Starting With Value, Or More Pears

This fall, I'm taking a color workshop from Barb Smucker.  It's a lot of fun, and very useful.  Barb is an excellent teacher, and the class has such varied participants that it's hard not to learn and get excited about art.  I'm going to try and restate some of the things we're learning, to help give me the language to talk about art.  Bear with me!

We started by talking about value, which reprents the light to dark range in art. Many, many artists recommend doing a value study when planning a painting.  This is a monochromatic small study to lay out where the lights and darks will be.  By extension, this leads into "notan," which is a Japanese design principle that applies to how the lights and darks are massed, or the composition.  If I understand this correctly, and I may not--you can do a value study without notan.  When you have reached a well-designed composition in your value study, then you have notan.  Here's a description from Mitchell Albala on notan and another example from Diana Mize for Empty Easel.

By extension, you can use an color for a notan study, and once you've laid out the lightest and darkest values, you can start to add in mid-tone values.  For watercolor, for the darkest value, I'll use a lot of paint and minimal water.  For light, I'll preserve the white of the paper.  And for a mid-tone in a monochromatic painting, I'll use more water with my paint.   Here are some thumbnail sketches for value studies for a still life using raw umber with three values--dark, light, and middle tone.  This study has three different interpretations--a mid/dark center of interest against light.  A light/mid center of interest against dark, and finally a dark/light against mid.  You can see, that how I choose to lay out the painting affects the mood and energy of the painting.

Then I need to extrapolate to color.  This is where it gets tricky.  I think I'll save another post for talking about the next step.  In the meantime, though, here are two of my paintings that I tried to translate from the value study (which, hopefully has some notan).  Both are limited palattes with prussian blue and indian yellow.  The high key light background painting at the top of the page includes quinacridone orange  (at this point, we'd eaten some of the pears, and we were down to one!).  The dark background (below) painting includes quinacridone gold and raw umber.

Post by Amy Bryce Watercolors.

And, The Leaves Turn Again...

When I started putting this blog together, one of my first posts was a plein air painting I did of some sycamore trees.  Every once in a while, I cycle back around and paint more trees....in the spring, and again here and here.  I apparently really like trees.  Now, almost a year later, the leaves are starting to turn again--although, barely.  The colors seem later this year.

Some of my best lessons of the year?  The grass does not need to be green.  That you don't need to be looking at the tree to paint the tree.  And, that my favorite season is rolling back in.  

A new group of trees caught my eye.  They must be a little bit stressed, since they're turning much earlier than the trees around them.  This was painted alla prima, with about four colors (Prussion Blue, Indigo, Indian Yellow, and a tiny bit of Permanent Orange Deep).

Bike Trip Along the Ohio River

Over Labor Day Weekend, I went on a bicycle trip with a truly wonderful group of women, known as the Babes.  We went from Cincinnati to Maysfield, KY to Portsmouth, OH to the Hope Springs Institute, and then back to Cincinnati.  For much of the route, we followed the Ohio river on KY Route 8.  Route 8 is is named for Mary Ingles, and her trek back to VA when she escaped from the Shawnee Indians in the mid-19th century.  

Before I left, I really debated taking my good camera--I knew I'd have lots of opportunities to take pictures (and if you have your camera out, it's an opportunity to get off your bike).  But it's heavy.  Really heavy.  And, even though it's not a super fancy camera, I was concerned about getting it wet even with a plastic bag cover.  (It did rain a lot on Saturday.)  In the end, I left it on the counter.  I think I made a mistake.

There were so many beautiful views of the river, of the fields, of barns still in use, and barns that had seen better days.  When the clouds settle over the mountains that ring a valley in KY?  You wish you had your camera.  

I tried to recapture the feeling I had on the road in three tiny paintings--they are all 3.5x3.5 inches, or smaller.

If I go again next year--I'm taking the dang camera.