Know Your Values

When creating a portrait or any painting for that matter we want to feel a connection and an experience of harmony. I feel that response comes from being able to create a portrait that feels well balanced and truthful and the basis of this is creating from an empowered place. In order to do this it is crucial to learn the skills of how to create the illusion of form. The main foundation to creating the illusion of form is values. You have to know your values. How dark or light is a color? How do the values relate to one another in order to tell a visual story? How do we create the structure to place our values on? These are topics that we will explore in this class. We will begin with a sketch learning how to see shapes and break down the form into a kind of puzzle while simultaneously learning to understand and see in three dimensions even when we are working with a flat surface. After our sketch, we will learn to create an underpainting that I see as a scaffold for our final oil port