High and low

-

The next assignment in the class was to create two value studies - one high-key and one low-key. It is one thing to know the difference (theoretical knowledge - I have a lot of that!) and another to be able to practice it. My photo, below, was low-key, so the value study was easy to do. Just copy the values - and exaggerate them a little to heighten the drama. Once I was done with the low-key value study in Payne's Gray, making it into a high-key was not so easy! It seems obvious now, but after reading Page 90 of "Powerful Watercolor Landscapes" by Catherine Gill, which I own, I understood that because the largest shapes take up the largest area, changing the values of those shapes alters the key of the scene. 

I did a high-key study (not posted here) but it seemed like a washed-out version of the low-key. Although I didn't deliberately do it, I took each field and made its value a little lighter and there was my high-key study! It looked washed out, and worse, had no darks because it had simply been bleached. And it was not creative in the sense that I didn't reassign values to the areas - just copied the photo in a bleached way.

So, I went to thumbnail graphite sketches and worked it out. The background and shirt were good places to start - they became white/light, as they took up a fair bit of area. Catherine's advice worked very well. 

Here are the sketches, the two value studies and the reference photo. I love it when disciplines overlap naturally - like using trace to create multiple value patterns from the same sketch (top left) - tracing paper is my relic from being in an architectural studio. I still use it, and not just for architecture.

quick value thumbnails in graphite

                                low-key value study                                  high-key value study

                                     resource photo                                             cropped photo




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connected shadows

-
Image
I have often passed by the Campbell Community Center/Heritage Theater and been struck by the beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival architecture with intricate ornamentation. Finally, I had the opportunity to paint it today with the SCVWS Thursday plein air group. I think I should have used a ruler for this as some of my verticals aren't parallel to the edge of the paper! I do like the purple/blue shadows and how the colored shadows blend into one another around all the bright white areas. As always, for me, greens are troublesome - they often look overworked in my paintings. But, I am pleased with this overall.                       “One Ticket, Please”
Read more

Faith vs. belief, and inspiration

-
Image
In yesterday's Gita session, we discussed the difference between belief and faith. I found myself saying that a belief was hard-edged and inflexible, and faith all-encompassing and flexible and always positive - akin to having a big-picture trust in the cosmos. When I heard myself say "hard-edged," it made me realize how many terms and ideas are so interchangeable between the world of watercolor (art) and spirituality (life). When edges are hard, the eye stops at each edge before it goes to the next "item." It's like stop-and-go traffic. You are making progress but it is not smooth, not a flow. When edges are soft, your eyes travel easily, from one object to the next because the divisions between the objects are blurred, and the values do the talking. It is like life, like consciousness. We are all one - not so hard-edged and separate - yet we don't know it, and bump up against one another because of our hard edges, fixed ideas and notions, prejudices an...
Read more

Design- vs. content-driven

-
Image
I've found that strong design-driven art is more attractive to me than content-driven paintings. Of course, the content or subject is there (unless it is truly non-representational work), but it is realized and recognized a split second after one has responded to the design. For this reason, subjects that lend themselves to being more easily abstracted - interiors, close-ups of anything, still life cropped just so - are more appealing than standard impressionistic distant landscapes where the shapes themselves tell you sky-earth-mountains-lake. A landscape can also be abstracted but I feel there is more effort in hiding or veiling landscape features for the slow reveal to happen. I've been working on this still life, and just starting with a notan helped me understand and crop shapes right away. Pushing some of the lighter shapes to the white of the paper helps with abstraction. Like a chess board where each shape is bordered by a contrasting value shape, or the way we typicall...
Read more