It's All About Value

I mentioned all of this several days ago, but I want to reiterate it. Thursday's meeting was helpful and it was also energizing. It helped to look other people's work. I think all of us in "the club" are improving. It helped to watch a painting demo. It helped to talk about values. Homework for the month of September is mostly about values.

Both with painting and with knitting, I can get into this unhelpful loop where I don't make my values distinct enough. As previously mentioned, I have a bad habit of not making my darks dark enough and my lights light enough. On Thursday, I asked if it was cheating to use Value Viewer, an iPad app. It has a mode where it divides a picture into light, medium, and dark. I want to get to the point where I can see this for myself or at least mostly without a crutch. The feedback that I got was that it's not cheating and it should help with developing an eye for seeing values.

It might sound silly to ask "permission", but I don't what to go down a path that makes it harder to learn what I want to learn in the long run. In the first set of group painting lessons that I took with Kat Corrigan, she strongly encouraged drawing the items you are going to paint rather than relying on tracing paper. In the short run, it was harder and it could be frustrating, but it was great advice.

As an aside, I started using grid lines. I really needed them and have come to rely on them. With all of the sketching, I probably should experiment with not using them or just marking the center of my surface. Writing this caused a mild wave of anxiety, which means that I should give this a try.

Anyway, I used Value Viewer for this painting and found it to be extremely helpful. It is easy to switch between the original photo and the mode which shows the 3 values.

Here is the reference phone, uncropped.

I painted from this same reference phone back in February 2017. This painting was an 8" x 8". The one from yesterday was 6" x 6".

In truth, I enjoy comparing yesterday's version to February's version, more than comparing it to the reference photo. It's fun to compare different versions with each other and see how my painting has changed. When I look at the reference photo, I can see some areas needing correction, such as the placement of her eyes. Plus, I still could work on getting the values better across the entire painting. I really like this picture, so I'll revisit it again.