Going through Handprint.com I found an article on the importance of value, that is, the lightness or darkness of the painting. You can think of this as black and white photography, where only shades of grey are used to create a visual image. The interesting point was that even a colour painting is built up from value contrasts. To make the point, MacEvoy showed a Hopper oil painting with all the colour removed, and it still looked great. Then he removed all the values, and what remained was incomprehensible. Why is this important to an artist? Because artists tend to focus a lot on colour, its what comes out of the tube, its what makes us excited. In fact paintings are mostly built from values!
In the palette cleanser I tested the idea by creating a colour-inspired painting on the left, and a value-inspired painting on the right of the paper. For the colour painting I started with an outline and then coloured it in, like paint by numbers. On the value painting I did the outline in pink, filled in the whole thing with shades of carbon black, then added a tiny bit of thin colour washes. Both sides have visual impact but feel much different, the left feels like a pizza exploded in the microwave, the right feels like a moon base.
I will need to think about this some more. Values are the cake, colours are the icing on the cake.
Palette Cleanse 34, 9 x 12" watercolour paper, watercolour, September2020
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