This week I started with the Love Life Drawing study group program. Each month we will focus on a particular skill with guided exercises, feedback, and QA sessions. This month the goal is learning about value reduction — simplifying the shapes of light and dark that make up an image. Control of value has a great deal to do with the sense of composition in a painting. I have been trying to reduce values all along, with little success; I keep getting hung up on detail. In his most recent live session, Kenzo outlined the basics.
These exercises took John Singer Sargent paintings as reference and challenged us to simplify them down to 4, 3, and 2 values. Sargent was a true master painter. Many artists learn by studying his work. We were to pay attention to how many light sources there are, where there are form and cast shadows. In the above exercise you can see that I lost confidence on the 2 value version and added back in some additional detail to pick out the figure.
