Value Study

So here's the latest on my oil painting glazing project. This is for the still life of the napkin, teacups, and the cranberry glass bowl (it's on its side leaning against the wall).

All I'm doing right now is the value study, in which you paint a black and white version of your painting. I keep working on it and it's pretty overworked at the moment.

I still need to make two parts darker, and one part less dark. Can you find them? The answer is below the image.

Less dark: the, um, evocative crease in the napkin that runs from the top middle to the middle right needs to be lighter. I should probably back off on the middle of the napkin where the cups meet as well.

Darker: Somehow I completely missed the shadow that the cup on the left casts on the cup on the right. I goes halfway up the cup. I drew it: you can see the line. Plus, I need to raise where the edge of the table is, otherwise the bowl must be hanging off a nail in the wall to be where it is.

Of course, I selected two cups which are essentially white, a white napkin, and a black background, so I'm going to be challenged finding some colors to glaze on top of what's there.

Comments

[KC]

You know, that's amazing. Lovely work.

[TheQueen]

KC - no, if I’d sat down and done it correctly the first time, that would have been amazing. I’m still spending 65% of my time correcting.

[KC]

Sorry, still amazing.

I mean, yes, I guess this is like the person who has just put on ice skates, stepped onto the rink, and immediately crashed onto the ice, looking, boggled, at the person who not only skates *in a line* *without falling over* and even looks graceful while doing it and *then* that skater also *jumps* and *spins around in the air* and lands and continues skating. And Non-Skater, while their attractive-but-distinctly-cold posterior slowly freezes to the ice, tells the passing Skater "that was amazing" and Skater tells Non-Skater "oh, that was nothing, that was just a single lutz, if I'd done a triple it would have been impressive" or something like that.

Yes, fine, there are approximately infinite reaches beyond where you are now, and you want to be somewhere up there and not here, but there's still a whole lot of distance between "cannot draw a teacup" and "can do a credible, albeit imperfect, value study of teacups and napkins, albeit with a lot of correction, in a new medium" (because this is the different glaze-y stuff that you haven't worked with before this, right? that don't behave the same as your other paint?). Sure! More practice will get your farther towards more-painting-less-correction. Sure! It's not perfect. But: it's impressive, anyway!

[TheQueen]

KC - well, I haven’t even started the glaze-y part, but I will take your compliment. It was good enough to post, even if there are errors. I might take another photo before I add colors and end up with blue napkins and orange teacups.

[KC]

Ah, okay! I thought it was all Mystery Goes On Weird Glaze from the canvas up and thus was slightly more impressed (because: new medium) than technically warranted, but: still impressive, still looking good.

So with the glaze you do black and white regular-oil-painting first and then glaze-colorize over the top of it? Oy.

Lots of photos of what you started with and how it looked when you applied it and how it looked when it dried seem like they'd be advisable with this stuff. I have the Derwent Inktense not-watercolor pencils, and the "dry" color is... not the same... as the color after you add water. So that is interesting. (but they are so vivid! and they're permanent, so you don't have to worry about the normal watercolor muddying effects so much! but still a bit mysterious to me.)

[TheQueen]

KC - It is totally possible I should have used the transparent glaze paints for the b&w - the black is transparent and it was beaded up over the opaque white, which sounds backward but according to the paint tube it is true.
I’m following this method, but I am too stubborn to take the class. https://willkempartschool.com/a-beginners-guide-to-glazing-an-oil-portrait/

[KC]

I can definitely assert that I have no idea. (except the whole "don't use water-soluble over fat/plastic without something in between" general layering stuff which is why some of the apartments I have lived in over the years had terrifically bad paint jobs - if landlords chuck a random paint over oil-based, it... does not work out very well.)

I am rarely enthused about video classes for anything, especially anything creative, so... yes. It also sounds from the comments like that video course uses very specific materials, which would bug me if I had different materials (unless the video provided equivalents). I'm also not big on Real Course Taking for creative stuff, *but* the critique and correction is worth quite a bit in theory (in practice, it seems to depend on how well your ideal lines up with the instructor's ideal (although some teachers are good enough at what they do to be able to be flexible and not apply haiku-writing-suggestions to a sonnet) and on whether they're competent at giving comprehensible critique that is usable by the student). But video classes don't usually offer feedback at all, sigh.

(That said, youtube videos carefully demonstrating specific knitting/crochet/sewing/? techniques are gold. But usually those are less than five minutes. And free. And thus you can skip from one to another until you find one that works well for you.)

[theQueen]

KC- yep, I did that for an hour last night. Also - at Mom's house for years we blamed flaking paint on the laytex/oil problem, and it turned out that paint also flakes when the temperature in an indoor area is not regulated.

[KC]

That is good to know re: temperature regulation - and maybe temperature regulation was a part of the Ancient Apartment paint problems, too! Our current Paint Interestingness is the paint trying to escape from our bathroom, which also happens while it is still wet, so I suspect that whatever-it-is under there is... something, although I don't know what. (we assumed the couple of white spots in the bathroom were just missed by the previous painters until we tried to paint over them with the [thank you previous owners of house!] tin of pre-mixed that-wall-color paint. And then the wet paint beaded up when applied. So... we've got E-Z peel, hard-to-restore paint in the bathroom, which, ultimately, I am basically okay with as long as it doesn't peel *too* much.)

[TheQueen]

KC - I would take a switch plate with the color painted on it to the hardware store, along with photos of the problem, to the hardware store, ask their advice, and then have them tinit whatever they recommend with those auto-color-matching machines.