School Work

Still Life for Class, 16 x 16

Here is a still life begun last Wednesday in Laurel's alla prima still life class. We started out blocking in values, using a dark neutral in various densities of paint, coverage, etc. Being a bit rusty, all my blocked in values seemed to come out the same — black.  Since we were to complete the piece for the next class and I couldn't reconstruct the still life at home, I continued on to full color, even though the correct value relationships hadn't yet been established. I struggled quite a bit with the values throughout the execution of this piece. Looking at this piece now, I think it is apparent that I never completely solved these issues, especially in the pitcher.

In any case, this turned out to be a valuable lesson, despite the less than optimal start, and maybe more so because of it.

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.