Value - What's My Problem?

Since the second painting class, where I had several value failures, I've been thinking about this. The concept seems simple.  It involves translating colors to gray and evaluating where they fall on a scale from white to black. In representing the 3 dimensional aspect of an object in only 2 dimensions getting the values represented correctly (or close to correctly) is critical. To keep it simple in class, we were trying to separate an object into only 3 values, light, medium, and dark.

I see two problems.  When I look at an object, I tend to zero in on this part and that part and later still another part, over and over again. I'm not good at seeing the whole object at one time. The follow up problem is that it's hard to decide at what point to move from one category to the next. If it's in the middle, is it light or medium or is it medium or dark?  It's silly, but I find it hard to make those distinctions. It feels as though these problems go hand in hand with each other.  My eyes and brain are jump around in a crazy loop from here to there and there to here. I overload my brain and don't get the information that I need.  

Great, I just thought of another problem. There's that tricky thing that I encountered with the donut in class. Yet again, my eyes and brain are liars. The brown part on top of the donut read as darker to me, since it was brown and the white at the bottom of the donut read as much lighter, since it was light.

This probably sounds more frustrating and annoying than it actually is. The need to identify some of my own problems and road blocks is actually sort of fun. I plan to keep plugging away, so that I can improve.

Here is yesterday's painting. I did not have much time to paint.  Because of that, I rushed and only followed the squinting rule.