Beginner Guide to Oil Painting Part 2: Value

1. introduction: thanks for joining me today. My name is Adele McFarland while, and I'm a visual artist and educator and I'm talking to you today from my studio in Nova Scotia, Canada. I have, ah, bachelor of fine Arts as well as a degree in education, and I've taught many levels of art education from middle school through to the university level, and I currently teach introductory color and intro to painting at ST Francis Xavier University. I love to teach. I love to help people develop a creative practice, and Teoh explore visual literacy through painting and all kinds of art making. In my personal art practice, I'm predominantly an oil painter, and my paintings use the human form and the natural world to explore one's relationship to their environment and the unknown, as well as the influence of the natural world on the human psyche through superstition, ritual and storytelling. So this class is the second in a three part series about understanding the fundamentals of color through oil paint. I love working with oil paint. It's my favorite medium, so I'm really happy to share this beginner. Siri's with you, where we really dive deep into understanding all of the aspects of color such as hue, value and intensity. So this Siri's off videos is going to be about value today. Understanding value is the really key to creating likeness in your work. So if you want your painting toe look like the thing that you're observing, then understanding how to break value down is a real key to that. So to create the illusion of depth and to understand things like contrast, working with value is really key to all of that. Today we're gonna be looking at how to mix our own black. We're gonna be doing some value scales, and we're going to do an assignment where we observe and paint a still life of draped fabric. If you haven't done so already, I urge you to check out the first class in this series on mixing color. Thanks for joining me on and let's get into experimenting with value 2. Materials: Hi. So we are going to talk materials. I'm going. Teoh kind of put my head in and say hello and then scoot out. So hopefully you can see my work station. You are going to need a surface to work on. So a board with a piece of primed paper attached is really great or, you know, a little canvas or something that is prepared to work on with oil paint. If you're really new to oil paint, you have to use a surface that is treated with a primer, a jet so or something like that. Today I'm working with an easel. You can certainly work at a table of that suitable for you. It's a lot easier for me to work this way or this type of assignment, so hopefully you can set yourself up. However you're comfortable, you are also going to need to make a little still life. So your assignment for this class is that we're going to be painting a little still life of fabric on a white background. So we're really gonna be just focusing on value today. So I have a little square fabric that I've draped in uninterested way and I just taped it to a piece of white foam core. You can make whatever set up works for you. But I'm looking for white on white. So, you know, it could be like a crumpled piece of paper on white paper. That would be much more challenging. This is just a white piece of fabric and await background, and I'm gonna end up tucking this up here for now. You are going to need a surface to make sure paint on. So I have a glass palette here. If you don't have a glass palette, don't worry about it. You could use wax paper. I've seen people you really use whatever you like. For this, you are going to need some painting mediums. So depending on what you're using today, you know if you're using a water mix herbal oil that you were going to need some water. If you were using oil paints, you're going to need a little bit of oil medium. I just use a walnut oil. Some of you may want to use his linseed oil. You might use a mixture of linseed oil and mineral spirits. Whatever you're comfortable with. If you don't know a lot about oil mediums and what to use. I do recommend I have a video on non toxic oil painting methods where I talk about what mediums a little bit more in debt. So if you're not sure what to use, check out that video. My advice is really to take some time and to experiment with different mediums to see what works for you and how you want to use it, how you want to paint. So I think oil mediums air really individual for how you want to work as a painter. Certainly you could even pay with oil paint without any mediums at all, and some people do that, so it's totally up to you. In this case today, I'm just working with walnut oil. I've got a clean jar and a dirty jar. You're going to want some paper towel or some kind of rag Teoh. Clean your brushes and wipe your brushes off. A palette knife is really good for mixing Paints a paint scraper. It's really good for cleanup. Certainly if you're not using glass salad, don't worry about the paint paper. You are going to need a pencil and a sharpener and for colors. Today, I would like you to have any combination of primary colors. Is really great of a blue, red, yellow. So I just have ultra marine blue Eliza in crimson and a Windsor yellow here. And I'm also going to use today a raw number. But if you have something like a bird number or a burnt Sienna, that'll be really nice of some kind of neutral orangey. Brown will be really good for this exercise as well. And, of course, some brushes. So, really, anything goes here. You know, you can use a synthetic brush or a hog bristle brush, whatever you have. Whatever you're comfortable with, that's good for today. Just make sure that they're a brush that is firm enough that it can handle the oil team. Okay, so we'll see you in the next video where we talk about mixing our own black 3. Mixing Black: