A Painter’s Practice
An experienced painter I once knew said “painters are the only people involved in the arts that think they don’t need practice”. Musicians practice, dancers rehearse but we painters think we might create something that could be framed every time we pick up a brush.
Today I went to the regional park to practice. I am working on seeing and simplifying values in a landscape.
Interestingly, Jesus frequently ended His parables with the phrase “he who has ears, let him hear” implying that many with ears (that covers just about everyone) were not actually understanding, not really hearing. It is the same with people learning to paint. Although we have eyes, we must train ourselves to really see and interpret the values in a landscape, then simplify the values we see into 3 or 4 values so our paintings will “read’ from a distance. What I have been practicing on my trips to the local park is to quickly paint a value study in my sketchbook using only Payne’s Gray. This exercise (…exercise…that sounds like practice!) does a couple of things:
It warms me up to paint with color on good paper
It removes the pressure to produce a finished painting that I would show to other people
It helps me organize my shapes, values and edges
Because I am painting in one color, it allows me to create big shapes and focus on the value jumps between shapes
What surprises me is that the value study often turns out better that the painting.
Here is todays value study and the plein air painting. The value study took 15-20 minutes and the painting took and hour and 20 minutes. The painting is 90% complete.
Value Study Painting
The takeaway is that a one-color value study will train your eyes to really see the value changes.
“Value does all the work; color gets all the credit”
I don’t know who said this, but it’s a keeper.
