Know Your Values

When creating a portrait or any painting for that matter we want to feel a connection and an experience of harmony. I feel that response comes from being able to create a portrait that feels well balanced and truthful and the basis of this is creating from an empowered place. In order to do this it is crucial to learn the skills of how to create the illusion of form. The main foundation to creating the illusion of form is values. You have to know your values. How dark or light is a color? How do the values relate to one another in order to tell a visual story? How do we create the structure to place our values on? These are topics that we will explore in this class. We will begin with a sketch learning how to see shapes and break down the form into a kind of puzzle while simultaneously learning to understand and see in three dimensions even when we are working with a flat surface. After our sketch, we will learn to create an underpainting that I see as a scaffold for our final oil portrait. The opaque layer comes next and we will be painting in monochrome with a variety of darks and lights better known as values. I will be adding in a few other colors in the scheme we will be using, but you are free to use just one color with white if you choose to. I would also like to say that you can use acrylics if that is a medium you prefer because these principles apply to any medium.

This course is for anyone who is curious about learning how to see the portrait in a new light and to learn to create the illusion of form. You just have to be open and willing.