We are going to be mixing our own black paint today, but I'm gonna come back. Teoh the color wheel. The first class in the Siri's. We looked at color theory and mixing color. There are three attributes of color. The 1st 1 is Hugh. So when I talk about Hugh, I'm talking about basically the straight out of the tube. Spectral colors of red, red, orange, orange, yellow, orange, yellow, yellow, green, green, blue, green, blue, blue, violet bite like that spectrum off color where if you were to take a tube of paint, you would be able Teoh, tell me its original huge so which which you would is closest to on the color wheel. So Hugh is really a way of explaining what family color can go into. The reason why I want to come back to color theory for a minute here is so I can talk to you a little bit about how we're going to you mix our own black. Now you can get a tube of black paint. Personally, I really like to teach mixing our own blacks because I think that that helps in the long run in terms of painting. When we get into painting, portrait's and landscapes and still lifes. If you can mix your own really, really dark colors, those colors air going, going to be much more colorful. So a really colorful black that that maybe I could lean more torrents read or or a black that could be or violet or blue. You're blacks. Your grey's can have temperature if you mix them, and that is going to give you a lot more versatility with painting. The theory behind mixing your own black is that you are going to mix three primary colors together, so red, blue and yellow with three primaries. Now, when we're working with paints, we are working with what's called a subtract ivo method of color theory. So that means when I mix my read my blue and my yellow together, they will mix and turn black. If you are working with additive color theory, that means that you are working with light and your three primary colors are going to be different. They're going to be red, blue and green, the primary colors when you're working with light. That would be more for stage lighting or working digitally. So if you put all three of those together with an additive system, you end up with white, which is really interesting. But when we work with paint were working with the subtracted method. So the red, the blue and the yellow mixed together actually create black. And then this has to do with the fact that each of these colors that we have are made up of pigment and pigment has particles that reflect or absorb light. So depending on the particular wavelengths that these particles either absorb or reflect, we see the object or the pigment of the paint as a particular color when were mixing are red or blue and a yellow together. All of those pigments those particles combined of all of those colors are absorbing all of the light. And therefore we see it as black or really, really dark. Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to section off a piece of this paper. I want to use this surface for both my experimenting as well as my still life that I'm going to complete sang in a section off re here. So around not quite half maybe less than half. So I have locked the room up here to do my still life. And then down here, I'm going to be doing my value scales and my mixing black. Okay, we are going, Teoh, mix our own black. I'm going to start off with some primary colors. My blue, my yellow, my read. I'm also going to take some bright number. You could also use a burnt sienna or a raw number or raw sienna for this, Basically what I'm looking for, it's like a brownie neutral color to work with. Okay, so I'm gonna mix all three of my primary colors together. The key with this is that you want this mixture to be a neutral in that you don't want it to be too blue. You don't want it to be too yellow. You don't want it to be to read. So oftentimes what we'll see is that a mixture like this will end up being, you know, either violet or green. Um, I'm pretty happy with the way that looks All right. So let's give it Let's give it a try and see what it looks like. Fall in our paper. We're gonna take a little bit of oil and that looks like a really nice dark black to work with, then another way to test out to make sure that your black is as neutral as you would like, so that you're not really just working with like a dark violet because the violet can sometimes look back is that we can take a little bit of white and gonna do a little tester to make sure we are working with a nice neutral. And that's excellent. Like I think, that that's a really lovely, lovely gray. But for the sake of experimentation today, we're going to try some other combinations. Now. A really easy way to mix black is to mix blue with Bert. Number were raw Sienna. This creates a really dark mixture that is actually really similar to mixing. Are three primaries together If I come back, Teoh the color mixing grid that we did in the first class in the series and I take a look to try and find my best darkest colors. I'm seeing my mixture between Eliza and Crimson and Ultra Marine Blue is really, really dark, but I know that if I mix white with that that it is going to come out more violent. But some of the more neutral ones that look very, very dark black are the mixture of ultra marine blue and the burnt sienna or the mag Unease Blue and the Burnt Sienna. That was the best combination, so mixing a blue color with a really dark Warren G neutral color is going toe also give you a really nice black toe work with, so that's a very easy way of mixing your own black paint. It is nice to use the three primaries because depending on what you're painting, if you want your black to be warmer than you know, you can put more read into it. If you want your black Teoh have more of a green tone, you know to use more yellow. If you want your black to be more blue than, of course, more, more