Learning to See

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Folds and Reflections Session One

The first live session will be here on:

Monday 17th January

at

6PM UK time (10AM Eastern, 1PM Pacific check the time in your time zone here)

What we’ll be doing

We’re going to be easing into the workshop with a value study of the reference above.

But we’re going to be going for extreme simplification, because this will give us more freedom to manipulate the values in order to create a different impression of the subject.

So although we’ll be doing a very simplified version in the live session, I’ll be encouraging you to try more than one version with different values so that you can experiment with making the highlights on the silver really stand out.

This is the stuff that really makes the difference in being able to paint silver that looks convincing. It isn’t the detail that does it, it’s the value balance, so we’ll be focusing on that in depth right at the start.

What do I mean by value balance? Don’t worry, I’ll be going through that in detail in the live session on Monday.

What you’ll need

We’ll be working 8 x 10 inches, so an ampersand panel of those proportions will be ideal. The reference photo is in these proportions.

Brushes: Personal preference is fine since we’ll be working in large, simplified blocks of value. To give you an idea, half inch hogs and/or synthetic flats will be ideal. You might want a couple of smaller ones for the finer sections. But this session is about values so brush choice isn’t crucial.

Medium: Linseed oil (refined or cold pressed) and a solvent – we’ll be working into a couch (a thin layer of medium applied to the panel before painting).

Paints:

  • Lead or titanium white
  • Ivory black
  • Raw Umber

Please have the simpe five step value scale mixed before the session starts. Try to make sure that the values you mix are all true neutrals in this case, i.e. they match the Munsell value chips as closely as you can get them.

Click here to watch a video demo of mixing the scale

NOTE: in the video I’m not trying to make my values perfectly neutral, but I’d encourage you to do so for this session. You can do that by varying the proportion of raw umber+white to black+white mixes. ALWAYS make sure you’re mixing the same values together when you’re trying to nail the neutral, so if your’e trying to nail a value 5 neutral, your raw umber+white mix and your ivory black+white mix must both be a value five.

Reference photos

Click here to download the reference photo.

It will print out 8 x 10 inches if you print it at the same scale as the image, but I’d caution against using a print out for values – just use it for drawing out.

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