Thursday, March 31, 2011

Working from Black & White Reference

An Early Snow, 11 x 14

reference photo


I took this photo about about a year and a half ago.  The color in the photo wasn't very good, but sometime later I removed the color in Photoshop and realized that it worked great in black and white.  It kept a good, clear range of values. So I challenged myself to work strickly from black and white on this painting and create my own color interpretation.  An exercise like this does two things: 1) it liberates you from agonizing over matching any particular color, and 2) it forces you to depend strickly on value for your color choices, which always makes a better painting.  I did this demo for a recent class thinking I'd have them work on the same exercise after a brief demo. However, they worked me to the bone that day and watched me work on my demo painting the entire time.  What slavedrivers!  ;-)

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