Establishing Values First in Oil Painting

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome. I am so glad you are here. In this class, we are going to talk about how you start your oil painting by establishing your values first. Establishing your values first is a great way of establishing strong compositions, expressing what you want to express emotionally in your work, and just overall having a strong start to a painting. As artists, this is such a helpful thing. In this class, that's what we're going to do. I'm going to talk about three different ways that you can start your oil painting by establishing your values first. Then I'm going to go over and share some favorite art of mine by other artists and we're going to look at these paintings, both in their color version and in their black and white grayscale version, and we're going to talk about how the values of that painting establish and strengthen the composition of the painting. Then I'm actually going to look at some of my own work and we're going to discuss and I'm going to present ideas about how the values reinforce and emphasize and strengthen the composition. I am so excited to be teaching this class with you and let's get started. 2. What is a Grayscale and Why it is Important: Decisions we make with regard to our value relationships in our paintings is crucial to creating engaging paintings. You have to simplify the infinite variety of value shifts that we can observe in nature, and we need to constrain and simplify those value shifts into an organized system that makes the way we render and create three dimensional form within our picture plane that makes it easier for the viewer to perceive that sense of three dimension or that sense of form and, you know, when you make it easier for a viewer to understand, you heighten their engagement in it. And so the simplification of that infinite value continuum found in nature is called the graduated scale or a gray scale. And selecting the type of gray scale that you're going to use is fundamental in maximizing the values and, you know, the values in your painting in your art, which then the result is that it improves your ability to communicate and connect with the viewer, with your audience. First order business as artists, is that, you know, when looking at our subject matter is to decide how we want to organize that value continuum. And, I mean, like, we can go from the most simplest value, you know, organization of a two value system, which is a light and a dark. So I like to think of Leno cut or wood blocks where the value of the paper and the black ink is, you know, those are your two values. The next easiest is a three value choice, and that is, you know, white, mid tone and dark. And, you know, that methodology is really great for organizing your composition. I don't think it's I think that simple when you simplify your value your value nuances to only three values, I think you lose some visual depth, you lose some nuance, but it's great for you to help you organize the design, the composition of your piece. And then, like, the classical painting scale, that is a classical scale. Endeavors to create a multi step gradient that goes from the lightest light to the darkest darks, and then it allows you to incorporate nuance into your painting. 3. Three Ways to Start a Painting: Okay, there are three ways to begin a painting when you want to present a strong, brilliantly lit scene. The first way is you start with painting your lights first. The second way is you start with you paint an area of your lightest lights and your darkest darks. And then the next one is you start with your darks first. It's a good practice to explore each starting paintings with each of these methods. And what do I mean by good practice? I mean, you set a personal goal and say that for the next three to five paintings, I'm going to start my compositions with laying in my darks first, or I'm going to start my compositions, laying in my lights first, and then work out from there. Or which, like, starting from your lights first, that usually means you're starting from your focal point and then working out to your supporting elements. We're working with your darks first could be you're starting with, like, everything that is your backgrounds, you know, the secondary items, and then you work up to the crescendo of the lights of your focal point. And then when you start with the lightest lights and your darkest darks, that one is you're evenly covering your entire canvas kind of at the same time. And it is a really good idea. So, several years ago I did this. I painted like five or ten of each method in a row. And so what that does is also set it gets you more and more with repetition, learn at a more intuitive level. And by doing ten of one and ten of another and ten of the third version, what that does is you give each start type an opportunity. You become equally good at each one. And so then you can in an unbiased manner, choose which one actually works best or when you come to a composition, because you have those three methods and you are equally good at each one, certain compositions work better by starting with the lights. Certain compositions work better, starting with laying in your lightest light and your darkest dark or starting with your darks first. And by being familiar and competent in all three types, it helps you make sure that you start your painting composition, you know, the composition, the painting, on its on your strongest footing. You will likely identify one that you prefer the most, and it usually is probably it's in sync with, like, your natural artistic voice. It's been a long time since I remembered that I did this exercise. And, what I've learned is that I tend to start my paintings with my darks first. This slide is talking about, like, your artistic voice, the aesthetic conventions in witch artists sees. And that, we do have our natural inclination. And so, for example, Vermeer painted in a very classical scale painting, where Rembrandt, his silk portraits were definitely tended to be low key, where Ann Redpath, who was an Australian still life artist that I really admire, she painted a ton in high key, and then we've got the impressionist Monet Pizarro, even Cezan even though he was a post impressionist, they tended to create compositions where the middle values prevailed. And you didn't ever get truly to you didn't get a ton of dark dark dark, and you didn't get a ton of light light light, but the majority of your values prevailed in the middle value ranges. Let's talk about what happens when you start with laying your lights first. Begin by laying