Make Your Holidays Sparkle (With Value Contrast!)

Holiday Prep I, pastel, 9x12

Holiday Prep II, pastel, 9x12

This week in my classes I wanted to do something a little on the festive side for the holidays. And I also thought it was time to break away from photos again and tackle some still life work.

I chose the items for these still life set ups with a wide variety of surface textures in mind. In each, I purposely chose a mat finish ornament to go beside the other shiny ornaments. The transparent satin ribbon, cloth background and smooth wood surface also added a nice variety of textures to study closely.

Some of the ornaments also had textured decorations on them. It was interesting to note that even though some of the sparkly  designs on the ornaments were actually white in color, the highlights on the shiny ornaments were still lighter in value than the white areas, just due to the fact that the nondecorated area of the ornament was very reflective. The white areas were not a shiny texture and therefore didn't reflect nearly as much light. Shiny, reflective objects tend to have larger extremes of lights and darks than less shiny objects with more of a mat finish. The black fabric in the background is the least reflective and has the least amount of value contrast.

For both of these pieces, I started with a quick  monochromatic underpainting using an alcohol wash on mounted Uart 320 paper.

Underpainting for Holiday Prep I

The set up for Holiday Prep I

AAC Demonstration

Morning Radiance, pastel, 14x11

I had the wonderful opportunity this evening to do a pastel demonstration at the Atlanta Artists Center for a great group of enthusiastic artists. Although this was more of a generalized demonstration, I explained how I use color harmony and the use of neutrals to enhance my mostly green subject matter from my photo reference.

Morning Radiance was painted on mounted Uart paper with a monochromatic alcohol wash underpainting. In the underpainting stage, I focused on not only setting up the value structure for the painting, but simplifying the busy tree foliage into large, connected shapes. By contrasting the foreground and background with value and color temperature, I attempted to create a dramatic glow of light that was radiating from behind the thick foliage.

Using Your "Ugly" Pastels

A Welcome Change, pastel, 12x9

Mountaintop Trees, pastel, 9x12

How do you get the most our of a vibrant color? Place it next to a very dull color. So when you're painting a colorful landscape such as an autumn scene, and have trouble getting those "brights" as vivid as you know they should appear, the problem usually isn't that you don't have bright enough pastels, you simply may not have dull enough pastels.

This week in my classes, we continued with autumn landscapes and focusing on balancing the brights with the greyed/muted colors.

I've noticed that most new pastel artists who are just getting started collecting their supply of pastels are usually lacking those all important dull, ugly pastels. They're the colors we usually overlook because  we think those colors will make the whole painting appear dull. In reality, they'll help get more mileage out of those gorgeous, saturated colors we love to use.

When deciding what colors to use for a painting that has bright colors, start by scribbling little color patches next to each other, finding one or two dull sidekicks for each bright color you need. These dull colors are greyed versions of each color family or very muted neutrals...they're usually those nondescript colors that are difficult to give a color name. The dull color you actually need is usually duller (and uglier) than you think.

Grey Matters

Fading Autumn Light, pastel, 9x12

In my Thursday class this morning we covered the importance of greys in landscapes that contain vibrant colors, such as autumn landscapes. In order to make those vibrant colors jump off the painting, you need to balance them up against muted or grey hues. Otherwise, you just have lots of bright colors competing with each other, and end up with a very busy look, or often even more muddied color than if you used a variety of greys (i.e...grey-blue, grey-purple, etc.).

In my demo (above) I began with very muted hues and greyed versions of the bright autumn colors that would ultimately be added in later stages. Adding those bright hues is definitely a "less is more" practice...a little dab of a bright color up against a grey or muted hue goes a long way!

I wasn't completely pleased with composition on this one...things ended up a bit too centered for my taste. "Fading Autumn Light" may be considered for the chopping block, and possibly come back to life as a smaller size. Still thinking about it.

We'll probably do one more class that focuses on greys in the autumn landscape.

***

In my Monday class earlier this week, we focused on edges. We also worked from an autumn scene, well, just because it IS autumn! The goal here was to exaggerate hard and soft edges in order to move the viewer's eye around to specific "resting spots" around the painting, carefully choosing where those spots are placed.

November Reds, pastel, 9x12

For my demo of "November Reds" I began setting up those hard and soft edges right from the start in the underpainting, shown below...

Underpainting for November Reds

Study, study, study!

