Compose a Painting Using Only Three Values

About Richard Robinson

Hi I’m Richard Robinson. I’ve been a professional painter since 2001. My claim to fame is only that I’m making a living as an artist and doing pretty well – something which I hear is not so easy to do, and I guess it does take a lot of work, but it’s work that I love doing.

I’ve been teaching painting nearly as long as I’ve been learning, and I enjoy helping other’s along the path as much as I enjoy learning from other artists. I started out in graphic design which is why I enjoy combining my talents in making these video lessons and putting them on the web. So far over 100,000 people around the world have seen my videos, which I think is pretty cool, and I get to meet a lot of them too which is even better.

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Hey Guys.  I am painting in my back garden today. I’ve got a little photo here that I have taken from over the harbor in Mckensie Bay.  I thought you might like to see this because what I am going to do today is design a painting in three values and I really like the layout of this just as it is.  But what I have decided to do is make it three values and make it, let’s see, my darkest value will be here and the tree so through that section and the boat and there.  And the second value , the second lightest value is going to be here, well it will be here and it will go to the dark value here.  And this will be the second value as well, and here, and here, here and little bits up here are going to be the lightest value.  So what I am going to do is mix up my colors and try very hard to stay within those three value ranges.

So here is the sketch ready to go on the canvas.  She’s a bit rough.  And the palette colors, very simple:  Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Red Light, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow Light and Titanium White.  And I’ve got walnut oil in there.

So, I haven’t bothered to make a sketch of this in 3 values.  I am going to work it out on the canvas because I think painting is a lot like a diary, a record of decisions.  So that’s what this is going to be today.

Ok, so what I’ve done is mix up 3 separate values: dark, medium light and a warm and a cool of each, and I am going to use those as a guide throughout the painting to try and help me stay within those 3 values and we will see if it works.

So here is the first block in.  I’ve got all the major values blocked in.  So I have broken the larger shapes up into smaller shapes and added some color variation as well.

Here is the finished painting.  I don’t know that actually trying to design it with 3 values was a good idea or not but certainly what did help me was making those grays at the beginning because I really tried to stay within those 3 values of those grays and having those big blobs of those premixed warm and cool gray really helped to keep the painting simple, keep the color usage quite simple and made it much easier to make grays because making grays is what takes the most time.

The one pitfall of premixing your grays like this would be that you don’t move far enough away from the gray so you don’t modify the grays enough with other colors and just be lazy and use what you have on your palette and you would end up with a very gray painting if you did that with not enough color variation.  So that is the only pitfall that I can see.

Anything that simplifies the painting process has the chance of making it less confusing and it sounds like a good idea to me.  So why don’t you give it a go.

Thanks for watching.  See you in the next one.