blue. Let's give this a try with the what amusing here Rot Raw number and my ultra Marine blue. So I'm gonna make service to together, see what that looks like. That's what I no, it's watch of black. They're really nice. I like the way that looks. Now I'm going Teoh, just take a little bit of my white and I'm gonna mix it with this black mixture to see what kind of gray I get. And that's another really lovely gray Very, very close to the grey that we created through mixing are three primaries to go If we take it a little further and we want toe play around with the temperature off are black Then we can play around with our mixtures with three primary colors I'm going, Teoh make a really cool black here So I'm gonna take more blue and you know a little bit you hear And a little bit of me, Right? Okay. You see what this looks like? So now I'm going. Teoh, try and mix up a warmer black. So this time, what I want to do is take more of the red and yellow. Then I do the blue. So this is actually looking very, very red. It's still quite dark, so I might actually end up being more that a brown. But let's just take a look and experiment, see what this looks like. And then if we are white, I can see that a lot warmer. So definitely take some time to experiment here with mixing your own blacks. Try mixing a black with a blue and a neutral color, such as a burnt number or raw sienna. Try mixing black with three primary colors and try to get the darkest color you can, and also try playing around with mixing some blocks that are cooler and mixing some blacks that are warmer. You will, as you get into oil painting, really want people to have all of those options available to you to give you our paintings depth to play around with color harmony. Oh, I also thought it was really important to mention that the reason why mixing a blue with a neutral or G color for brown color why that works? Why that combination creates black has to do with the pigments that are used in these color . So like a burnt sienna, it is an orange color, an orange neutral, and it has yellow qualities and red qualities in it to create that orange color. So then, when we add the blue, you get that three primary combination that cancels everything out and turns everything into really, really dark color. The same with the raw number. Wrong number, probably has raw numbers, almost like a black color itself. But it does have mawr kind of reds and yellows in it. So there, by adding the blue really takes it down. Teoh, a color that is very, very similar to black. So really, really dark color. So it's all about combining those three primary colors together. Okay, join me in the next video where we are going to work on some value scales. 4. Value Scales: in this video, we are going to be doing some value scales. So when I talk about value, I am referring to how light to duck. So when we do a value scale, what we're going to be doing is creating color swatches where we can start with a black that we've mixed up, and we can progressively be adding white to that black so that it gets lighter and lighter . Alternatively, you can start with white and you can add black paint to white paint so that you get color swatches that are progressively darker and darker. What this is going to show us is the full range of value that we can work with. So the full range of lights and darks. So I'm going to start off by taking some of this original black that you mixed up. And I'm actually going to go for the raw number and blue make sure here. And I might just take a lot of these blacks that I was mixing up and put them all together because I don't want to waste my paints. This all combined course should work out really nicely. Nice black, and I'm gonna mix up a lot here because we will definitely use it with this activity. Okay, so that might be looking a little warm. Still, I think I'm fairly happy with that Looks. So now I have my weight paints. I might just add a little extra, get some oil on my brush here and for my first value scale, I'm gonna work from dark to light when adding oil into my oil paints. I'm really looking for a consistency where the paint flows. There's not too much oil, but also, the paint isn't too thick as well. So what's gonna kind of spread out on my paper really nicely. So I'm gonna do my value scales underneath my no black mixing squares here. So now I'm going, Teoh, take just a small amount of the white. Now, this white that I'm using today is a titanium white, and it's fairly strong, so a little bit goes a long way. It can really take over some other whites that you can get, such as a lead. White. Yes, is a little more settler, so it doesn't take over paint. It isn't. It isn't as opaque as a titanium white, you know, add a little bit more. Basically, what I'm looking for here is I want to get as many steps from my darkest to my latest as I can. So I recommend kind of experimenting with this and seeing how how many steps you can go, but also trying t o make sure that there's a difference between each step. We're gonna speed this up now and we'll talk a little bit about what we're seeing once I'm done all of my steps Way . Okay, so now that I have a sense of working from black to white now, I wanna work from white, adding in the black way, No. - So what we're seeing here is a gradation from dark to light and then from light to dark and exercise like this, especially where you really trying to get as many steps as possible can really help you understand the subtle shifts of value and how much control you have over value in your paintings. The other thing that you may notice working on this is that you may feel like you have more control over the subtleties of value over controlling the steps of value. If you work from light to dark so adding black into the white. But it actually really just depends on the type of white paint