SEEING SLOWLY & CAREFULLY

Happy Birthday to Suzanne G:-) today, who's looking forward to learning more about painting reflective surfaces like glass. This painting's for her to study. Check out the shapes created by the darks and light values. Check out the placement of the darks and lights. Examine the edges carefully.

Some edges are sharp, hard. Some are soft, fading away. Some values literally disappear into another value, never having an edge.

Seeing what is there is so critcal in making something look real on a flat piece of paper. We all tend to observe what's around us fairly well. But I think the trick to painting realistically is not to just observe, but to carefully see and slowly look at the shapes, values, and their edges, then paint what we've seen. Keeping the really white shapes pure white helps a bunch in creating the depth in a watercolor. Painting really good darks where it's the darkest gives great dimension to the reflective surface, too.

At the end of this month, we have a special demo planned for Thursday morning's class on reflective surfaces. I'm looking forward to it. Painting glass and brass is easy to do as long as you look slowly and see where the edges and values are. We'll make it look REAL, three dimensional. Wish you all could be in class.

"APPLESAUCE SOON?" Transparent Watercolor on 140#CP Arches 10 x 22" Collected

SEEING CLEARLY

Figuring out how to paint glass seems to be one thing that stumps some artists. But it's actually exactly the same as anything else we try to paint. Look at the shapes of the darks and lights on the glass surface, and capture those shapes with the correct values and with accurate edges.

Most of learning to paint and draw is about seeing. Training our eyes to see what is REALLY there, rather than what we think is there, is vital to developing our creative process. Observing the actual shapes that are created by the different darks and lights, seeing the changes in the edges of those darks and lights --- seeing values, seeing edges --- that's what helps us know what to paint.

By far, the most influential element that we (mistakenly) think we must paint is color. A person may spend lots of time trying to find the perfect match for a color. However, color's main job is to develop the emotion of a painting. It also adds atmospheric perspective to a painting. Color alone seldom describes an object very well. The darks and lights or VALUE changes are what does the job of telling us what's going on in a painting, what it's about.

When painting glass, (or brass or any shiny item,) a broad range of colors will work as long as the lights and darks are created in the correct shapes with the correct edges. To give more emphasis to this, I've added some Photoshop enhanced pictures of the above painting.

The first pix has much less value change, with fewer darks and lights, resulting in a flatter painting, showing what happens when there's not enough value change from light to dark. While the jars still may look like canning jars, there is no impact when looking at the painting because the value changes are only strong between the metal handles and the glass. The other three 'paintings' now have crazy color combinations, to show that glass looks like glass if the values and edges are correct, whether the 'color' is correct of not. COLLECTED