For me, it was incredibly liberating, and felt very natural. I think that's because that's how I think anyways. I've never been good at achieving what I really want a character or certainly an environment to look like with only line. I have to fill in areas to show contrast in shapes and values. So to just go for it with a painting, came very easy to me. That being said, at a certain point, I still ended up struggling with the painting aspects of painting. But I'm getting better with brushwork, and changing up my stroke language.
Craig talked about using negative shape, basically as an eraser for a painting. You can always carve back into your stories to "erase" out marks, and redefine the shapes. This method felt very intuitive for me. The idea that you should slop the shapes down, and then carve back into them to refine is what I think I've been trying to do my entire time here. But I didn't know how to control it, and so it always came out super sloppy, and just a mess. But seeing the way Craig handled it in his demo was really helpful. It made it possible. Lights correct shadows, shadows correct lights.
The color black absorbs all light. So when painting thing that are black, unless they are highly reflective, you should always exaggerate the diminished value contrast between light and shadow. In fact, (and this totally work) you should probably just block the entire shape in with flat value, and then leave it as long as you can. At some point, it won't fit with the rest of the modeled painting, and so you should add more contrast, but for the most part (at least in a quick study) leaving the blacks in solid value really helps sell the illusion of low contrasting light relationships.
How do you make a cool color seem even cooler?……
Put a warm color next to it.
On my studies for this week's turn-in, Craig wanted me to really work on pushing the value contrast in my figures. I also need to simplify the value structure. Be bolder. He like my interior composition (stove) the best. He said it had a nice shape language and the values were the best. He also liked my landscape, but compositionally, the tree on the right should either be brought further in, or pushed out of the frame more. Where eI have it right now, it's tangenting a bit, and causing for a harder read of the image, and the foreground plane in general.. The urbanscape (boats) painting, he felt was okay, but the perspective was a little wonky in the foreground building, which I immediately recognized. Silly mistake on my part.
