Thanks a lot... you don't have to excuse if the video goes too long, the more time you spend helping us sharing your amazing knowledge the more we have to be thankful to you!
Thank you for such a realistic down to earth and informative video. It was such a relief to see how you blend and watch how you form the picture with the values. So so helpful with all your explanations. Never understood till now how to see values but now I believe I can now see better. I've never found the idea of painting a painting of values so interesting! Thank you for making this available for free also. Nowadays on social medias, so many artists post videos but due to editing, it's like they whipped up a masterpiece in a 15 minute lesson which can be horrifying!😄
You're welcome! And yes that's true, especially on Instagram when videos have to be so short. The reality is that it takes a lot of slow work to do this stuff well.
Paul, you're like a great Preacher. He all way has a sermon that no one want to stop listing to. Thank you for careing enough to video step by step. I don't comment much but I'm following you.
Thanks for posting this, so generous with your knowledge and very clear. It’s very helpful and I know will save me lots of frustration in trying to understand and apply values.
+Nina Jackson colour show coming this Thursday! The cat is fine thanks, the cold is dragging on. I'm guzzling lots of tea made with fresh ginger so hopefully my voice will be recovered by Thursday :)
Thank you so much for posting this excellent tutorial! I've been struggling with value for the past year or so. Progress has been painfully slow but you've given me much new information to work with. I really appreciate it.
Hi Paul ... I tried your advice to train on values and color. After a few days I allready can see an improvement on my paintings ... thank you very much !!!
Thank you for your videos. A wealth of knowledge. I tried working from still life images on my computer screen but found it very difficult to match values. Do you have any advice on working this way? Thanks
Excellent Video! Question on using the value checker: Q. Matching a light value or middle gray 1:1 from set-up to painting makes sense, but how do you use a value checker when the darks in the set-up are lower in tone than black paint, which is illuminated on your easel? When the range of value in your set-up is wider than your oil paint range, then checking values 1:1 would not work with an eye flick because the darks go beyond your oil paint range. What is your solution to key the painting to the set-up in a scenario when the range of tone in the set-up is several steps beyond your value scale as it is illuminated on your easel? Would not the value relations be solved by perceptual techniques via squinting or using a black mirror instead of a 'value checker'? Thanks for your work!
Excellent question, and unfortunately there isn't a single, easy answer. Mostly, there are three approaches to this problem. 1. Match the darks and accept that the lights in your painting will be darker than they are in the subject. 2. The opposite. Hit the lights, accepting that you'll run out of room in the darks. 3. Start in the middle and work out to the extremes. You might choose a different approach depending on the aesthetic you want. You can also change the balance of the values to give different effects. But that again is a complex subject that needs a lot of space to do justice to. There's a really good treatment of this in "The Practice and Science of Drawing" by Harold Speed (you can download that book for free from a Google search, it's out of copyright.) When using an exact matching approach like this, one way is to angle the card away from the light a little and measure the steps from the dark values to the middle value, than angle it toward the light and measure the steps from the light to the middle value. You'll need to compress the values of course, in order to translate them to the painting, but this method will give you a fairly even balance of the values and quite a realistic result. Hm, I shoudl do a video on it, it's hard to explain with words! I did a bunch of work to try and understanding this problem better years ago on my blog, you can see the posts here: www.learning-to-see.co.uk/munsell-tone-studies It's a fundamental problem of realist painting that gets glossed over far too often.
@@PaulFoxton Thank you so much for this very thoughtful reply and your link on the munsell studies is very good as well! I would love to see your video on using the value checker and keying the painting when you have time to make it. Also I would love to hear your thoughts on keying your paintings while outdoors. I can think of many circumstances in painting from life where using a value checker would be impossible, such as painting a backlit model on the beach or a sunset while standing under a tree. What are your thoughts in these cases? I remember "Hawthorne on Painting" saying to key your paintings purposefully higher on a sunny day so that when you bring them indoors they read as that sunlit effect (shadow masses at middle value 5 or even a step higher at 6 sometimes). Look forward to hearing more of your perspective and studying your videos. Thank you again for sharing your work and experience!
One thing no one has ever taught me, coming from an artist family, is the term value. Only after attending art classes cos I wanted to learn oils, did I get told that I needed them but I struggled. So first of all thanks a lot for this, I will be practicing this at home. I’ve currently suspended my classes until I come back from the uk (3months) so in the meantime... drilling
Thanks, I really hope this helps you! Getting to grips with value is a foundational skill for drawing and painting, and time spent developing that skill will never be wasted.
+Fabrizio Aldonne Just drew with them, layering them carefully one on top of the other till I got the value I wanted. It's very like mixing paint, but you do it all on the drawing. More like pastel, actually.
I'm am very new to oils so please forgive me..but is it possible to fix values after a painting already has lots of layers? or should I just try to paint it over on a new canvas? I've made a flat mess of things but I don't want to give up on it.
