Once I have a basic tonal value sketch based on a photograph it’s time to use my magical artistic powers to transform or "re-vision" the image into art. As an artist, I have the power to make my paintings sing or create a believable new world enclosed within its four edges. To build your skills beyond being a copyist and become more expressive in your work you have to see beyond the photograph and then build on it.
I always start with my focal point. This is the first place I want the viewer's eye to land. An important rule of composition is that the eye is attracted to the greatest point of value contrast before any other contrast. The human eye is drawn to something light set against something darker or vice versa. By carefully using tone you can create, or strengthen, the focal point in your paintings.
Next, I examine my three-dimensional forms: A careful transition of light and dark tones on a subject gives the illusion of three-dimensional form. It is not the color that makes an apple look like an apple. It is the contour and the form shadow that describe its shape and texture. You could color it blue or yellow, and it will still look like an apple if the tones are right.
Using tone correctly also creates an illusion of depth; the farther away an object is from the viewer the more it takes on the value of the background.
Repetition of particular shapes also adds rhythm and meaning. Rounded forms are more sensual and comforting, angular shapes more threatening, and geometric shapes more conventional. I look for areas where I can adjust my shapes to add emotion at this stage.
Capturing emotion is an art in and of itself, and it’s not automatic. Allowing one value tone to dominate your painting can play a significant role in developing mood and visual impact. Out of the three aspects of color, (hue, value, and saturation) value is the predominant mood maker!
Whether you work in realism or abstraction, planning and revising your work to strengthen the tonal values will produce stronger, more meaningful artwork.
Restricting the range of values is another way you can direct the mood of your artwork. This is called the “Major Key”. A limited tonal range at the light end of the value scale is called “High Major Key” and a limited tonal range at the dark end of the value scale is called “Low Major Key”.
Low-key paintings dominated by darks have a dramatic mood conveying things we sense about darkness, such as mystery, intrigue, fear, danger or sanctuary.
High key paintings dominated by pale colors give the sense of being bathed in light, setting a more ethereal mood. They can suggest optimism, clarity, and life, but there is also the danger of appearing weak, vague, and washed out.
“Minor Key” is manipulating the contrast (difference) between the darkest dark and the lightest light in your value range. The greater the contrast (difference) between the dark and the light tones, the more the visual intensity or dynamic increases. The greater the affinity (closeness in tones) the more the visual intensity or dynamic decreases.
You might want to experiment by transforming your value sketch using several different Major/Minor Key combinations to evaluate their impact on the mood of your piece. If you are skilled with ProCreate or Adobe Photoshop this is a very simple process.
Below is a chart with a variety of Major/Minor Key settings for you to contemplate.
Now that you know that you are probably missing visual information about the world around you, see if you can awaken your perception to notice whether or not an apple is truly red when it looks violet at twilight.
Can you actually see the violet apple, but still know it is red? Does your brain effortlessly subtract the blueish veil from the red apple and “restore” the “true color”.
What happens when you try to see what is actually there, not what you think you see?
It is fun to play this mind game with color and tone, real and not real, seeing and perceiving, truth and invention. Can you see how much easier it will be to apply your color and have fun with color contrast once you have your tonal value sketch ready? I will dig deeper into the application of color in another newsletter.
Training yourself to “see like an artist” opens up a whole world of perception that has been waiting for you to awaken to it. Suddenly you will begin to see things in your daily life in a way you never noticed before.
Jonathan Swift says “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”
For this we have to be a little courageous, we have to experiment and try, we have to make mistakes and trust that our perceptions will expand through experimentation. Once you can open yourself to this way of seeing you can paint pictures that jar regular people out of their well-worn habits of seeing.
If you are interested in understanding more about tonal values and still only have a blurry idea about how artists see, reach out to me and let’s talk. I welcome the conversation and I am available for private classes or workshops. I hope you will use these thoughts to strengthen your perceptions and your paintings. Regardless of your art form, understanding how to play with tonal values can significantly improve your creations. With Light and Delight,
Better choices about what's essential in your life and your art.
Life is complicated.
I’ve been feeling overwhelmed recently and you probably feel the same. Too much change, too much divisiveness, too much information, too much pain, too many choices, too many decisions, and too much detail. The abundance current is flowing like a firehose, breaking down the old, revealing what’s been hidden underneath and I feel out of breath from swimming to keep up with it all.
I need to breathe. I need time to pause and reflect.
One of the advantages of being older and wiser is having more tools for problem-solving. When it feels like everything matters and everything is urgent the tool I use is to create a space where I check in with myself and realign with what really matters to me.
