A Glen in Antrim
One of the worst sunburns I ever got was in Ireland. Imagine that! But I was happily engaged in plein air painting, and thus I did not notice the slowly creeping spread of the red over my skin until much later when it started burning.
That’s how “engaging” engaging with nature can be…until it’s too late LOL
Now to the real subject of this post….
I’ve recently gone back through our forum and tried to find all the discussions around value patterns and making preliminary sketches or tonal studies to block out those patterns. I have to confess that I’ve not paid much attention to that sort of thing in the past, but I can see how it would help to establish a good composition.
But…..there’s always a “but,” isn’t there?
One important value from our forum has been to make me rethink several things about my painting practice. I like very much that fellow members are rethinking these things together.
This painting is what I presume would be called a “high key” painting because it does not have what would be called a strong value pattern. My question would be does it suffer from not having a stronger value pattern? Would or could it be improved by stronger darks? Would more contrast give it more drama and more visual impact?
I imagine if I made a gray scale version of this painting it would be rather insipid…maybe even boring, certainly not striking all in grey.
I’m just trying to think through all these suggestions about value patterns.
If I were to paint it again, what would you do?
This is 12x16 inches on an Arches block of 140# CP.
Critique and suggestions welcomed!
Grainne- a very nice painting. Your water and sky are great. In looking at it, I’m having a hard time discerning the light source. Is it off the right? Which would make what appear to be shadows on the river bank make sense. If to the left, as the right hillside seems to indicate then I think simply using slightly darker values on the left hill would help. Maybe it is like I seem to paint and that is light from the rear. Bad habit because shadows and shading are hard to come by, but it seems like that is what I always paint. In which case, most everything will be roughly the same tone. Hope this helps.