Fellow thick paint enthusiast and painter José from Spain recently wrote me and asked how to use the grayscale in the field. I thought it was a great question and made the following video to help explain the process.
I hope you find it useful.
Brad Teare — August 2014
Hi Brad, I have a nine-scale value finder like yours after seeing you use this some time ago and find it useful. I have a general question that I am hoping you, and some of your regular followers might comment on. Are there any "exercises" you do to improve certain aspects of your painting? And thinking back to when you only had a year or two of painting under your belt (my situation) where there any exercises then that you found helpful in improving things like color mixing, reading and missing values, improving your edges, etc. Seems I can find tons of blogs and info about how artists themselves paint, but a lot less about how they practice or improve beyond just painting more often.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
That is an excellent question, Tom. Worthy of a whole blog post. But to get you started one thing I did was carry a nine value grayscale with me wherever I went. I would try to guess what the values of various patches of color I randomly saw. It was a good exercise to expand my observational skills.
DeleteI also made a series of color charts as suggested by Richard Schmid. Some people find that useful. I didn't really feel I gained anything by doing it, though. It did help me learn how to use a palette knife since I used a knife to apply the color.
Does that help?