Speaking of Art Blog

I recently read a very interesting art blog entry by my pastel friend, Vianna Szabo, www.viannaszabo.com. Her article was about choosing between making a painting mainly about value (shading) or mainly about color. If you choose value, then use your whole value range, super light to super dark and every shade in between. If you want to emphasize color instead, then keep your value range smaller and punch up your colors. Here is a link to the article: http://viannaszabo.com/blog/102945/choosing-value-or-color-for-a-stronger-painting

After reading the article, I looked back at images of my artwork. What I saw was that I am naturally drawn to rendering paintings and drawings that are all about value. Over the years I’ve done a few pieces that have a more limited value range, but those don’t excite me like a painting with a very wide value range.

So then I had to ask myself, “Have I always subdued my colors so that values were emphasized?” Hmm, I have to admit that sometimes I haven’t subdued my colors at all AND yet I had a wide value range too. Well, now that I see the benefits of choosing one over the other, I decided to try out my newfound knowledge in my next painting.

This is the finished piece: 

While I was working on the background and especially the foreground for this piece I continued to remind myself, “Subdue the colors, Mary Ann, subdue the colors. This is not about the color, it’s about the value contrast.” It took conscious thought, and I was very tempted to jazz up the railing colors even more, but I didn’t. I left the only small jazzy color spot as my center of interest, the red-orange-yellow stripe of feathers on the Red-winged Blackbird. I kept all the other colors in the whole piece very subdued, and in some spots the colors looked like what I would consider to be downright bland!

As I’ve mentioned and illustrated in previous blog entries, the true litmus test for strong value contrast in a painting is to remove all the color from an image of it using Adobe Photoshop. Would this painting hold up well to the test?

Oh my, yes! Look at the contrast! If I had used brighter colors in the background and foreground and even in other places on the bird, I would have run the risk of confusing the point of my piece. This one is all about values, NOT color.

Thank you, Vianna. I know this is dating me, but as an old Monkees song goes, “Now I’m a believer, yah, I’m a believer.”