Making It Simpler to Find Understanding

Grayscale photograph of simple still life.

I've been rereading Carol Marine's book (and thinking I should change back to oils as acrylics are only slightly easier than watercolors) and came across her three-value wording: dominant, secondary, and smidge. Of course, everyone talks about mama, papa, baby (which I first read in Tony Couch's amazing book, Watercolor: You Can Do It). So I set about to create a very simple still life to force three distinct values, each being of a different size. This was more of a challenge than I thought it would be!

Composition #3. The intention was that the light value be
"dominant," the dark value be "secondary,"
and the medium value be the "smidge." OOPS.

And composition #3 STILL took me 30 minutes to draw/shade (plus another 15 minutes to set up the still life). Here's my critical voice chirping in...I'm not happy with the drawing; wish it were more accurate. But the values! Now I'm cooking. Look at those distinct differences, and they are in masses! My intention was to set up the still life, draw the composition, then do a small painting in acrylics. Ran out of time again. You'd think someone sheltering in place would have more time, but there's still life to live. Today was the grocery shopping, which from start to finish, is always a half day, then a doctor's appointment in the afternoon. I've been tracking my time, and I'm really realizing how precious an hour is, and how important it is that I use it wisely in pursuit of my art. Ian Roberts says in his book Mastering Composition that if I do a composition a day for a year, I will have that AHA moment. I'm banking on him being right.

Now that I've written this post and added the two photos, I can see that I've STILL messed up the values. The right background is medium, which makes the medium and light value masses almost the same size. Since the pear is still on my desk, I guess we both know what tomorrow's composition will be.

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Mean Critic Meets Scary Progress

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For the new year, I've decided that before I start a painting, I'll note the goals for that painting session and/or the finished product if I'm not painting alla prima (in one session). I've sort of informally been doing this for the last couple of months, but now I want to consciously follow these steps: 1) write down my goals, 2) paint, 3) acknowledge that the painting is crap ( see previous post ), 4) note how I did or did not meet my goals, and finally, 5) create a next steps list. Of course, these steps won't be executed until I've done the all-important value studies! Last October I painted a lesson from Dreama Tolle Perry's Flow class , a cute carafe of cream with a white ceramic basket of strawberries. The basket didn't read "white" in my painting, which I didn't like, and I wanted to figure out why...but I wanted to use my own still life to do it. So I set up a scene informed by Dreama but all my own. My scene used my own props to...

Becoming an Artist

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