Exercises from week 2 of the Love Life Drawing study group. We continue to work on value simplification, this time with photo reference. The previous week, working from John Singer Sargent paintings, we had the benefit of an artist having already simplified the messy world into a composed work; we just further reduced them. Life presents all kinds of troublesome detail and deciding which of them are important to your “message” is a fuzzy space with no real right answers. Lots of wrong choices though!
Okay, so the mug picture jumped out at me the most of the 3 references. I did a pass on it, which is not what you see above, and it was awful. There was no clear subject, or even clear rules about what source value ranges would map into values in the painting. It was a chaotic mess.
I downloaded an app called Notanizer to help understand the underlying picture. In that, the downward reflection of the mug really jumped out at me. It became the star of the picture. So I revised the painting to focus on that. Lines are rough and all that, but that’s a product of not trying to keep it clean!
There was a second tier of challenge to go back to one or more of the references and refine it. Change contrast and/or reframe the picture to better describe your subject. We did a live lesson about how changes in contrast draw the viewer’s eye to a subject, and this was a good chance to think about it in a concrete way.
I returned to the mug and decided to punch up the reflection even more. I let the specular reflections on the mug itself stand out a little bit more, cropped the frame some, and removed the faint relections of the mug in the window’s lower left corner. I’m pretty happy with how this came out.
