Limited palette for a dusk street with a warm shop window
An 80-minute acrylic study on 40 × 50 cm canvas board. The scene is a narrow street at dusk: a shop window emits warm light at roughly 2700 K, shadows on the opposite wall read cool blue-violet, and wet pavement carries reflections. The candidate is limited to titanium white, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, ultramarine and ivory black. The first block-in uses every mixture at high chroma; the shop window is lemon yellow, the shadows are a flat grey made from black plus white, and the pavement reflections are painted as hard vertical stripes. The candidate has 45 minutes left. The exam brief asks for atmospheric depth, a dominant temperature and readable focal contrast-not local colour matching. The canvas board is already tinted with a thin burnt-sienna wash.
1. Explain why the high-chroma block-in and the black-plus-white shadows fail in relation to colour theory.
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High chroma everywhere destroys the temperature hierarchy: if the shop window and the shadows are both saturated, the eye has no warm-dominant anchor and the dusk effect disappears. Black plus white makes a neutral grey with no hue, so it cannot represent a cool shadow receiving blue-violet sky light; it reads as dirty rather than receding. The hard vertical reflection stripes ignore the pavement's texture and the angle of incidence: reflections are broken, vertically stretched and lower in contrast than the source. The tinted burnt-sienna ground also matters, because it warms every subsequent mixture, so opaque highlights must be laid with enough body to preserve the light key.
2. Propose a revised palette hierarchy and mixing strategy using only the five permitted pigments.
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Keep ultramarine as the shadow base, but mix it with burnt sienna to neutralize rather than with black; add a touch of yellow ochre for grey-green passages. For shadows, use ultramarine plus burnt sienna plus white, varied warmer near the shop and cooler away. For the shop window, use yellow ochre plus white with a small burnt-sienna edge; reserve pure white for the hottest core only. For the pavement, scumble ultramarine and burnt sienna, then drag warm broken strokes vertically under the window, lower in chroma and softer at the far edge. The dominant temperature should be cool blue-violet with a warm focal accent; chroma peaks at the window and drops toward the corners. Use black only for the deepest occlusion, if at all.
3. How should reflections and edges be handled in the remaining 45 minutes to preserve depth?
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Work the reflections as vertical broken bands with a dry brush, following the pavement's perspective; make them darker and sharper near the object and softer and fainter toward the viewer. Keep the window's inner frame crisp, lose the outer wall edges into the dusk, and soften shadow boundaries where ambient light fills. In the last 20 minutes, check the notan by squinting: the window should still dominate, and the pavement reflections should read as a second, lower-contrast rhythm. Do not add white to every light; add it only where the light source's image would actually reflect.