Value

 A few months ago I went to a talk by Nathan Fowkes. He is a concept artist and painter and designs light and color for feature animations. He paints en plein air and draws his color inspiration from nature. He brought to the talk some of his sketch books, and I particularly liked his thumb size paintings, where all details are not present, except the most essential elements to form a painting, very abstract. I have painted en plein air for many years, but have never really seen a fellow artists paintings up close, and they were so inspiring.
In the talk he talked about the importance of value, it being the foundation of any painting, if the values are wrong in a painting, no colours can save it. He uses a Photoshop filter to demonstrate taking a detailed painting and removing its details and turning it into a blocky image with only the tonal values, it was easy to see what makes an image successful.
It's always the topic in every art book about the importance of value, I knew about it, I use it to evaluate my work at my job, but in my paintings? When I do a painting it's usually because I am inspired by the colours, painting a grey scale painting felt like a school chore. But I had been painting a couple dozen paintings of the same view outside the work window, I wanted to do something different, so I did one in grey scale after the talk.

8.5" x 6.5" - 2003 Aug. 13

To my surprise, it was so much fun! I also learned a lot from doing this painting. It forced me to only focus on the value, and the relative value of the different objects, and how they are different from each other. Not just that, it helps me to design/alter the image by separating the elements at different depth using value: popping the little people on the bright street, and making sure the building is darker than the tree near the bottom.

If I had painted this in colour I would have been more concerned about the colour accuracy and probably not whether the final colour has the proper value. I believe if one can do enough of these value studies and train himself to pay good attention to value in his paintings, it will make the colour paintings so much stronger.

The view from the lounge: