The Value of a Value study: Greyscale!

I know, you're going to yab me about the title. Hey, I never said I was super witty or something, lol. Btw, shout out to GRR Martin for the Game of Thrones "Greyscale" call-out (write faster dude!)

What's a value study? Well, it's something I don't see a lot of artists in these parts do, but it is CRUCIAL. VITAL. IMPORTANT. Any other word I can capitalise, so you get the idea that you should grab a pen and paper and take notes.

So, value studies are important, because they teach you how to represent things 3-dimensionally (really important for Representational Artists), otherwise it looks flat. It shows you how light and shade affects an object and shows its form. It can be used as a powerful tool for Design and Composition. It is hard to see properly when drawing from a picture, because most cameras, even the expensive ones, compress values, and then your drawings/paintings always look flat (cough Pencil artists in Nigeria cough).

Most people are very familiar with 3 shades: Light, Medium and Dark. As a professional, you should be able to identify Values to upto to 10 shades (yup). Here's a tonal bar to start you on your way (make yours btw).

courtesy Atelier Atlanta

And here is one of the most important exercises you should do: grab a white object, a ball, a container or anything. Take a lamp and light it from one direction. Draw/paint what you see. Repeat. Repeat till you start seeing tones everywhere. Here's mine:

value sketch of a container, pastel on paper

This exercise is important and you can and should use any medium. Here are more examples.

David Lobenberg, watercolour value sketch

Twi, value study

Jaime Treadwell, oil

David Ebben, cast painting, oil

 You can use any colour, as long as it is a monochromatic painting/drawing (y'all know what Monochromatic is, bah?). Btw, I arranged my pastels like that, to further teach me how to strengthen my value work.

My pastels in colour

same pastels, just shot them in black and white

You can see that, in black and white, they read like a Tonal bar. Neat, huh?

Well, go explore, my lovelies! Happy Painting season!

The Art of the Conté Drawing

Hello m'lovies.

How have you been? I'm going to start a  products review series of posts, as I think it's important we know what we use. Knowledge is power, or so I've been told (lol).

Conté is a type of drawing chalk, packaged in France in the 1700s by a man called Joseph Conte but artists have been using it since the time of the Renaissance (Michaelangelo, Da Vinci and co all used it to draw). For me, it's a lot better than a Graphite pencil, it has nice colours and is smooth to use. They are a lot like pastels but harder and because the name "Conté" is trademarked.a lot of companies call them "compressed pastel". It has just gotten popular here in Nigeria though.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing, before 1926

Michaelangelo, 1550s

Susan Lyon, 2014

I reviewed a few brands I got recently in Lagos. They are the General's compressed pastel sticks, Conté a Paris (the original brand) and Rembrandt Carre Crayons.

swatches of the colours and brands I have

From top to bottom: Rembrandt, Conte a Paris and General's

I did these quick studies of paintings, to show you what they could do. Nice, no?

Finally, here is my own original work, I spotted this dignified elderly gentleman at National Arts Theatre and insisted on doing a drawing of him, using red Conté.

I really like them and I would urge you to try them out, and you can also mix them with charcoal too. So go have fun!