Defining my values

As promised, the focus in the studio this week was values.

I am coming to greatly appreciate how important it is to have your values straight. I thought I would share some of my work for the week.

This Centennial Trail painting greatly benefited from my doing a value study. I had tried to paint it last week before my week-end workshop and had been displeased overall. There were things that worked, but the overall impression was that it was a muddy mess. I am not going to show it to you because I cut it up for scrap paper. (Great excuse, yes?) After the workshop I did a value study and then painted it again.

I was much more pleased with the results:















This is my value study of a photo I took on the trail in October. It was a somewhat blah photo. I really never intended to paint it. But after the workshop, I came to appreciate the complexity of the reflections and decided to give it a go:


If the painting is worth sharing, I will post it next week. Regardless, I have found my greater focus on values to be very helpful.