Manly Sketching Class: Week 3 - Value

May 22, 2013 | 1 Comment


Week 3 – Value
We had another fun day today in Manly … with some very important concepts to get our head around. Achieving good values in your sketches is essential and training the eye to see colour as value and to make decisions on value when out on location is a lot of fun!!?! Isn’t it!!!!

We started in the studio with some abstract exercises – reducing the scene before us into only 3 values- light, dark and mid tone and then secondly working with a 5 value scale. We also tried to make clear distinctions between whites – local colour – shade- cast shadow -blacks. Lots of brain stretching is needed to get a clear idea of these 5 distinct concepts – but it comes in so handy when painting in watercolour which we will see next week (in fact it is easier to understand with colour BUT it is important to be able to see colour as values first)

I was hoping desperately for a sunny day- but it was cold and grey. As we spent longer on the studio exercises today we only got out for a short period and sketched the subject building in lines. We then headed up for lunch at the Butchers Cafe (food was great!) and I explained how to do a value sketch of the building from my photo taken on a sunny day – showing how the workflow of preserving whites, looking at local colour, shade and then cast shadow works when out on location.

Here is my sketch of the building with my value study done with pitt brush pens. Having 4 pens – warm grey iii, iv, v and black – is perfect for doing 5 scale value studies. (you can use the cool grey versions instead…but I am a warm grey type of girl!)

Another fun day! ….thanks again to my totally amazing and dedicated class!!!!

next week COLOUR – I don’t need to tell you all that I am really looking forward to that one!

1 Comment

  • clgnmoon says:

    Your class that your teaching sounds wonderful. Do you ever think about having an on line class for e who cant get to your part of the world?
    Sure hope you would think about this.
    Thank you so,
    Linda

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