The Atelier Tier, Value Mixing
Added 2021-12-01 11:24:57 +0000 UTCThis is a lesson that will prepare you for your sphere painting project. Super important stuff- get ready to finally learn to set up and use your palette effectively.
By the way: Vimeo, my video hosting platform, has lately had some issues displaying videos across various devices (particularly ipads). If there is some trouble seeing thew video let me know in the comments and I will do what I can to fix it. Otherwise a laptop/desktop is the optimal device to view this on.
Comments
Late to the party but in case anyone sees it - you can absolutely use your palette the next day. The best simple way is to cover it with saran wrap gently and put it in the freezer. You can technically augment this a step further by putting a bottle cap with a couple drops of clove oil on the palette under the saran wrap, but if it's just overnight I don't really think there's an advantage. Some painters will mix a tiny bit of clove oil into their paints directly and this will make them extremely slow to dry, but I think that it's worth getting used to the default behavior of paints as a student (for example, titanium white is generally going to take a much longer time to dry than burnt umber right out of the tube), and my understanding is that there are questions of archival difficulties with this technique.
Steven Anderson
2024-02-16 03:13:50 +0000 UTCIs it ok if I premix my values one day and that use them in the painting the next day, or I will lose some freshness in the mixtures? I ask this because this evening I've done this excercise but it took me more time than I thought to get it right, so I would like to start the sphere painting tommorrow morning. I've placed the palette in the fridge in order to preserve better the mixed paints. In general I'd like to make a habit of premixing my values to have more control on them, but I find it a little bit difficult and I'm pretty slow, so until I get faster I'll probably have to use this approach and premix one day in the evening and then make the painting the next morning This also because I'm not a full-time painting student, I study in University and I use to paint in the evening when my academic work is finished so I usally can't do prolonged sessions and have to paint in sessions of about two or three hours...
Adriano Arceri
2024-01-03 21:50:09 +0000 UTCWhat we get at the end of this fist part of the project is a so called "value step scale"; Creating a value step scale is a very common exercise for beginners, but it is not really clear to me how to use it once you have created one: I've read severeal books like Juliette Aristides' "Lessons in Classical Painting" and Richard Schmidt's "Alla Prima", and they say that it's not just about doing an exercise: you should use the value step scale you made as a guide to judge the values in the subjects you're painting (they in fact use also the more advanced version, the color chart, in which also hue and chroma are included). But I don't understand how one should use it: I mean, in each subject we have different values, different temperatures, how can a single value step scale of neutral colors act as a trustable guideline? Or one should simply start each work doing a specific value step scale (like the gradient you do at the end of this video) in order to have a specific guideline? And also, Schmidth says that he uses his color charts to identify exactly which color (including value, hue, chroma) he needs, and then he knows how to make it because he knows how to re-make this color present in his color chart. So one should annotate the exact proportion of paint A and paint B to get that color C that you have on your color chart so that when needed you know how to exactly replicate it? In this way the value step scale and the color chart seem like a system of coordinates where you identify where you have to go and than you can calculate the coordinates; instead of latitude and longitude you have hue, value, chroma and the proportions of your pure paints that you have to mix in order to get in that exact point. Is this the proper use of value scales and color charts? I'd like to ask what you recommend in order to become familiar with values, as it seems to be the most fundamental skill a painter should master; if other specific exercises are needed beyond this one explained in the video.
Adriano Arceri
2024-01-02 21:37:35 +0000 UTC
