Edition 1.0 www.VirtualArtAcademy.com ©2005 Barry John Raybould

Form Unit One 5

TECHNIQUE:TWO-VALUE STATEMENT

PurposeOne of the most important things to get right in a landscape, figure painting, or still life, is to get the basic light and shade patterns working. For each local color there is one pair of color spots that you need to get right. These are the two adjacent color spots created by light and shade on the object. The good news is that you only need to get a few of these relationships right to get a great painting. The bad news is that it takes a lot of work to get them just right! This is because there are about a million potential combinations of just two colors (at the very least!).

Once you have these color spots accurate, it takes very little work to finish the painting. However, if you do not get them right, no amount of work will result in a good painting (in terms of color).

Example: study

This 15 minute color study uses just a few light/shade color pairs:

♦ the hair

♦ the shirt

♦ the legs and face

In addition, there are some more subtle warm/cool color pairs in the grass.

Spend more time drawing the light/shadow shapes accurately than anything else. Hold off on blending the light and shadow shapes for objects until the very end of a painting, particularly for objects in the middle distance.When you have finished the rest of the painting you may discover that you need much less blending than you thought

.

In the figure, there are two major light/shade color pairs:

♦the flesh of the face and the arms

♦the shirt

In the figure of the shop-keeper, there are three color pairs:

♦the face and arms

♦the shirt

♦the trousers

Blending and drawing

Example “Boating Trip”

Example “Market Decisions”

get the shape of this line accurate