love painting sunny days. Sunshine and shadows really help when I’m trying to suggest depth on my flat sheet of paper and the strong tonal contrasts on sunny days can add great impact and excitement to even the most mundane of subjects. We do have one major problem, however. In the reality of a sunny landscape there is a vast difference between the lightest light and the darkest dark we can perceive with our eyes, a difference that has been estimated to be 2,000 times greater than anything we can hope to reproduce on paper. We can see something of this problem when working from photographs. A camera tends to adjust its exposure so that sunlit areas are not bleached or burnt out but this has the effect of making shadow areas dense, almost black, and certainly much darker than we would perceive them to be in reality. So what are we to do? It would be logical to think that if we make our shadows really dark
