The Easter bunny is running late here. This little experiment with in acrylics was begun at Easter and intended to be finished over the four day break. It wasn’t that simple.
Painting white on white and having it not look grey is all about carefully managing the tones. There needs to be just enough dark (in this case the sliver of shadow under the ceramic rabbit) to make the rest of the painting look light. Otherwise it may look like an over-exposed photograph. If everything is light, nothing looks light. The shadow, however, cannot be took dark either. There is a lot of reflected light in this scene which will bounces the light into even the deepest crevice.
I began by painting in the shadow with a value 5 which meant that everything else would be lighter. The next darkest dark was everything which faces away from the light – technically still a shadow. I went two steps lighter to value 7, making it as clear as possible that it is a shadow but still reading as white rather than grey.
The trick then was to get that separation of light from shadow with the recommended couple of steps when I am just about of them. By that rule I only had values 9 and 10 left. (White and almost white isn’t much to work with…) In this case where all the objects are white, but I wanted the satin to appear shiny, the white was reserved for just that and a couple of tiny highlights on the rabbit. That meant the rest of the painting had to fall around value nine. Clearly not enough, I cheated a little, and went down to value 8 on a second layer of paint when it all read as far too light.
Quite simply a balancing act of white on white painted and re-painted until it looked right.