your lightest tones first. Take special note to lay the closest to pure white down first. After the lightest light is laid down, begin to work and only the value relationships on the light end of your value spectrum. When you're working in the lights first, what will happen is that you'll notice that you get very quickly to your darkest value of what is possible in your paint pigments to provide you because remember, our value in nature, we have an infinite value spectrum. But with our paint pigments, even every black is not as dark as the darkest dark, or what is it? I nature, the darkest dark has a little bit of color to it, and in nature, your litus light is not pure white. It has, you know, a color tint to it, maybe a little bit orange, a little green, a little blu. And so that means with our pigments, when we're looking at our pigments, we have, you know, they have to come in just a little bit from your litus light. And then because you have a little bit of color and your darkest dark, they have to come in from absolute black. And so from there, your pigments are already constrained. And then, because of the pigments that we have, and when we're working from litus light, we get to our darks, like, what's the maximum possibility of what our pigments are able to give us in our darks. We hit that really fast when we focus on, starting with our litus lights first. The majority, what will happen is that the majority of your canvas will end up being dark in value just because you go through your light value so very quickly, so rapidly. Rembrandt's work is a great example of that. And then, and so therefore, your painting will often end up being low key in painting composition. Okay, starting with your lightest light and your darkest dark values. You begin by laying in your lightest light and your darkest dark values at the beginning. And then you work within that value scale in between. You will find that the majority of your color notes fall in the mid tone range of values. And in order to maximize the brilliancy of light, you'll need to be careful and really plan your shifts in your values. And, like, there is a chance that you could likely create a weak painting this way. If you are not carefully and very consciously making plans for your value, you know, your value shifts in the design of your composition. And that's where, like, you look at Premier's work. His work is still fantastic, even though a lot of his work, there's a lot of values in your midtones. And then, even the work of the impressionists work, with all your values being so stuck in the midtone range, you would think that the paintings they lose a little bit of form because they're so color oriented or midtone oriented, but at the same time, they are still fantastic paintings. And so you just have to make sure that when you're using this methodology, that you're constantly thinking about your composition and planning your values in a way that supports your composition. Okay, starting with your darks first, but begin by laying in the darkest values first. Proceeding towards the lightest tones with this method. You arrive at your lights and your paintings before you arrive at the lightest lights that is found in nature. The light masses will dominate your painting, and all the variety of light tones will be adapted to still fit within your graduated scalar values. This method produces high key paintings that are very effective at representing brilliantly lit scenes, and Anne Red path is a fantastic example of. She does phenomenal high key paintings. 4. Discussion of the Importance of Values Part 1: I have a series of slides that I just kind of want to open up to discussion. This is a fenton Latour painting and created a gray scale of it, and then I have the color version. And I really want to just talk about how the values of this painting support the composition. And like this painting by Henry Fenton Latour is a wonderful example. Like, for example, wherever you have high chroma, passages in your painting. Oftentimes, those are in the midtones. And so, yes, the value is spot on, which makes it visually still feel very three dimensional. But it's the color saturation and the colors that make these passages in a painting read so well. And then the chrysanthemums in this painting, the whites and their values is what drives that part of the composition. And so it's a wonderful. Looking at paintings that you admire in both color and then right next to it, the values, it helps. I think it's a great example of how you can it's another way of it's another way of analyzing the paintings that you admire and learning how to make them work out, you know, like, you know, take ideas, and how do you want to apply them to your own work? So I love this painting by Nicholson. Still Life with apples and a fantin Latour painting, and I have the grace. I created a gray scale of it, and then I have the color version. And this painting by Henry Fenton Latour is a wonderful example. Like, for example, wherever you have high chroma passages in your painting, oftentimes those are in the midtones. And so, yes, the value is spot on, which makes it visually still feel very three dimensional. But it's the color saturation and the colors that make like these passages in a painting read so well. And then, like the chrysanthemums in this painting, the whites and their values is what drives that part of the composition. And so it's a wonderful. Looking at paintings that you admire in both color and then right next to it, the values, it's another way of analyzing the paintings that you admire and learning how to make them work out. You know, like, you know, take ideas, and how do you want to apply them to your own work? So I love this painting by Nicholson. Still Life with apples and knives. And what I love it? There are several things I love about this painting. I like the composition. In fact, one of the things is it's one of the early paintings, life examples that was done, where it's obvious that they were using artificial light to light this composition, which as, you know, you know, artificial light in a house was relatively a new technology for. And so it's always fun to see how that started to get interpreted and incorporated into paintings. But what I also like is that your colors are flattened, but you can see, and this is a high key painting, too, because as a whole, the percentage of dark values are minimal in comparison to the large swaths of midtones and your light values. And then this tulip and fruit trees in bloom by Anton Coster. Now, in this one, this is a wonderful example of a probably started with the lightest light and