Hi Shirley, Sure, you can overpaint previous layers. The main thing to make sure of is that you don't use less oil in subsequent layers - i.e. don't use turps to thin the paint, and if you added oil to the previous layers, add at least the same amount to subsequent layers. This is the "fat over lean" rule, and is to stop your paint cracking as it dries. If you have a fast-drying layer over a slow drying layer, there's a danger that your paint will crack.
Heh. Messy but you can do cool things with them :) They smell, too, although like the smell. The thing is, though, the basics concepts are the same no matter what the medium is.
Tutorials that involve the teacher talking to computers and fiddling with technological issues and chatting with people....searching around for slides....yikes-I say yikes! Thank you for doing this valuable lesson (pun)...appreciate it -have given up color to understand values better.
I would so love your videos if they weren't such an incredibly inefficient use of time. The important info in the video could be 15 minutes. Same for most of your videos.
+Sunday Aito - its not a poor tutorial, if you do not understand the terminology, then go google it, the information is all out there. You are being given, for free, a very large amount of detailed info here which can be used to take painting to a very high level of realism. I find it very annoying that you can be so rude about my friend Paul's considerable effort and generosity in making this freely available for everyone. You are looking the proverbial gift-horse in the mouth.
+Paul Foxton I'm guessing this is the guy facebook.com/sunday.aito - he likes Simmie Knox (which is encouraging) so I assume he is interested in painting - so, Sunday, instead of getting off on the wrong foot with Paul, myself, and lots of us who are interested in realist painting, why don't you friend us on facebook instead? Sent you a friend request :)
Thanks a lot... you don't have to excuse if the video goes too long, the more time you spend helping us sharing your amazing knowledge the more we have to be thankful to you!
Thank you for such a realistic down to earth and informative video. It was such a relief to see how you blend and watch how you form the picture with the values. So so helpful with all your explanations. Never understood till now how to see values but now I believe I can now see better. I've never found the idea of painting a painting of values so interesting! Thank you for making this available for free also. Nowadays on social medias, so many artists post videos but due to editing, it's like they whipped up a masterpiece in a 15 minute lesson which can be horrifying!😄
You're welcome! And yes that's true, especially on Instagram when videos have to be so short. The reality is that it takes a lot of slow work to do this stuff well.
Great information, thank you Paul!
Paul, you're like a great Preacher. He all way has a sermon that no one want to stop listing to. Thank you for careing enough to video step by step. I don't comment much but I'm following you.
Thanks for posting this, so generous with your knowledge and very clear. It’s very helpful and I know will save me lots of frustration in trying to understand and apply values.
Thank you for helping me understand the values!! Can't wait for the color show!! Hope your cat is OK and you're over your cold! Great job!
+Nina Jackson colour show coming this Thursday! The cat is fine thanks, the cold is dragging on. I'm guzzling lots of tea made with fresh ginger so hopefully my voice will be recovered by Thursday :)
Thank you so much for posting this excellent tutorial! I've been struggling with value for the past year or so. Progress has been painfully slow but you've given me much new information to work with. I really appreciate it.
+boglake22 You're very welcome, thanks for taking the time to let me know you've found it useful!
Awesome! Thanks for posting. I have struggled with values for a while and this was really helpful.
You're very welcome!
Boots Zara Walken
Hi Paul ... I tried your advice to train on values and color. After a few days I allready can see an improvement on my paintings ... thank you very much !!!
Thank you, thats' so good to hear! You've made my day. Please keep in touch and let me know how you get on.
thank you so much for your help! I can't wait to get back to it!
Thank you for your videos. A wealth of knowledge. I tried working from still life images on my computer screen but found it very difficult to match values. Do you have any advice on working this way? Thanks
Great video. I wish we could've seen your palette more.
Excellent Video! Question on using the value checker: Q. Matching a light value or middle gray 1:1 from set-up to painting makes sense, but how do you use a value checker when the darks in the set-up are lower in tone than black paint, which is illuminated on your easel? When the range of value in your set-up is wider than your oil paint range, then checking values 1:1 would not work with an eye flick because the darks go beyond your oil paint range. What is your solution to key the painting to the set-up in a scenario when the range of tone in the set-up is several steps beyond your value scale as it is illuminated on your easel? Would not the value relations be solved by perceptual techniques via squinting or using a black mirror instead of a 'value checker'? Thanks for your work!
Excellent question, and unfortunately there isn't a single, easy answer. Mostly, there are three approaches to this problem. 1. Match the darks and accept that the lights in your painting will be darker than they are in the subject. 2. The opposite. Hit the lights, accepting that you'll run out of room in the darks. 3. Start in the middle and work out to the extremes.