that you're using. As I said earlier, a titanium white is going to be more opaque. It's gonna be a lot stronger if you work with ah, white paint that has less opacity. Then you will notice some differences and how it interacts with your colors that you're trying to lighten. So another thing that I would like to experiment with here is adding white paint to a color and also adding black paint to a color so that you can see how more able to alter the value . So for this you can use any color you want. I think for this activity I want two years. I have an emerald green. It's just a pretty color green I would like to work with. But this green is sort of already in the middle in terms of value, so that will be able. Teoh, just as an example, really see the shifts in in value, both for adding white and also adding black. If I were to choose, say, an ultra Marine blue, it wouldn't take much. Adding black to the ultra marine blue for it to turn black right away. Similar with something like the Windsor yellow, which is already pretty life, its value is already very light. It's not going to take long, adding white to this color for it to be really on that higher end of value. So let's give the emerald green a try, and we'll see how we can alter value through adding white and then through adding black. And for this really, you can use any color to experiment with it. Z totally your choice. I'm going to start off with just taking some of this emerald green and I'm gonna set it into the center and I'm going to add white and black, respectively, on both sides. So will kind of be moving lighter in one direction and then darker in the other way. - If this is all really new to you and you haven't done a lot with oil paints for painting in general, I really encourage you. Teoh experiment with some more colors to get a sense of how you can change the value and you know how many steps of light you can get. How many steps working towards dark you can get. I'm going to stop today with with just experimenting with the green, especially because our next assignment is going to be just working with our gray scale. I might, as I work along, sort of alter the temperature off the graze that I'm using for my still life. However, I'm not going to get into working with any kind of vibrant color. I would like to keep it really simple today so we can take the time to really concentrate and look almost meditate on what we're seeing. And we won't have to worry too much about color at this point. Will just be working with black and white. Okay, So stick with me. And in the next video, we are going to work on our assignment. 5. Assignment : we are going, Teoh, start working on our assignment, which is going to be are still life. And what you're gonna do is arrange your piece of fabric so that it drapes in a way that you find interesting. It's actually a lot harder to paint something that's very flat without a lot of value to deal with. So for this, I want you to get lots of nice wrinkles and folds. So I've got this arranged, how I want it. And I'm just gonna set up here so that I can see it. So when you're working on you're still life. You want to make sure that it is in a place and you're always looking at it from the same direction from the same spot because as soon as you change your position, you are going to be looking at a different part off the still life and that visual information is gonna change. So I am going, Teoh, use what I have on my palette here, and I'm gonna start off by making three different values. So I want and light a medium and a dark because I'm working with a subject that is essentially all white I can take a look at my value scales here and decide where I want my light my medium on and my dark to be you know within this range Working from dark to light Where do I kind of need my love eat lightest and my medium and my darkest To be now looking at my still life And you can look at your still life will bring it down again The darkest areas that I'm seeing might not even be as dark as black So you're gonna have some shadows on your surface that the fabric is on And there's gonna be, of course, shadows in the fold But their shadows might not actually be true Black. There might be a couple places on this entire thing that we're looking at, so we really have to decide. Okay, what in my darkest areas that I'm seeing and so I think in looking at my range here, and it's really nice to have your value scales right on hand with you for this so that you can take a look at these value scales. You can take a look at who are still life and decide. Maybe my darkest is kind of in this middle range. This middle gray would be the darkest area that I'm seeing Maybe into here, and my medium is probably going to be somewhere in here. And then, of course, my lightest areas are really quite close to the white. What I want to do first off is mixed. Just three different values. And once we really get into painting, you can add mawr value more ranges in value, but to start off and to get everything blocked in, I really want you to just makes up three values. So we're gonna do that. Here I am going Teoh, clean up my palate and use what I can from my earlier mixtures. So I'm going to just grab this really dark color. And I might actually added in here to some of this directing anagrams of this up. Put it here on. And I'm gonna grab this cause this might be really useful for my medium color for my medium tone that'll be using. I'm gonna grab some of this. Just put it all over here for now, and I'm gonna use that stuff and the rest. I'm probably just going to clean up I'm gonna scrape my palate down. It's a wrong number. Can I still have lots of blue here that I'm going to mix in? Way to check yourself in terms of whether or not you feel like you have the right value is to actually take a tiny bit of your darkest value and compare