I have done years of work clarifying my personal values, my purpose, and what it feels like to be fulfilled and satisfied. Good health, freedom, deep connections, learning, reflection, joy, creation, and teaching are most important to me. Knowing what is essential helps me to identify my priorities and pass on those problems that are not mine to solve.
The story below is really helpful to me in differentiating from everything that calls to me.
There once was a philosophy professor who was giving a lecture. In front of him, he had a big glass jar, a pile of rocks, a bag of small pebbles, a tub of sand, and a bottle of water.
He started by filling up the jar with the big rocks and when they reached the rim of the jar, he held it up to the students and asked them if the jar was full. They all agreed, there was no more room to put the rocks in, it was full.
“Is it full?” he asked.
He then picked up the bag of small pebbles and poured these into the jar. He shook the jar so that the pebbles filled the space around the big rocks. “Is the jar full now?” he asked. The group of students all looked at each other and agreed that the jar was now completely full.
“Is it really full?” he asked.
The professor then picked up the tub of sand. He poured the sand in between the pebbles and the rocks and once again he held up the jar to his class and asked if it was full. Once again, the students agreed that the jar was full.
“Are you sure it’s full?” he asked.
He finally picked up a bottle of water and tipped the water into the jar until it soaked up in all the remaining space in the sand. The students laughed.
The professor went on to explain that the jar of rocks, pebbles, sand, and water represent everything that is in one's life.
The rocks represent the most important things that have real value – your health, your family, your partner. Those things that if everything else (the pebbles and the sand) was lost and only they remained, your life would still have meaning.
The pebbles represent the things in your life that matter, but that you could live without. The pebbles are things that give your life meaning (such as your job, house, hobbies, and friendships), but they are not critical for you to have a meaningful life. These things often come and go, and are not permanent or essential to your overall well-being.
If you fill the jar in the opposite order there would be no room for the rocks. No room for what’s essential to you.
Written by Siddhi Latey (Weloquent)
This lens of essentialism will improve your artwork as well as your life. Our paintings often try to say too much, with too much information. When we don’t really know what it is that we want to say we have no idea what belongs on the canvas and what belongs in the discard pile.
It's easy to overwhelm your viewer with all the information in your scene and all the marks and shapes you fell in love with.
Whether you are a realist or an abstract artist what’s essential to your art is distillation - expressing your idea in the simplest way possible using shape, composition, and color.
This system of essential questions can help you to evaluate your artwork as it evolves from concept to completion. They are the rocks in your composition.
Essence:
What matters most in this artwork? Can you express your idea with less?
Is there one corner that you love more than anything, a mark or line that moves in a particular way? Could you format (crop) the image to contain just that one thing and eliminate the rest?
There is always a choice, and we can simply leave out what is not needed to tell the essence of our story. Ask yourself if you can tell the story using just 20% of the information in your resource image? How much of the other 80% of the detail could be sublimated into a larger value zone?
Is there a clear path of priority through your artwork? Pick and choose what stays and goes so you amplify the essential and delete or diminish the rest.
I'm going to use this photo as an example of how to zero in on the essence of an artwork and how to apply the essential questions.
What attracts me the most in the photo we started with is the waterfall. Here are two formats that capture the essence of this waterfall.
Shape:
What are the main structural forms in your image?
Asymmetrical shapes are more appealing. Can you adjust yours to be less symmetrical?
Could you say what you need with fewer shapes? Are there smaller shapes to combine into a larger mass that interlocks with two or three sides of the canvas?
Have you considered the negative space as a shape?
Value:
Squint at your image… Is the simplest, essential form of the image apparent?
How have you used a limited value range to set your mood? When you set the endpoints of your value scale in a smaller range emotion is enhanced.
Is the strongest contrast of light/dark at your most important event?
How are you using value to separate one shape from another?
Do you have a clear 2-value pattern (Notan) that conveys the essence of the image?
What happens when you add more values? How can you use value zones to contain and compress detail?
I think the vertical image has a more interesting pathway and interlocking asymmetrical dark shape than the horizontal one above.
Squint at this image...Is the value pattern more interesting? What you are seeing is a two-value separation (Notan). Does this capture the essence of the waterfall in the original image?
Can you follow a clear priority pathway through it? How might I improve on the pathway?
Here is how the image might look with more values. These additional values are being used to separate my large shapes into smaller ones.
As I add the details back in I associate the details with a larger value zone. Each value zone has a limited range of values in it.
My biggest value drop is in the correct rule of thirds location and I can exaggerate the effect of the waterfall hitting the river to enhance the pathway through the painting.
