The Follow Up Painting

In all truth, the idea to do paintings in neutral colors using 4-values began with a homework assignment from Kat Corrigan this spring. The assignment was to paint a sink, preferable a kitchen sink, several different ways with different parameters. One of those was to paint it in gray scale. This assignment made me nutty. At the time, I thought the biggest challenge was figuring out what to do, which mostly had to do with composition. Looking back, some of the other problems were making values distinct enough and finding the shapes in the objects.

For this assignment back in May, I struggled and painted several boring and not very good paintings of my bathroom sink. I never posted any of these at the time, since I was not happy with them. Here is one of them.

May 2017 - gray scale homework

As I paint and write in this blog, I think and write about values and shapes a lot. That, along with the gray scale painting exercise in May, and my new app, Notanizer, percolated and came out as an idea to do 4-value paintings. It turned out to be a good idea. Plus, it was a good painting exercise to use while I was back in my hometown over Thanksgiving visiting family. Part of my comfort zone for painting is being in a familiar place, alone.

I was thrilled with the painting of Hammett in my last post. Generally when this happens, the next several paintings are cursed, since I psyc myself out somehow. Instead, I had another good experience with another 4-value painting of a cat. This is Wingnut.

#161 - Wingnut in 4 Values - 8" x 8" - STD paletteI 

For this one and the one of Hammet, I used a gray scale and value finder tool. After mixing a colors, I checked the color against this tool. I’m still finding that I need to add much more white when going lighter. I added a fifth value and tried to include a tiny bit of the shape of the cat’s body, rather than just the face.

I noticed something new. I tend to be heavy-handed with my brush, so I tried to vary the downward pressure on my brush. If I can keep at it, I hope to be able to paint better cat whiskers.

This experiment has been amazing. It is all about values and shapes. Color and details just don’t matter in the same way that values and shapes do. It’s like values and shapes are the cake and all the rest is the icing.