In all of my pastel classes this week we focused on doing small, timed studies. I find this to be a great exercise to not only prepare for a larger painting, but also to simply increase your painting skills (and painting speed) by getting more painting mileage behind you. Some other benefits to doing quick, small studies:
- You're more inclined to try different, riskier approaches since you know you won't have very much time invested in each little piece...you'll quickly see what works and what doesn't.
- You're less inclined to fuss over each area of the painting since it's not meant to be a finished piece.
- You'll think more in terms of the "big picture" rather than minor details, which helps you to narrow in on what you want to say with the painting.

In my Thursday class, we focused on composition and painted three versions of the same landscape using different formats for each (square, vertical and horizontal), spending no more than about 20 - 30 minutes on each. Below are my demos of each...

The Long and Winding Road I, 6x6

The Long and Winding Road II, 8x6

The Long and Winding Road III, 6x8

In my Monday class earlier in the week we focused more on timed exercises to help everyone get more in the habit of blocking in larger shapes and quickly getting the entire surface covered, rather than getting caught up in unnecessary details. Students had 30 minutes to work on each of three separate paintings. Below are the two demos I did for that class:

Does This Go Anywhere?, 10x8

Uphill, 10x8

The paintings at the top of this post are done on Sennelier LaCarte paper and the ones just above are on gatorboard prepared with pumice gel (toned first with a warm neutral color).

As I observed the progression of the three paintings each student did in each class, most every student made substantial improvements from the first one to the third one!

Starting with a Plan

Evening Shade, pastel, 8x8

This is a demo from a class I held this evening in which we focused on the basics of establishing values. Using a monochromatic underpainting (my favorite type of underpainting these days), we set the stage with our value structure, and build upon that structure with a fairly limited color palette. We worked from a black and white photo, one of the best methods I've found to teach values.

I always encourage my students to do preliminary thumbnails in order to plan two key aspects of their painting: composition and value. Here's a very brief explanation of how I do this:
1) Composition: Consider the balance of large and small shapes, the placement of your focal point (often using the "rule of thirds"), and avoid placing a key element in the center of the painting (horizontally or vertically). Of course many of these "rules" can be knowingly broken, but that's another blog post for another day.
2) Values: Try to simplify the composition down to 4 or 5 value groups. If done carefully in your planning stages, this makes the beginning of the painting faster, easier, and much less intimidating.

My thumbnail composition/value sketch.

Sometimes I work out my composition first and then do my value sketch separately, or sometimes I combine those steps as I did here. I used pencil for this sketch, but I often use 3 or 4 values of grey markers, which is a great way to force yourself to simplify your value groups. Notice that I also indicate lines outside my borders of the sketch to more clearly see the division of space within my composition. It also helps to size it up to my painting dimensions.

Black and white reference photo.

Except for rare occasions, I don't usually spend much more than about 10 minutes on thumbnails. But whatever the amount of time I take for this planning stage, I've found that it's time well spent to determine what I want to say with the painting, and what will make it artwork rather than a copy of a photograph.

Colorful Underpaintings in my Monday Class

November Marsh, pastel, 9x12

Last week in my Monday class we did a monochromatic underpainting. This week we jazzed things up a bit using a colorful underpainting. While some thought was given to the values initially blocked in for the underpainting, the main goal was to first underpaint colors that would contrast nicely with the colors ultimately layered overtop.

Underpainting for November Marsh

Liquid underpaintings work great to allow you to layer complimentary colors without ending up with mud. When you wet down a color, it becomes a dry surface on which to overlay it's compliment, giving you some nice clean, "sparkly" contrast. Here I used an orange and yellow-orange under the sky and water, and various purples and blue-purples under the yellow-orange hues.

November Marsh is my demo from this morning's class.

Underpainting in my Monday class.

Been Down This Road Before, pastel, 9x12

In my Monday morning class today, I introduced liquid underpainting to some new students in the class. For my liquid underpaintings, I use alcohol over an initial light layer of pastel, which is how I got this painting started.

I used a mostly monochromatic underpainting to set the value structure, using a dark blue Nupastel to block in most of it and a very dark reddish-purple soft pastel to intensify only the darkest areas. Straying a bit from the monochromatic structure, I also added just a touch of a yellow-orange with a Nupastel to the lightest areas (the sky and road). Even for my monochromatic starts, lately I've been including a warm color to underlay my light areas when the ultimate color used in that area will be on the cool side...I find that this keeps the color from have a whitish, chalky look.

Sorry I don't have photos of the initial block in on this one.