It's Still A Problem

I am experiencing challenges with painting landscapes and it's all about capturing values accurately. My detailed nature gets in the way. It makes it hard to sort out values into blocks and decide where the edges are. Also, I think I get caught up trying to "see" or think about too many value changes.  I will look at something and think, this is the darkest dark, but within that darkest dark there is some variation. Then, I try to figure out where the values change and I'm off into a tiring and not very productive loop.

These days when I'm painting a simple or distinct subject matter I've gotten better. I experienced these same feelings back in October 2016 and I wrote about it here. It's funny how closely this captures how I am feeling today when dealing with landscapes or complicated subject matter.

While I may sound negative these past few days, I actually don't feel that way. Yes, I am frustrated, but what it comes down to is figuring out the problem and figuring out how to address it. I like doing that. I do wish I had learned some rudimentary skills earlier in life, so I had basic knowledge or habit to fall back upon. I know that it's hard for most people to learn how to read music as an adult and I can relate to that.

One thing to do is get serious about doing preliminary value sketches and start making a flipping decision about where the value shifts are. Carol Marine talked about this in her book. Alphonso Dunn talked about it in his book (which I am going to check out from the library again). If I recall, I think he said that you only need 6 levels of value at most.

My other idea is that I might purchase several earth-toned colors of paint and use those plus white to paint some landscapes. It would take away the need to mix color, plus I think using the bright colors in my palette would be distracting. It's the same idea as when I painted Hammett back in November, but applied to more complicated subject matter.

It's humbling to have to learn the same lesson over and over again.