May 2016 – Diane's Painting Blog

It’s comfortable to have a painting process that I can depend on, steps that if followed will usually carry me through to a positive end…but sometimes that can be boring. To shake things up I decided to play with values.

Values can be used in several ways;

Basic Values– using dark to light to render the illusion of three dimension. Creating the effect of depth on a flat surface. How could it be a bad thing for all the elements in a painting to be rendered in the correct values ?

Value changes create contrast. If a painting has many contrasting areas sprinkled throughout, it can be confusing, sending the viewers’ eye all over the place.

Narrow Values– any colors placed side by side of the same value will harmonize a painting. It will also cause a certain flatness which may or may not be desired.

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The photo above consists of various colors, but it’s the narrow value range that holds it together.

In the above bars the first one has totally unrelated colors but a narrow (dark range) of values, making them easy on the eyes, not like the one below, which contains colors in the same family as above but different values, nothing I’d like to look at for too long!

Selected Values- Choosing which values to narrow and which to exaggerate in order to create a pleasing design within the painting.

I chose to use this method because my subject had various elements which I wanted to hold together while designing the area within the canvas.

Since I wanted to concentrate on this one concept a limited palette was used , Cadmium Red Deep, Yellow Ochre, black and white.

The way I approached this was to hold back on the values until everything in the image was in place. By the time this was done I had a good feeling of how I wanted this to visually move, it may sound funny but I had to get to know her and her world before this came together for me. The rough texture seemed right for this earthy subject.