Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Value sketches


I'm constantly amazed by the generosity of artists. Some of the best advice I received very early on -- and am trying to follow -- was regarding value sketches to work out the lights and darks of a composition. It's also a great chance to work out structural issues before getting too far into the painting. A visual version of a two stave musical sketch before taking the dive into the twenty or more stave score of a full-blown music composition. (For those of you wondering -- a stave is one of those funny looking five-line dealies onto which composers scribble our little black dots...)

Seems like an obvious preliminary step, doesn't it? Apparently lots of people skip it.

Here is my two-stave sketch for a new painting idea...my first try at tonalism.....no title yet, but the subject is from a photo I took along the Sevier River in Utah.

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