WHY DO ARTISTS SQUINT AT THEIR WORK?

When we are drawing or painting in colour, we use a range of darker, medium and lighter values of a hue. Our Colour Mastery workbook goes into great detail about rich (chromatic) greys and how to achieve darker values of a hue without the cheap hack of adding black. (in which case you are ‘toning down the colour’ while also ‘toning down the value’.) There are exceptions to this combination of effects eg. To desaturate a secondary violet, we would use a primary yellow, but its inherent mass tone is quite light, therefore it will desaturate the violet, but will not make it darker.

All pigments have an intrinsic value in their mass tone, which is why we advise students to choose dark versions of blues and reds first because they can be easily lightened. If they buy a ‘primary blue’ labelled as such by a manufacturer, which has already had white added, they are unable to darken it without de-saturating (or compromising the purity of) the colour.

That brings us to SQUINTING. You may be aware that in the retina at the back of our eyes, there are photoreceptors called Cones and Rods. 

The Cones are more about interpreting colour, while the rods help us to measure dark and light. Rods work at very low levels of light. These are used for our night vision because just a few bits of light (photons) can activate a rod. Rods are not involved with colour vision, which is why at night, we see everything in a grey scale. One human eye has over 100 million rod cells.