glow; leave the white outlines of the neon tubes (if large – smaller ones can be written in at the end with white gel pen).
- Intensifying layer – Same colors as the glow, but start at a distance from the neon and grade into the clean water as it gets closer, so that you end up with light-to-dark glow.
- Darks layer – Work from the edges in to grade dark-to-light, perhaps using transition colors (e.g. violet to grade between red and blue/black).
If there are elements other than the neon (it’s not just a sign but a scene that contains neon), each layer can be proceeded by blocking in shapes in the same general colors/values.
Supplies Notes
Katie basically used the same colors she showed in her color class a few years ago. Some criminally underrated paints, according to Katie:
- Rich Green Gold (PY129)
- Transparent Orange (PO71)
- Quinacridone Coral (PR209)
- Quinacridone Violet (PV19)
She uses a lot of Qor, which she prefers because of the intensity and vibrance. She explained that their proprietary binder is colorless, unlike gum arabic which is a bit yellow; this allows their blues to be more blue.
Paper: Katie prefers smooth hot press paper for vibrance and clarity. In class, she was using New York Art Supply 100% cotton paper, which I believe is a Jerry’s Artarama house brand, as it is a bit cheaper than Arches/Saunders and comes in convenient 5×7 sizes. She prefers Saunders for commercial work.
Random Advice
Some other advice that came up in the class:
- You can’t learn and make a good painting at the same time. During the class, focus on learning, it doesn’t matter if you like what you’re painting.
- When you don’t like a part of your painting, it’s common to obsess over it, but that will make the part you don’t like more intricate than everything else, and the eye will be drawn to it. It’s better to ignore the part you don’t like and work on everything else. I had never thought of it this way before!
- Staining paints stain the paper (can’t be lifted to white), but they do move if you put water on top. Staining doesn’t mean waterproof.
- There’s no good budget paint brand, to save money buy fewer paints.
Conclusion
The lighting aspects of this were really fun. The problem is that neon is mostly lettering, which I do not like! I’m not neat enough. Underdrawing the lettering is crucial – and in a larger scene, it’s also important to underdraw the other stuff because you’ll start to forget what’s going on with all the layers. Luckily a nocturne is mostly dark enough that an underdrawing is unlikely to show.
I really like all the colors we used; they’re very pleasurable to use. In the past I’ve dismissed Transparent Orange as a sort of awkwardly in between vibrant and muted, but in this application – mixing with Quin Coral to make a glow color – it was really great. I also really liked Quin Violet as a transition color between red and blue/black. And Indigo essentially became black when layered over the red glow color, so that was nice use of mixing-by-glaze.