Color:
Consider the color grouping you will employ for harmony & mood?
Will your painting be based on a particular color or color arrangement that contributes to its essence?
Which color interaction will have priority in each of the following three contrasts?
Choose one for each contrast of:
Hue - similar/dissimilar
Value - low/med/high
Saturation - low/medium/high
Hue is the name of the color, usually one of twelve around the color wheel. Saturation is the strength of the hue. Saturation is reduced by adding black, white, or a complement to a hue. Value is the range of light/dark in your colors.
Play (Variation):
Play is the pebbles in your container of composition. Play doesn't just help us explore what is essential it is essential in and of itself. Play creates the poetry in your work.
Variation and difference keep the composition interesting and alive. Map the pathway of priority through the artwork as you vary the interval, length, height, angle, weight, color, and value of your shapes and marks.
In this painting my color harmony is split complementary - Red-Orange, Yellow-Green, Blue-Green
Choose one for each contrast of:
Hue - similar/dissimilar
Value - low/med/high
Saturation - low/medium/high
Notice the variations in height, angle, weight, color, and value of the roses.
Is the essence clear?
In this painting, my color harmony is Analogous - Green, Blue, and Violet. warm colors are extremely limited and neutralized. Choose one for each contrast of:
Hue - similar/dissimilar
Value - low/med/high
Saturation - low/medium/high Notice the variations in height, angle, weight, color, and value of the architecture and the hydrangeas. Is the essence clear? Can you tell what inspired me here?
Finished:
One of the hardest and most essential questions is how to tell when your painting is finished.
It seems like there is always more you could do and more you could add. Your painting is not just about regurgitating the facts but about returning to what inspired you to create it. Reflect on your original intent when you chose the essence of this artwork. How did you live up to your vision for your artwork? Is there unity? Poetry? Perhaps you did not attain your entire vision for the piece. But, if you captured the essence of your inspiration you have more than enough.
At some point, you need to declare the artwork the best you can do at this time. If the essence of the piece truly inspires you, remember you can return to the point of inspiration and create a series of variations on your theme. Done is better than perfect. I often return to old artworks years later, pop them out of their frames and revise them with what I learned.
In situations of overwhelm in art and in life, less is more.
There is relief in amplifying the essential and leaving the rest. Picking and choosing what belongs and what does not is essential. Understanding the difference between the things that feel urgent and those that are truly important not only reduces overwhelm but is critical self-care.
Efficiently completing urgent but unimportant tasks keeps me from being effective in the areas that matter most to me. Reflecting on what is essential helps me to reorder my priorities and be effective as a human, an artist, and a teacher.
In art as in life, having a system returns our effort many times over. Figure out your priority list. Reduce or omit what holds you back. Walk away from dead ends. Amplify yourself and your work by concentrating on and creating more of what matters.
Interested in amplifying your effectiveness as an artist? Reach out to me and let’s talk. I welcome the conversation and the opportunity to expand with you. With Light and Delight,
Susan Convery
Did you know that your brain processes two billion pieces of visual data per second? Did you know we only “see” about 50 bits of this information?
The human brain is designed to quickly identify and interpret everything that enters the visual sphere. When people tell me they can only draw stick figures and symbols what they mean is their brain can only label an icon for the object and is not engaged with the unique peculiarities of the object itself. Their minds do not perceive the subtle changes in the color of a lemon in a dark blue shadow or the variations in a white piece of paper half in and half out of bright morning sunlight. Their mind receives the signal for “yellow lemon” or “white paper” but strips out the detailed relationships of color, line, shadow, shape, contour, and value of the object in its environment. By doing this the brain is doing us a huge favor. If it didn’t block out most of what was happening around us, we couldn’t focus.
According to a study by University of Oslo psychology professor Stine Vogt, Ph.D. in Perception (Vol. 36, No. 1). nine psychology students and nine art students were asked to view a series of 16 pictures while a camera and computer monitored where their gazes fell. She found that artists’ eyes tended to scan the whole picture, including apparently empty expanses of ocean or sky, while the nonartists focused on objects, especially people. Non Artists spent about 40 percent of the time looking at objects, while artists focused on them 20 percent of the time.
What does the artist see that most people do not? The first thing an artist observes is light. The appearance of what we see at any given moment is totally dependent on the relationships between light, objects, and our position as viewers of the situation. Without light, we can see nothing. Too much light and we can’t determine anything. Our ability to see the world around us is dependent on the amount of, and conditions of light within the range between total darkness and total brightness.
