Shapes and Value

Sunbathed Field, 11 x 14

This was a demo from this past week's Monday class.  Since it was the first week of a new session, and we had some newcomers to the class, we started with a basic exercise of blocking in large shapes.  This gets the composition in place before tackling the finer details of the subject matter.  In this painting, I first divided the composition into about 5 shapes to start wtih, roughing in only values, keeping all edges loose.  From there I broke down each shape into it's more subtle value ranges, and addressed warm and cool colors.  Later in the process I sharpened and softened edges according to where I wanted to lead the viewer's eye.  I'm not always thrilled with my demo paintings, but I'm pretty happy with this one.