The chalky still life: two light sources, 140 minutes left
A candidate in the PSEB practical examination has 180 minutes to complete a still-life study in poster colour. The set-up is a white plaster cube, a brass jug, one red apple, a dark green glass bottle and a royal blue cloth. Daylight enters from a high window on the left. Forty minutes in, the candidate sees that the study looks flat and chalky: the plaster cube and the jug sit in almost the same value, the red apple carries a pure white highlight and a black shadow, and every edge is drawn with equal sharpness. There are 140 minutes left. Fifteen minutes ago the invigilator switched on the hall's overhead fluorescent tubes, and the cast shadows on the table now run in two directions. The sheet is 56 × 76 cm and only the middle is worked up. The candidate wants to know what to change first, and what will be lost by trying to correct everything at once.
1. What should the candidate change first, and in what order, with 140 minutes left? Justify the priority and give a time budget.
Read the worked answer
The chalkiness is a value failure, not a colour failure, so value is the first intervention.
- Diagnosis: the cube and the jug share a value because every lit plane has been mixed with a lot of white, so all mid-tones have collapsed into one light grey. The apple's white highlight and black shadow are the two ends of a scale with nothing in between.
- Rule to apply: fix a five-step value scale before mixing any hue. The white cube holds step 2 on its window-lit vertical plane; the brass jug's body sits at steps 3–4, but its specular streak is the single step-1 note in the picture. Metal is darker than plaster, yet its highlight is brighter - that reversal is what makes metal read as metal.
- Time budget: 20 minutes to re-mass the shadow shapes and restate the three big values; 70 minutes to paint local colour while repeatedly checking each object against the cube; 30 minutes for reflected light, cast shadows and edge control; 20 minutes to stand back and correct only the largest wrong shape.
- Do not correct everything at once. The cube is the fixed reference: any passage reworked must be compared against it, otherwise the whole sheet drifts lighter.
Edge sharpness is the last thing to control, not the first - sharpening edges before value is settled only makes the same flat shapes look busier.
2. How should the candidate resolve the conflict between the window light and the overhead fluorescent tubes, and what does that decision change about colour and shadow?
Read the worked answer
The picture now has two keys, and a still life can carry only one. Decide which light explains the form, then demote the other.
- Choose the window as key: it is directional, high and left, and constant. The fluorescent tubes are a broad, weak, cool fill - they do not justify a faithful second set of cast shadows, they fill top planes.
- Practically: erase and re-align the earlier cast shadows so that every one of them follows the window's direction and angle. The tubes' shadows should be painted as short, soft, cool haloes directly under the objects, never as a rival set of dark shapes pointing elsewhere.
- Value consequence: the top plane of the cube is now filled by cool light, so it becomes slightly cooler and marginally darker than the window-lit vertical plane, not lighter. That one change stops the cube reading as a flat cut-out.
- Reflected light: the red apple spills a low-chroma red into the cube's shadow side; the brass jug throws a warm patch onto the table; the blue cloth lifts a cool note into the jug's shadow flank. These are small notes, painted after the form is solid.
If the invigilator later switches the tubes off, a picture built on one key still stands; a picture painted with two equal keys looks wrong under any light.
3. The candidate decides to fix the colours of the shadows. Explain what should replace the black shadow under the apple and the white highlight on it, and how each of the other objects should be handled.
Read the worked answer
The apple's black shadow and the chalky cube are the same mistake: chromatic darks replaced by black, chromatic lights replaced by white.
- Red apple: the shadow is a dark red, not a neutral. Alizarin crimson with a little ultramarine, and a touch of the bottle's green if it is adjacent, keeps the shadow on the red side of the scale. White goes only into the lit planes, never into the shadow.
- Green bottle: transparent glass is described by what it does to light behind it, not by green paint. Lay the dark green as a thin glaze over a light passage; the highlight is a hard, narrow shape, and the bottle's shadow on the cloth carries its green.
- Blue cloth: the largest cool area. Its folds need three values - lit, half-tone, and a dark that is bluer and cooler rather than blacker - because it anchors the cool side of the contrast against brass and apple.
- White cube: white objects take the colour of their light and surroundings. Lit plane = the window's warm white; shadow plane = cool (ultramarine plus a little burnt sienna); the apple's reflected red is the only warm note on the shadow side.
Test the sheet upside down or through half-closed eyes: if all the darks carry the same weight, the picture will still look chalky no matter how accurate the local hues are.