Lesson on value and tone

The last three weeks has been spent bending the brain! Margie, that was the most challenging painting I have ever done and I have learned so much. It was well worth the hours of work. The first step in the project was to paint a mono tone painting, anything we liked. I had already started to paint the centre when I remembered to photograph it.

Then we had to divide the painting up into segments. Most people did squares. Yours truly decided to do circles which became slightly distorted as they went out, sort of like looking through a porthole. Then we had to paint each segment using just two colours plus white, matching values for the differing tones. Each segment was to be a different colour combination.

If anyone has been to the Sixty Minute Artist lately you will know how he has been concentrating on tone and value. Very challenging and difficult to get right. I landed up repainting four of the circles as the colours where just too way out.

Now to photograph it for this post! Oils are even more difficult to photograph than acrylics! You can never get an exact match to the painting! Then as another exercise we grey scaled it to see if everything was correct – not bad at all – even if I say it myself!!!! There are the odd places where you can see the circles but not many. This was a huge learning curve and truly strained the brain!