We asked Tom to explain why value studies are so important to him. Tom writes, “I never go anywhere without my sketchbook. When you record your impressions and emotional response to a subject as immediately as possible, your memories are documented, and your artistic voice becomes second nature. Because watercolor can be seen as a subtractive process, only white – the only light – in a final painting comes from the pure white of the paper itself. So what is not painted is just as important as what is. It’s critical then to identify the areas of lightest lights, darkest darks, and mid-tones. So for that reason, I always urge students to do these quick [value] sketches. They can be great just as they are, but others can be so helpful in acting as value and compositional “roadmaps” for final studio paintings. The numbers in this example are what I show to my classes to illustrate values in the simplest possible terms: 1. the lightest, 2. mid-tones, 3. the darkest . The point is to show values – not specific objects – as abstract compositions of shapes without getting lost in details. When you’re confident that you have a strong composition of shapes of darks and lights, and you know the areas of whites to save, you can paint much more quickly, intuitively, and with far more confidence.”
Below is Thomas W. Schaller’s value study (Beta Series, pencil and watercolor) and his watercolor painting, “Chapel at Rocamadour”.
* “Color gets the credit, but value does the heavy lifting,” is a quote from a blog post by Debby Kaspari, “The Value of Greyscale Studies” http://goo.gl/vGSn4
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Art League instructor Peter Ulrich demonstrates how to paint watercolor
in a limited palette. In this demonstration for his class "The
Watercolor Experience," he uses three colors: Daniel Smith Indanthrone
Blue, Da Vinci Cadmium Red Light, and Winsor & Newton Raw Sienna.
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