darkest dark and worked in between, and where the majority of this painting are your mid tone values, the value gradient that you're working on. And it and you get to see the pattern of light and dark and how strong it is. And what I always like to do when I'm looking at a painting and analyzing it is to, I'll take my thumb and cover. And if I cover these three squares of white linen, the composition starts to disintegrate. But those three light values are very important to making sure that, you know, when I look at it, compared to the lights of what's going on in the flowering tree with it's either I don't know what type of tree it is. The whites in here are not as light as the whites in these. That one's a little bit deeper in value. I have always loved this painting, Poppies by the Coast by George Binet. And I thought it was my love of flowers that always drove me to love it so much. But when I was making this slide show, I was struck by what a fun value composition this is. So one of the things that I noticed is, so for example, we have color that tells us when the sea changes to sandy shore. But in value wise, that's all one big shape. And so it creates something that embraces and kind of, like, hugs and surrounds the poppies. I was struck by how the black and white value shifts and jumps. Are so narrow that they actually come across as much more darker value shapes when you take the sense of color away. And then how the red and the green and become one shape value wise, where in the color version, we identify because of, you know, their color compliments, red and green are color compliments. And red is a warm color. Green is a cool color. And when you're dealing with color compliments or color temperatures warm comes forward, cools recede. And so we still have a visual depth, but when we're looking at it purely as a black and white grayscale image, how design wise, they become they really become one unit. Compositionally. And then the very soft subtle shifts of values of that receding shoreline. And I really encourage you if you like a painting, to check it out and analyze it as a black and white. This is a John Lafarge. This one is at the National Gallery of Art here in DC, and I love it. The flowers are back lit, so the flowers become very dark in value that are the reds and the Nble. And then we have these wonderful lights, the slight Zina and this light rose, and how what I thought was, you know, it is a mid tone, but it's a dark midton of the landscape in the back, how it counters to the white drapes. But this is one thing that always this is a perfect example of your value scale in a painting is like infinite. It's gigantic. In nature, it's gigantic. But in painting, you are limited to what your pigments can do. So that means it's going to be a lot more narrow. And so all of these, like, high key whites, actually, they're mid tones. I love breaking apart a painting and looking at that and then thinking, uh, okay. So that way, the next time you go out and paint something that's got a ton of white in it, realize that you're probably going to be at, say, level four, five, six, seven, if you're doing if you have a 20 scale graduated gray scale. Yeah, it's just fascinating. So okay. And then, turning this one into a black and white struck me to realize that this very, very light background is a mid tone. And then, of course, the orange and fuchsia are darker in value than I anticipated they were. And then the pink and white and yellow Zenas are some of the lightest areas of the painting. And then your spectral highlight is the closest to true white, where the rest are lights, but they have they're probably at value level two, three, you know, four, five, six, seven. Yeah, and then you got some of your darkest darks right there and right there in your coarse shadow. 5. Discussion on the Importance of Values Part 2: These are some paintings that I've done. So I thought I would talk about some very direct examples of my work. Value wise. When you're painting, I don't always even realize what I'm like, what's accomplishing, what's happening. But to get my ltus light, my spectral right there in that inside of the petunia, right here, on the lip of the bowl and then the spectral highlights on the cobot glass. Now, because the base of the cobot blue glass is so much darker in value, those spectral highlights will not be as brightly white as, say, in the petunia or even on the lip of the bowl. However, when we look at it in color, it feels so dramatic. And why is that? Because when you have a dark value next to a light value, it's going to create more visual it's visually a stronger strength. And some of the darkest values in this painting composition are this side of that cobalt blue glass, and then right here where the stem and the bot blue meet. But, the bowl doesn't have got a little couple of dark areas right there, too. This one, is this one was like, what is it? Remember the rule that I said that when you are creating a painting, you have to choose and simplify your values. And some values, you'll push them darker, some values, you'll push them lighter. So for example, these three flower petals and then that connects, there's a slight bridge, visual bridge there. They are they probably were not as dark, but I probably created that unification to make for a more interesting space and also more interesting negative space. And then it goes through. It's interrupted by this very light pansy right here, and then it's continued on. And that creates visual unity in your composition. The silver is we've got silver highlights, but then we have some dark shapes as well. And then here's a painting. God, I love this one. And so, also, I want to point out, all three of these paintings were painted from life. When you paint from life, you see values so much better than when you work from photographs. And that's one of the reasons why it's such a good idea to spend time painting from life is because you discern values. It's just so much easier to discern values and color, too. And this one I started with my I started with my lights first on this one, because I remember when I remember painting this one, and it was the first time I had painted for Cynthia, and I decided instead of looking at the individual flowers, I painted in, like, yellow masses. And I'd paint the whole yellow mass kind of of, like, say, this color right here or this kind of greenish color. And I would paint the mass in, and then I went back in and then, added the lighter values or added the darker values. Now, this painting this painting is one where I started with my lightest lights and my darkest darks, and I started