This is a topic that came up in my classes in the past a lot, and I struggled with this myself. I always looked up to certain landscape artists who I admired that painted beautiful rocks. They made it look easy, so I tried to mimic them at the beginning when I was learning more about rocks. If you can believe it…I figured out it is a lot harder than it looks! As I gained more experience and canvas and brush time as the years went by, I slowly started figuring out certain things about rocks. One of the major keys to painting them is reflected light. Painting outside, from life, is where you can really experience this. Living in the southwest, there is a ton of light bouncing onto the horizontal surface and getting pushed back up into the verticals. Think of rocks as verticals. As light hits the horizontal surface, it bounces back into the face of the rock. When you look at photographs, it is noticeable, but not as much as you will notice studying life.

I always encourage my students to paint from life. When you are standing there and look hard enough at the photograph, you get to see this sort of inner glow, this is called reflected light. It gets bounced back into the rock face. What happens is, when you add a lighter value, it gives an inner glow. That value inside the rock, and color which needs to be cooler than whatever the rock is. So, let’s say the rock is red, it has to be a cool red in the shadow. It has to be cool and somewhat muted too. When I say muted, I mean the values need to be close to each other. If you push those values too far apart, your eye will focus too much on that area.

Painting outside, from life, is where you can really experience this [reflected light]

To get the reflected light, inner glow, it is basically the same color you have as a general, overall color. The shadow is just a lighter value of it. You have to mess around with it, there is no formula. You have to see how much you want to bring that value up around the rock in certain areas where light hits it. It is something really important, that I believe will really help you paint your rocks make them come alive. It is sort of the extra layer that will make it look more three dimensional.

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