Value Epiphany!

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 reflect my love of cooking, especially in the summer/fall with basil from my herb garden. And it used a lovely fluted white creamer. First goal, my own still life reflecting my personality, done. But silly me, I was so excited that I jumped into painting it without doing a value plan. The painting is sweet (upper right photo), but I thought it was crap (see previous post), so I put it away in the garage to dry. 

I decided the problem was that I didn't do a value plan and that I still didn't know how to make something look "white" in oils. So I set my next goal—to have a solid value plan to follow and to figure out the white object thing. For the latter, I downloaded Carol Marine's What Color Is White? class, which helped immensely! For the value plan, I made a pencil value sketch (upper left photo), then I painted the scene in shades of gray (bottom left photo), mixed from three primaries and white (using Carol's method from the White class). Which leads me to my final goal for the repaint—to paint with a limited palette (cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red medium, and ultramarine blue). My thinking was that if I wasn't worrying about color I could concentrate on values.  

With goals in place (in my head; only being written down now as I type), I painted. And it was crap (bottom right photo, see previous post). It's been two months now, and I've been doing other creative things (painting, journaling, quilting, cooking), but that painting has been in the back of my mind nagging at me. Something was not right with it. I knew the limited palette was not for me (way too limiting!) and that I wanted to paint it again with a color bias palette (a warm bias and cool bias pigment for yellow, red, and blue), but I hadn't done that because something else was still bugging me. The white creamer still didn't feel white enough to me, and overall, the mood of the painting felt a bit ominous. Not the goal for a tomatoes and basil painting. 

But today it hit me. I had keyed the entire scene to the full value scale, from white to black. In reality, the darkest part of my scene, the background in the shade side, was at least two steps from black, not black itself. With that part of the painting keyed too dark, everything else ended up too dark, creating that ominous feel. And, I now realize, this is also an issue for the rose paintings I've done. Drats! Now I need to paint that Voodoo rose at least ONE MORE TIME. (Can you hear me sighing.) I believe this is what it means to paint in series—to continue to evaluate your work and ask "what if," then answer those questions by painting it again. At least, this is how I am learning and making progress. 

Well, I have my next assignments (while I also move forward on value studies for a landscape painting): 1) repaint the tomatoes/creamer scene with an expanded palette and a darkest value that is more true to the scene, and 2) repaint the Voodoo rose, also paying attention to the darkest value (but I'll have to decide which palette I want to use...maybe Dreama's full spectrum palette). At any rate, I have my self-imposed marching orders. Time to paint.