How to Create Depth by Contrast

In this text, American artist David Berkowitz Chicago will talk about a particular resource that allows to create depth through contrast in drawing and painting. The great advantage of this resource is that it is so simple that it does not require the use of color or different materials to be put into practice.

Some of the best-known painters in Western Art History have produced works that accentuate the illusion of spatiality and three-dimensionality that drawing and painting possess. In fact, some of the best-known works of these painters are particularly spatial. Las Meninas by Velázquez and various paintings by Vermeere seem to be habitable spaces in which we could enter. Or the characters in different Rembrandt paintings seem to come off the frame and really stand in front of us.

There are different techniques to achieve the sensation of three-dimensional and spatiality in painting and drawing. The best known of these techniques are perspective and volume. However, there are many others that allow us to produce these same illusions. Among these methods we find the graying and the correct use of color theory, the colors that advance and recede, and technical resources such as the use of impasto, glazes, charges and saturations.

What is contrast?

In terms of color, contrast is defined as the difference in tone that exists between the colors of two or more points in the same image. There are different types of contrasts, to begin with there are contrasts in terms of white, black and gray values, and others in terms of color contrasts.

To accentuate the sensation of spatiality in drawing and painting, the type of contrasts that most interests us is the contrast of white, black and gray values. However, Chicago-based painter David Berkowitz will explain both in a little more detail so that you get a better understanding about what we are talking.

Contrasts in white, black and gray

The contrasts between white, black and gray are those that occur between the different values of the gray scale. They are of different types: high contrasts, medium contrasts, and subtle contrasts.

High contrasts are those that occur when two colors are used in the same image or in the same section of an image that are widely separated from each other in the gray scale. The highest of this type of contrast would therefore be the contrast between pure white and pure black, explains David Berkowitz Chicago.

Average contrasts are those that occur between two tonal values that are not so far apart within the gray scale, but that are not too close together within the gray scale.

Subtle contrasts are those that occur between two colors that are very close together within the gray scale. These can be so subtle that they become almost unnoticeable.

Increase and decrease the contrast

In relation to what was discussed in the previous paragraph, increasing the contrast between two tonal values would therefore be to use colors that are widely separated from each other within the gray scale.

In the same way, reducing the contrast would be to use colors that within the gray scale are closer, even closer than what the scale of values visually allows us to recognize.

Contrasts in color

Talking about contrast in terms of color can imply two different themes, chromatic contrasts and contrasts in terms of tonal values. Because to accentuate the sense of spatiality through the use of contrasts we will really only use one of these two forms of contrast, it is worth clarifying the differences between the two.

A chromatic contrast is one that occurs between the nuances of two different colors, a tonal contrast is one that occurs due to the tonal values ​​of two different colors.

As mentioned in the text, colors as values ​​within the grayscale, colors have different characteristics that are referred to by different concepts.

The hue of a color is its chromatic characteristic, this translates into whether that color is orange, red, yellow, lemon yellow, blue, cyan blue or ultramarine blue. It also has to do with what kind of color it is regardless of whether it has black, white or gray mixed in it.

The tone of a color has to do with how dark or light that color is if we link it with the gray scale. It does not have to see if it has black, gray or white in the color, but what shade of gray that color resembles if we place it as one more gray value within the gray scale.