The Difficulties of Light, Dark and Parish Boundaries

Navigating light and dark (called the ‘values’ in a painting) in colour is challenging. The great aviation artist, Robert Taylor, offers the advice to those wondering how best to start painting, by answering “with a pencil” and I think part of his point is that drawing offers a more direct route to recognising the importance of tonal value than can be easily achieved in paint.

Assuming one has practised this, worked a composition in pencil and set out the values to one’s satisfaction, there is for the painter then the tricky matter of making the same thing work in paint. On the face of it, it seems easy,

One of my recent late evening activities was to try and follow on the map the parish boundary for the parish of Talley where I now live. It is part of a personal project to try and understand better the history of the local area. As I did this, in a break from painting, it occurred to me how similar the difficulties of keeping track of the lights and darks in a painting were to the challenge of keeping track of a parish boundary on a map (particularly if you are literally tracing it with tracing paper over the top!).

If you’ve never tried to do this, have a go with a 1:25,000 map and you’ll see what I mean, just following one with your finger is hard enough. In case you don’t care to, I’ll talk you through it and explain (in the brackets) the analogous process of keeping track of light and dark values whilst painting:

(I have mocked up some fictional maps to go with this article to show the point, in case you don’t care to fetch out a map, but I think my dotted lines are a bit too easy to follow compared to a real map.)

First of all, there is the challenge of finding the right faint dotted line on the map to start with (the equivalent of finding a starting mid tone value in the painting to work the rest relative to). The parish is clearly marked, but the odd shapes of their boundaries often mean that the first line you pick up is for an adjacent parish.

Once you find the right one (the equivalent of finding a good starting mid tone) and follow the line, it doesn’t seem too bad, off you go across an open field, with curiously inexplicable wriggles, and perhaps the faint dotted line follows along a river (you are now managing to set out some other tones apparently in keeping with the first). All of a sudden the boundary line has gone and your finger is still sailing along the river merrily (some parts of the painting’s sky are getting too dark).


So you rewind a little and notice the boundary quietly slipped off down a little stream joining the river (you had too much of that dark blue mixed in, chasing a lovely blue to your sky), off you go up the stream, congratulate yourself on turning off of it to follow correctly a hedgerow (you got the relative light and dark of the distant hills about right (hooray!)). Three hedgerows later and you’re feeling slightly cocky, where’s the problem?! Then suddenly at a hedgerow junction- where is it? No sign -. (the foreground has gone just too light relative to the sky, even though it is a beautiful green and the detail is marvellous (drat!)).

Ok. Re-track, ah, there it went, it joined the constituency boundary, a confusing sort of dashed line gallivanting off down the dazzling orange ‘B’ road (you were so preoccupied putting nice brush strokes in those foreground grasses that you hadn’t noticed how light in tone they became). Right then, follow the road, focus, still there, caught that naughty detour briefly off the ‘B’ road round the other side of the houses, presumably the old road alignment. (You remembered to darken the ground properly where the shadow of the building fell on it.)


Wave good bye to the constituency boundary and suddenly it seems to have gone again amongst what must be a newish housing estate on the map (that farmhouse jutting into the tree line in the painting made you fail to notice that you changed the values to either side of it for no explicable reason). Oh, actually, the dotted line didn’t disappear in the housing; it just was obscured by the green short dashes of the footpath which goes round the edge of the houses. (A little more red pushed into the green mix has brought the tree line back to right.) Must be back near where we started following this little line now (whole painting beginning to have nicely judged balance), just a half mile to be back where we first found the boundary, should be a cinch. There, it just runs round this wood and straight across that field (just those roofs reflecting the light to do, nice and bright, an easy and exciting finish, great!).


Ah- that straight line across the field was a power line, the boundary actually went on a circuitous route round the edge of that old wood boundary, and snuck home quietly, obscured by the fence to a farm track. (Reflections on roof way overdone, actually a soft saturated orange for those tiles is far better, and just some little catches of light on the guttering ticked in quietly here and there bring you home to a quiet finish!)

The problem of both these activities is that the core objective is obscured by bright and dazzling details and distractions which constantly confound expectations.

Beware, artists, of the deception of colour and, rural historians, of the seemingly inexplicable vagaries of parish history!