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In my last blog post I talked about the concept of how a simple value pattern or silhouette underlies great paintings.  It is one thing to talk about simplifying a painting it is another thing to put it into practice.  Finding the silhouette and maintaining it throughout the painting process is the most difficult concept for artists to grasp.  It is something I struggle with  and part of that struggle is overcoming misconceptions about what makes a painting work.  Here are some common beliefs that steer artists away from creating a simple value pattern.

I love detail- you can be as detailed as you want as long as the values stay within the range of the silhouette.  Artists run into trouble when they paint “things” without regard to the surrounding values and colors.

If I add more it will be better- Paintings are visual converstions between the artist and the viewer, keep the story simple and uncluttered for major impact.  If you want to know if your painting has too much information, put it on an easel then step about 10 feet away.  Use your hand to cover up parts of the painting.  If the painting looks better when you block a part of it off then there is too much going on in that section.  Here is a tool that can help you simplify without destroying all your hard work.  To soften a pastel painting take a paper towel and fold it.  Use the folded edge and very lightly drag it across the surface.  This will soften the pastel without disturbing the drawing.  With an oil painting a palette knife scraped across the canvas will do wonders.

I’ll keep working on the (nose, tree, eye, cup handle) until I get it right. – leave it alone and paint around it.  Every inch of your paper or canvas is important and each stroke will work only in comparison with what it is placed against.  An eye will look like an eye if you paint the cheekbone, side plane of the nose and brow bone as their correct form and value. 

I love bright color- color without regards to value is useless.  The correct color is always the correct value; the correct value is not always the correct color.  Too much bright color is jarring you need some neutral tones to play the strong colors against.  Also pay attention to the light source.  Mud is created when artists paint light that is inconsistent with the light source.

In my next blog posts I give you some tools to overcome these problems.

This is a work in progress from a lesson I taught in my studio recently.  Using Adobe Photoshop we cropped in the photograph to find a composition we liked then put the photograph into grayscale then reduced it to 2 values in posterize.  The goal of the lesson was to keep the silhoutte simple while suggesting detail.