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Last week we talked about shade and shade and shade.

I’m not repeating myself, they’re three different things. Read the article here if you’re confused.

Today, let’s cover the type of desaturation we see all the time.

Except you don’t think of it as desaturation.

Weird.

There are several ways to desaturate a color.

Remember, desaturation is when…

Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate!

No, you got chocolate on my peanut butter!

That’s basically desaturation. Call it mixing, call it contamination, or adulteration.

Desaturation is two great tastes that taste great together.

Last week, we talked about true shading— desaturating with black.

Many of you would look at this swan’s wing and see the color of the feathers shifting from pure white to murky blue.

You’d say this was shading.

But what if we looked at it the opposite way?

See, everyone is sooooo quick to shade.

I shade, you shade, we all shade until we’re sick of shading.

If all you have is a hammer…

Shading is that hammer. A lot of you would color this swan’s wing by shading it, right?

So flip the script. Can you bend your brain to do it?

What if we were to start on the body of the swan and work our way to the tip of the wing?

Desaturation doesn’t always run dirty.

We can start dirty and end clean.

Or at least cleanish.

We can desaturate gray blue with little drops of white.

Add some white.

Then add more.

And more.

These desaturations are called tints.

Now I know, this doesn’t seem right. For years, I’ve been yakking at you about the dirty desaturates.

But there’s more than one way to desaturate a cat and tints are one of ‘em.

Now last week, I showed you some shading and we talked about how shading scales tend to give people the willies.

What starts as a nice vibrant strawberry red, gradually turns into the black hole of doom where no light can escape.

Black is a dead color. It doesn’t bounce any lightwaves at our eyes so we literally sense black things as a total absence.

Is white the opposite?

Meh, not really. We’re used to seeing tints in our regular lives.

I mean, yes— technically a tint is tossing too many lightwaves in your general direction. It’s so much information we can’t handle it all, so your brain just sees a big white-out.

But our world is full of pastel colors so we’re accustomed to the color confusion caused by white desaturation.

Tints do not feel creepy. They feel clean.

This week, as you’re walking around in your colorful world, try this little color experiment.

Flip the shade.

Try looking at things backwards. Instead of thinking about everything as gradual shadiness, search for the lightward shift.

It’s an important excercise. One of my best drawing teachers once told the class that we thought too much about shading.

“Form is created in the light”

Next week, we’ll continue our desaturation tour.

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Speaking of shading pale pink petals…

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Once upon a time, we used to prop our drawing boards at an angle with actual hockey pucks. I lugged six of them around campus for years and when we moved a few years ago, I found a whole trove of ‘em in the back of a file cabinet.

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