it to the value that you're seeing on your still life on. The way to do this is to hold it up so that it's in front of the area that you're trying to compare the value to, and you can squint and squinting really is one of those things that helps us so much in terms of simplifying value so that you can better observe it. So if you squint and you feel like it's within that range, then that's perfect. Then that's your darkest area. I might actually lighten mine up just a tad, because I feel like it's just a little bit too dark, like there might be one or two sections that are are that dark, but they're really small, so I'm I'm going to get more of going to get more of a broader a general dark color that's closer and I feel like that is is a lot more within the range that I'm looking for. Okay, so now we're gonna make a medium again. I'll just just kind of stealing what I had left over from my value scales. I'm going to compare that to where I'm seeing my main areas, my lightest, which is gonna be really close to white. But I might actually just mix a little tiny bit of of this mid tone grey just a tiny, tiny bit because it's not gonna be quite pure, pure white. I've got from what I can see some strong highlighted areas, but for the most part, it's not going to be quite that bright, bright white. But I won't use as much of the straight white. Now, I have three different values to start with. And as I get working, this is going to kind of get obliterated, and I'm gonna end up mixing everything all together. But it's nice to start with these three and take time to look at your still life and identify those three values where you see them. So I really want to just simplify and concentrate on where we can observe value in our still life and how we can break what we're looking at down into large shapes of value. So depending on what you're using for pain today, if you are using oil paint with painting medium or a paint thinner and you want to do a thin, sketchy wash first, that's great. You're working with the water mix herbal oil. Then you might want to water some of your oil paint down and do a little sketch. Today I'm going, Teoh, get consistency that I want to work with. But I'm not going Teoh because I'm just working with the walnut oil. I'm not gonna thin out my paint to too much. I'm gonna be working pretty straight with the oil paint. But what I want to do is get a basic outline right away, what I'm looking at and some some basic tones down. So I'm going to start with a little bit of oil on my brush, and usually you're gonna wanna work dark so light. But what I want to do right now is just establish the basic shape of my still life. You can certainly take a pencil and draw out the basic shape that you're seeing, and that's totally fine. I think when we're working with oil paint, it's great to dio little pencil sketch today. I'm gonna kind of just go for it with paint. So you do what you're comfortable with, Absolutely. Grab a pencil and draw out some of the details that you're seeing. But you can also just kind of go for it with paint. So what I'm gonna do is just lightly sketch out what I'm seeing. The basic fools the general shape of what I'm seeing. And I'm using the medium tone that I mixed up. I'm just using my brush to roughly sketch out what I'm looking at. I want my subject to be nice and large on my paper. I don't want to make it super small because I wanna have a lot of painting to do. I want to explore all the value and seeing, so I want to really make it nice and big. So I have the general shape of my fabric sketched out, and now I want to get into identifying these kind of chunks of really value of dark and light areas so I can see I've got a shadow kind of a double shadow over here on the side. I'm gonna sketch in, and then here I got well, Shadow Oh, yes, I got kind of stuff line here that feeds. And then I'm really dry brushing in where I'm seeing my shadowy areas. I made a mistake here. I want to actually kind of flatten this out. So I'm gonna come into just grab some of my light color and I'm just gonna grab another brush. I'm gonna just cut in there because I want this to be a little straighter down. So that beauty, the beautiful thing about oil pain, is that it's so easy to edit in this way, you can very easily paint haute or alter or scrape away whatever it is you want to do. I'm happy with us now. I'm going, Teoh, start by putting in my darkest areas Now, I'm going to get into my middle value range, which is the majority of the larger shadows that I'm seeing kind of in the center here. Way, way. - Now I'm gonna come in with my light color, but I'm gonna be careful toe leave the areas where I have really very white highlights I'm gonna leave those because that's where I'm going to put my lightest thing, which is is the white. But this is almost my latest color. Uh, so at this stage, I've added in my three values that I mixed up and shows I've taken time to look at my still life and to squint at it and identify the values and really simplify everything. So the fabric as a subject matter is actually fairly difficult. And it should provide some opportunity for frustration because it's going to have a lot of really subtle value changes, a lot of wrinkles. But the key here and the reason why I choose fabric as a subject for understanding value is that you have to kind of slow down and simplify and understanding Value is so important to be able to simplify having those kind of visual observation, Aeltus rules are gonna help you really be able to create work that has, ah, likeness that has depth that looks three dimensional, having the ability to look at something on break it down into three different values. Raid away is so useful it's going to make you a better painter, better artist, and I also really believe that taking the time, Teoh, observe And to see things