You might choose a different approach depending on the aesthetic you want. You can also change the balance of the values to give different effects. But that again is a complex subject that needs a lot of space to do justice to. There's a really good treatment of this in "The Practice and Science of Drawing" by Harold Speed (you can download that book for free from a Google search, it's out of copyright.)
When using an exact matching approach like this, one way is to angle the card away from the light a little and measure the steps from the dark values to the middle value, than angle it toward the light and measure the steps from the light to the middle value. You'll need to compress the values of course, in order to translate them to the painting, but this method will give you a fairly even balance of the values and quite a realistic result. Hm, I shoudl do a video on it, it's hard to explain with words!
I did a bunch of work to try and understanding this problem better years ago on my blog, you can see the posts here: www.learning-to-see.co.uk/munsell-tone-studies
It's a fundamental problem of realist painting that gets glossed over far too often.
@@PaulFoxton Thank you so much for this very thoughtful reply and your link on the munsell studies is very good as well! I would love to see your video on using the value checker and keying the painting when you have time to make it. Also I would love to hear your thoughts on keying your paintings while outdoors. I can think of many circumstances in painting from life where using a value checker would be impossible, such as painting a backlit model on the beach or a sunset while standing under a tree. What are your thoughts in these cases? I remember "Hawthorne on Painting" saying to key your paintings purposefully higher on a sunny day so that when you bring them indoors they read as that sunlit effect (shadow masses at middle value 5 or even a step higher at 6 sometimes). Look forward to hearing more of your perspective and studying your videos. Thank you again for sharing your work and experience!
Great class 👏
One thing no one has ever taught me, coming from an artist family, is the term value. Only after attending art classes cos I wanted to learn oils, did I get told that I needed them but I struggled. So first of all thanks a lot for this, I will be practicing this at home.
I’ve currently suspended my classes until I come back from the uk (3months) so in the meantime... drilling
Thanks, I really hope this helps you! Getting to grips with value is a foundational skill for drawing and painting, and time spent developing that skill will never be wasted.
Where could I buy the white sphere, cylinder. cone and cube objects to paint from life?
Actually, you can make it yourself. You can find the introduction on google. I make mine myself and it worked well.
What do you mean by chalk and charcoal? You mixed them with oil or just drew with them? Thanks
+Fabrizio Aldonne Just drew with them, layering them carefully one on top of the other till I got the value I wanted. It's very like mixing paint, but you do it all on the drawing. More like pastel, actually.
I'm am very new to oils so please forgive me..but is it possible to fix values after a painting already has lots of layers? or should I just try to paint it over on a new canvas? I've made a flat mess of things but I don't want to give up on it.
Hi Shirley,
Sure, you can overpaint previous layers. The main thing to make sure of is that you don't use less oil in subsequent layers - i.e. don't use turps to thin the paint, and if you added oil to the previous layers, add at least the same amount to subsequent layers.
This is the "fat over lean" rule, and is to stop your paint cracking as it dries. If you have a fast-drying layer over a slow drying layer, there's a danger that your paint will crack.
Also did you make the thread grid yourself?
Yes, it's made from black foam board with thread attached with blu-tack. Nice and simple :)
Paul Foxton thank you. I have a big project ahead 😎
TRY F5 WINDOWS
You looks like David Leffel
Hah! Unfortunately I don't paint like him, though :)
Oh No you are Wonderful and thank you for your help to artists.
This is why I paint digital, cause this these oily paint are too messy lol
Heh. Messy but you can do cool things with them :) They smell, too, although like the smell.
The thing is, though, the basics concepts are the same no matter what the medium is.
Paul Foxton, they do smell good.
Tutorials that involve the teacher talking to computers and fiddling with technological issues and chatting with people....searching around for slides....yikes-I say yikes! Thank you for doing this valuable lesson (pun)...appreciate it -have given up color to understand values better.
I would so love your videos if they weren't such an incredibly inefficient use of time. The important info in the video could be 15 minutes. Same for most of your videos.
very poor tutorial. Have no clue what he is talking about.
+Sunday Aito - its not a poor tutorial, if you do not understand the terminology, then go google it, the information is all out there. You are being given, for free, a very large amount of detailed info here which can be used to take painting to a very high level of realism. I find it very annoying that you can be so rude about my friend Paul's considerable effort and generosity in making this freely available for everyone. You are looking the proverbial gift-horse in the mouth.
+Dave Corcoran There's nowt as strange as folk Dave, eh? Maybe he just saw the title and was expecting something about economics. :)
+Paul Foxton I'm guessing this is the guy facebook.com/sunday.aito - he likes Simmie Knox (which is encouraging) so I assume he is interested in painting - so, Sunday, instead of getting off on the wrong foot with Paul, myself, and lots of us who are interested in realist painting, why don't you friend us on facebook instead? Sent you a friend request :)
+Dave Corcoran Very nicely done Dave.
+Sunday Aito Please upload a better tutorial, thanks.