Last week my students and I painted a grayscale and it was a lesson for me in how difficult it can be to create the subtle transitions from white to black. I had not done this exercise in quite a while and found it quite challenging!
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We all found that the middle values were the most difficult to paint. There wasn’t enough ‘value’ range left to paint the middle. One approach I tried on my second attempt was to paint the white, then the black, then IMMEDIATELY paint the middle value.
My value scale is suffering from mid-value crisis.
I plan to punch holes down the right side near each value change and use it as a value checker when I’m out painting. The one I’ve been using is divided up both horizontally and vertically – rather then one column going down vertically. I like having one column of values.
I decided to re-test the values on one of my older still lifes. I converted the image to black and white. Initially I thought the values were pretty decent in the original…
But when I remove the color … I see how I might have done it differently.
I told my students to hang on to their earlier work to use as a good reference point later on to see how far they’ve progressed – and this is a good example of that. Were I to go back into this painting, I might have created a more dramatic image by darkening some of the shadow areas, especially directly underneath the pear shadows, and adding one or two highlights in the upper ranges – BUT I’ll know it for the next painting and I’ve learned a lot from this older work.
This week – we may be painting a color wheel.
Happy painting!