differently, Teoh, take apart complicated visual elements on and try to represent them as simply as you can. Is this really interesting exercise in just seeing? And I find that that translates into my life beyond my artwork that taking the time to slow down and observe and think about how things come together visually is absolutely a form of meditation. So now that we're at this stage where I've done my best to simplify what I'm seeing, I'm gonna take it further and I'm gonna make it more complicated. I'm going to start to put in some more detail. So I'm going to start to add in some more of these values that we're seeing here rather than just the three I'm gonna add in some darker value in the shadowy, folded areas and I'm also gonna brighten it up a little bit, so I'm gonna add some lighter, bright highlights. The other thing that I want to do right now is I want to start adding in some warmer raise . So right now this is very grayscale. I've used three different values, but what I want to do is bring in some chromatic elements. So a little bit more color on my still life. I observed that some of the areas do look warmer where some of these shadows underneath our gray er and there are cooler gray up here in this area. A lot of my highlights look a lot warmer. So I want to bring in some of that warmth. And I'm going to do that by adding in a small amount of yellow into the really, really light color that I'm gonna be putting in here. So I'm gonna go ahead and start that now, and you can way , way. Okay, Uh 6. Clean up: Okay, now we're gonna do a cleanup. So what I want to do is removed as much oil paint from my brushes is possible with some paper towel. So really just want to squeeze out as much oil as I can. Just get as much paint off of their as I can. And then I have a clean oil and and a dirty oil, and I'm going Teoh swished my brush around in the dirty oil and then take as much pigment off as I can on a rag. And then I'm gonna take though these brushes to the sink, and I'm gonna wash them with warm, soapy water. I use just a plain old ivory bar white I re bar of soap on. It works really well to just get the rest of the residual oil out. You can also use at this stage some mineral spirits to clean the rest of the paint out of the brushes and then use soap and water. But I forgo the mineral spirits because I don't like to use them. So, at this stage, uh, if you're working with a glass palette, then you're going to want to clean up your glass palette. I might use some of this paints later. I don't like to waste a lot of paint. So what I'm gonna dio is I'm gonna do my best to kind of move all of the really usable stuff out of the way. These are some really nice graze. Um, So the next time I sit down to the palate, if it's in, you know, the next 24 hours or two days, um, this pain should still be wet enough for me to use, So I'm gonna pull kind of as much of that usable stuff up a zai can. This is a really another really great thing about oil paint is that it doesn't dry as quickly as acrylic paints, so you can come back to your palate the next day and the paint's still gonna be wet and usable. So at this point, once I've scraped up what I want to use, I'm gonna come in with a pallets, Faber, and just clean my surface, - okay ? And at this point, you know, I've got some rags that have paint on them that I've used with paint and oil, and I want to make sure that I dispose of these properly. So oil rags. There's a risk of combustion if they're sort of left, all bundled up. So what I like to do is keep them loosely in a container. I have a metal container that has fools in the top found stainless steel, and it's perfect for storage so that my oil rags can dry, and I don't have to worry about them combusting before I throw them out. The other thing is that I usually work with some cloth rags on. It's important that cloth rag, if it isn't going to be hung up or laid out that you also store it in a fire safe container . What I usually do with my ragas that I'll unfolded and kind of leave it out to dry for the evening. 7. Overview : so just a little wrap up of today's class. We looked at mixing black, and we talked a little bit about how to mix some warm blacks and some cool blacks and some different ways of mixing. We also looked at value scales and creating a gradation from dark to light and then from light to dark. We also looked at how we can alter the value of color through adding white to make the color lighter and black to make the color darker. And then we went on to our assignment, which was to look at a weight piece of folded fabric and break down what we're observing into three different values. And from there go on, Teoh. Add in small amounts of detail. So today's assignment we kept it fairly simple. I really just want you to take some time to observe value. So even just looking at a piece of fabric and thinking about where you're seeing the darker areas where you're seeing the highlights, breaking down value into shapes and slowing down and just taking time to observe getting into experimenting with value scales and working to create a Z many steps of value as you can is so helpful in getting to observe value in the objects we want to paint. I really believe that if you want Teoh hate a likeness and work with oil paint in an observation away. So you are painting your subject so that it looks like what you're looking at. I think you really have to focus on the value. It is really one of the most important things and a really fundamental part of color theory . I hope you enjoy this class, and I can't wait to see your assignments. Fabric can be a challenging subject to approach, but I believe if you take your time and you simplify, you're going to be really happy with your results. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope you tune into some of my other classes on skill share.