When we are swimming in an overwhelming sea of a million colors representing hundreds of perceptibly different lightness values. color is often different, or even opposite to what we expect it to be, know it to be, or assume it to be. Strangely, the best way for me to understand the color in my photographs is to remove it altogether. That’s why I begin by breaking down my composition into simplified representations using only black and white.
The simplest way I know to truly understand the light in my picture is by creating a Notan. Notan is a Japanese word for an alternating black and white pattern.
I use Notan to separate light from shadow into a two-value abstract pattern which reveals how light falls in my artwork. The light family (white) consists of all areas that are touched directly by the light source. The shadow family (black) consists of everything that is hidden from the light source. This includes all shadows and reflected light areas. A clear separation of what is in light and what is in shadow will make everything that is not working in my image immediately apparent.
I start this process by tracing my source image over a lightbox and creating multiple photocopies of my tracing. I use Tombow double-ended markers, or a Sharpie, to separate the light from the shadow on my first photocopy. Alternatively, you can use your phone or computer to convert your source image into grayscale and then increase the contrast until you have a black and white representation of your image. If the image still reads as you want it to at this stage, then you are ready to move on to a more detailed tonal value study.
Value does not describe the price or amount paid for an artwork. Value is an art term used to measure the relative lightness or darkness of a color or color shape. Value dominates our visual experience. It is the strongest element of visual contrast and largely determines our perception of form as we explore a picture.
A value scale ranges in discrete steps called tones that start at one end and step towards the other from white to black or vice versa. I use this handy tool for matching any color to a tone on the scale. You can either buy one or make your own value scale by painting strips numbered from one to 10 or one to 100 that range from pure white to pitch black on a piece of white cardboard.
To keep my tonal value study simple I use only 4 values - white, light-mid value, dark-mid value, and black. I buy Tombow markers in three values to use on another photocopy of my tracing to ensure I stick to just these four values. The key in this step is grouping values. Squinting at your subject helps to link the values and shapes of individual objects into larger masses of connected shapes. Consider the negative space and join the values of these surrounding spaces into a single value in an interesting shape that supports and defines your object(s).
It sounds really easy, right?
The difficulty with our perception of tone is that it 100% depends on the light; when the light changes, the tone changes with it. That’s why to our brain, tonality is unreliable. Tonal value is such an impermanent property of an object, that it can not be determined without looking, it is only true at this moment. For instance, our lemon is perceived as yellow even if it may look white bathed in bright light, or may appear black against backlight. We need to compare our object to something else; see it in relation to other colors to see its tone. We can only notice our object’s tone through intentional looking and only by holding it in the same gaze with something else - like our value scale. That’s why the artists in the study above were seen to scan the whole picture and not focus on the individual objects. They were looking for tonal relationships. All artists eventually learn to perceive tonal relationships, but do you know that even very experienced artists need to be reminded to look at the tonal value of color?
Because tonality is an optical phenomenon; and, as an optical illusion, our brain does not acknowledge it, it is easier for the amateur artist to begin working from photographs. Assessing the tonal value of the different parts of an image is much clearer in a black and white version of the same photo. Doing this makes a difficult subject easier to paint.
I don't always get the tonal value correct when I work in color. Therefore, to spot the mistakes, I sometimes scan or photograph my own paintings and then convert them to black and white and view them on my computer and phone as a way to spot what is and is not working.
In general, what was white in my Notan sketch will be white and light-mid value in my tonal value sketch and what was black in the Notan will be separated into dark-mid value and black in the tonal value sketch.
The goal for my tonal value sketch is to use 4 tones to create:
a contrast of light and dark.
the illusion of form.
a dramatic or tranquil atmosphere.
a sense of depth and distance.
a rhythm or pattern within a composition.
I always start with my focal point. This is the first place I want the viewer's eye to land. An important rule of composition is that the eye is attracted to the greatest point of value contrast before any other contrast. The human eye is drawn to something light set against something darker or vice versa. By carefully using tone you can create, or strengthen, the focal point in your paintings.
Next, I examine my three-dimensional forms: A careful transition of light and dark tones on a subject gives the illusion of three-dimensional form. It is not the color that makes an apple look like an apple. It is the contour and the form shadow that describe its shape and texture. You could color it blue or yellow, and it will still look like an apple if the tones are right.
If you are interested in understanding more about tonal values and still only have a blurry idea about how artists see, reach out to me and let’s talk. I welcome the conversation and I am available for private classes or workshops. I hope you will use these thoughts to strengthen your perceptions and your paintings. Regardless of your art form, understanding how to play with tonal values can significantly improve your creations. With Light and Delight,
