A Day in the Life, Values

I have been thinking about teaching my beginning watercolor class tonight and decided it is about time we started to talk about values!! No, no, not the family kind, the light kind!! What makes our eyes/brain know we are seeing a form?, light. Therefore when a painter wants to construe form on paper, canvas, or whatever flat surface, the light, medium, dark and all values in between have to be painted to fool the eye into thinking it is seeing a 3 dimensional object. If you think about it, it is no easy task to paint a vase, for example, to look like it is round, so round you want to reach out and touch it, on a flat 2 dimensional surface.

Above is a picture of a white vase, the task tonight for my students will be to paint in watercolor the light to dark values seen on the vase, the dark inside the vase, and the shadow cast on the table from the vase. This is a great exercise to get your painter muscles trained to see the different shades of a color on a 3 dimensional object and translate it through paint.
What is going on in my studio? Since I was traveling to see my family, I didn’t get as much time to paint as I would like. I have made some progress, however, on my flower watercolor collaboration.


Can’t wait to return to my studio tomorrow!

Read more at: How’s the Weather.