After Design or Composition...Value is the star!

Hello Friends!

I've had this Montana ranch reference for a few years now.  I saw it today as I was going through my photos, and it put me right back on that road...seeing the white farm house up against the tracks and mountain, washed out in sunlight.  I had been painting in the small town of Plaines, MT nearby, while my husband fished the Clark Fork River with our boys.  I loved the little town of Plains, a one street town, with a beautiful double midnight blue train engine barreling through it. It had a small cafe where I had lunch and gorgeous vistas to paint.  On my way back to the cabin in the late afternoon sun, I saw this ranch and had to stop to take a picture.  

I had a definite mission in painting this.  I wanted the viewer to feel the heat of that late summer afternoon. I purposely designed the values to portray the light summer field and house as one large very high key shape. Value in a painting is the light and dark of the shapes.  Not just shapes of objects, but large shapes that can include smaller shapes.  High key is a very light value.  I also wanted to create rhythm with the values in the mountains, as well as directional diagonals that would draw the viewers eye to that farmhouse.  The farmhouse is the "star" of the painting.  Every painting has to have one star...or focal point.

I make little folders at the back of my sketch pads that hold various ratios of squares and rectangles.  That way, I can create my thumbnail to be the same proportion as the canvas that I have chosen to paint on.  It also allows me to try different compositions as well...be it square or a longer rectangle shape.  If you sketch you thumbnail on the wrong sized rectangle, your painting will not read like your thumbnail.

Here's a visual of my process.

One way to see if you accomplished your intention with "Values" is to take a picture and change it to black and white.

You can see that the farmhouse and foreground field are the same value.  Yay! 

PAINT FOR GROWTH, NOT PERFECTION

HAPPY PAINTING!