Working en grisaille
Working in a range of tones of the same hue is called working en grisaille. To qualify for the title, the image must use a range of tones: thus, line art is not grisaille. This term means painting with tone only.
Grisaille is a valuable style of monochromatic art, which is often used as a preparation for painting in color, since it can establish the tonal composition of the image without the distraction of color. I mention it here only because a lot of amateur (and even professional) artists make a mistake with it: they “color” different parts of the picture with monochromatic ranges of a single hue, making every spot essentially its own grisaille patch.
This kills the color interaction in the picture as surely as adding neutral gray to it. A single monochromatic range works because that’s how our night vision works. But we subliminally expect the shadows be of different color than the lit parts of any object, the red cube to throw its rosy radiosity on a white wall, and so on. Working in this “compartmentalized grisaille” simply does not imitate the natural color even remotely, and therefore looks dull and false.
This error is especially widespread among artists working mostly with computers, and can be attributed to the particularly vicious style of making light and shadows propagated by many Photoshop users (and even teachers). Instead of working with color properly, they quickly fill the different parts of the image with flat colors, then add “highlights” and “shadows” in two separate layers set to Screen and Multiply mode, using pure black and pure white. Neither changes the hue in any way, altering only brightness, and the resulting image is an instant “compartmentalized grisaille”. This practice is even more widespread than just using neutral gray in color work, and while only the freshest newbies make this mistake with natural media, I have seen many digital artists doing it, who were otherwise considerably skilled. The only remedy for this is studying color theory and learning to see color. Even an amateur artist with no great skill at seeing hues can benefit greatly from applying the rule of complements, making the shadows the opposite hue of the light, which is roughly how it works in real life.
Uses for neutral gray
Finally, I am going to pay tribute to the dreadful, much-abused neutral gray. Just as many poisons can become medicines in smaller doses, neutral gray has its uses too.
First of all, neutral gray is invaluable in digital art because of user interfaces. While it does disrupt color compositions when inside them, it also frames them without affecting their hue, which is a very valuable quality. A colored window frame would inevitably interact with its contents, a red frame making the picture greenish, for example. Neutral gray is the only color (besides black and white) that does not have this quality, and so if you look at the working area of Photoshop or Painter, you’ll see that it’s neutral gray, regardless of which fancy “skin” your interface might be using.
Second, a mixture of black and white can be used as underpainting for glazes, to achieve a translucent effect in oils. However, it’s not the only way to do this, and thus not specific to neutral grays.
Third, the clash between colorless neutral gray and color is really a particular case of contrast, and contrasts are what makes compositions work. An accomplished artist could use that contrast as he uses any other, to the benefit of the composition. The easiest way to put it to use is by having just one small element in a grayscale picture rendered in bright, vivid color – it’s an instant attention device. Making the monochromatic picture in neutral gray (using a graphite pencil, for instance) would only enhance such contrast, by bringing the saturation contrast to its extreme- and it will not form a hole, because in this case the gray will provide the environment.
Neutral gray can also work if all other colors are very desaturated, themselves, where the interaction is already very low and subdued, and can’t be disrupted as badly. In such environments, if used with caution, neutral gray can work as a color: if the overall tone is warm, it can serve as a cool tone, and vice versa.
In general, a spot of color looks better in a colorless environment than a colorless spot would do in a colored one. I have not seen a single case of the opposite – all cases of a neutral (or just too desaturated) gray in a distinctly colored picture instantly punches an ugly, conspicuous hole. Any color must be used carefully, and with awareness of its interaction with the composition, but neutral gray requires extra wariness.
Until you are confident in your knowledge of color theory, it’s probably best to leave neutral grays alone. A skilled chemist can work with poison without adverse effects, by way of comparison, but I don’t think anyone without proper training should handle potassium cyanide.
Article by Eugene Arenhaus.
The images of the coyote illustrating the en grisaille technique were adopted from a fragment of Bag O’Tricks by H. Kyoht Luterman under the educational fair-use clause of copyright law; Ms. Luterman does not make any of the mistakes mentioned in the text.