in the middle of the bouquet, and I worked out. And I probably started here. And I was able to get the brilliancy of light because I also always kept When you work with your lightest light and darkest dark, you have to always also think about making sure that you leave room enough for your highlights and that you leave room enough for your darkest shapes. All right, I got one more. And then this painting is a painting where, again, I started with the idea of my darks and my lights adjacent because I remember painting this painting and it was a great day. It was a super great day. It was like, I was so great that I was afraid I wouldn't even have good enough light to paint that day. I remember with this piece, I wanted to explore the idea of all the different colors that you can see in the shadow shape of the apple. While capturing the different highlights you can find within the apple, too, like, on the hind and also on the white of the apple. And it was an exploration of it purely was an exploration of midtones because the white of this apple it's not white. I mean, look how dark it is in value. So we can always explore our values, and we can always test things out by deciding how do we want our values to land in our paintings. And one thing I want to point out is that if you are encountering muddy colors and colors that just don't seem like working out right, in all actuality, you probably have a value problem. Now, granted, I've talked about color before in that, you know, if your values are incorrect, you know, it's like your local color, you check your values, you check your color temperature, and you check your color saturation. But I would say that the majority of your issues with a color that is off, I would say more than 50% of that time has got to do with the fact that your values are off. And sometimes, even if you can have wrong color saturation and wrong color temperature, but if your values of that color mixture is right on track, it will still work. 6. Simplying Value Shapes Example: If brilliancy of light is to be conveyed in your work, the relationship between some of your tones must be sacrificed. You do this by choosing to shift some values lighter and some values darker in order to create a more defined value shapes within your composition. So for example, in this composition, one of the things that I did to create a little bit of unity in my darks on this is that the the reflected lights in the side of the ginger jar, I essentially eliminated. I create, you know, there's a little bit the value of the terra cotta, the cream bottom, the unglazed bottom is a little bit lighter in value. But up here, where there probably were a little bit of nuances, but I simplify that. And again, like in the leaves here, I chose to simplify and unify those values to create it creates pattern and unity. So I sacrificed some nuance in the values in order to create a stronger composition because your shadow values are there to support the lights, which is where the interest plays in your composition. And by simplifying my darker shapes that enabled me to put more variety and nuance into my color into my that includes the buds. This leaf right here, so it creates a transition, and there's such a wonderful movement because of that. And so it reinforced what was going on in the light. So therefore, it reinforced and made the composition stronger. Now, if I had put a whole bunch of values back in the dark leaf shapes, I probably would have it would have taken away from the focal point of the composition. And so with that in mind, I did simplify. 7. Homework: Okay, for this lesson, I want to encourage you to do some homework. And that homework is it's a two part homework, and that is you are to go out and gather art that you admire, similar to earlier in the lessons where we had I had paintings from a variety of artists. And I had a color scale and a black and white. And what I want you to do is take that art that you really admire and take a screenshot and adapt it into a gray scale and really analyze that piece of work as a black and white. Assess how the artist used that painting's values to emphasize and improve and strengthen the composition and, you know, make a point to analyze and make an assumption that potentially this artist chose to do a low key color scale or a classical or an impressionist or a high key scale, and make that decision about what you think that artist used as a value skill to help strengthen their expression as an artist using their values. And then the second part of the homework is to commit to practicing the three different ways of starting a painting, with an emphasis on values. Your values start. So choose whether or not you're going to lay down your lights first. So therefore, you're going to probably end up with a low key composition, or if you're going to do a half and half where you lay down your lights and you lay down your darks and you kind of build them up. And that tends to set you up either for probably impressionist where you have a ton of mid tones, and you have some lights and some darks. But the majority of your spectrum is in the midtones, or it can be a classical setup, think of Vermeer. You have a graduated value scale through and all aspects of that graduated value scale is presented and recorded in your painting. And then lay down your darks first. And that tends to create a hike painting. And here I made a couple of I did a slideshow. So for example, here's an example of laying down your lights making sure that your lights are the predominant, then it sets up essentially a low key setup, a low key composition. This is a classical value scale where I probably well, looking at it, I laid my lights in my darks simultaneously, building the composition up together at the same time so that way I could create a sense of the full value spectrum. And then I don't make a ton of high key paintings. And this is an example of my work that I've created that does fall into a high key level where, you know, the majority of the area of the composition are my lights to mid tones, and then the darks have a lesser percentage of area on the painting canvas. So that's what I'd like y'all to do is take some time to explore starting a painting with one of those three types of value scale organization. And what that does is that helps you set up. And that way, you're very familiar with the different types. And then that allows you to know how you want to start a painting when you start a new setup. And, you know, just makes you paint more confidently. It helps you paint more confidently. And yeah, that's it. So good luck and thank you for being here.