Local Color, Value and Light

It's been a busy few weeks with work, travel and the start of a new art class, and thus my postings have been rare. Okay, they've been nonexistent. But that changes with tonight's post, which shows work from my first assignment in Laurel's "Color and Value in Still Life" class at Laguna Gloria.


After warming up by painting a simple value scale from white to black, the first phase of the main assignment was to paint only the local values in any one of several still-life setups Laurel had arranged around the studio. That is, render the inherent lightness or darkness of the objects in one of the still lifes without showing any of the cast light or shadows that we normally use to distinguish shape and texture.

Next, we were asked — ever so sweetly by our wonderful teacher, Ms. Daniel — to now do another study, showing how light and shadow affect the local values of the objects.

Finally, we were to try one more version, this time including the local color of the objects in the lighted scene.

In case you were wondering, the spherical object you see is what used to be called a smudge pot, for some indecipherable reason. They were used back in the day, more or less as heavy-duty lanterns by road crews to light detours or road construction boundaries. And yes, I'm old enough to remember them. But that was in deep East Texas, where I wouldn't be surprised to still find them in use today. So I'm not necessarily that old. Just for the record.