Creating a Thumbnail

Focusing on your values is the best place to start when your thinking about doing painting. Often we get frustrated when starting a new painting with, where do I start, how do I accomplish this or that. Our values will help us to simplify our concept, and pull away all of the details that bog us down. If you need put your picture in black and white, this will help eliminate all of the color and some detail distractions. Then looking at your painting in value you can simplify even more. By looking for shapes in your picture, then map out a thumbnail of those shapes.

Creating a color mock up

After creating a thumbnail that you think would work (don’t spend more than 5 min). you can then create a color mock up to test out the colors. Having your picture in both B&W and color will allow you to compare your values. In this video, I go more indept into values and their importance when creating a painting. And how to do this with your watercolors.

Value Chart

Here is a value chart in both color and B&W to show you how your colors look with in a value scale.

Thank you all so much for your support and hope this information is helpful. If you have any questions let me know in the comments below.