Composing a painting is much more than just arranging shapes and values. Nobody understood this better than the almost forgotten artist and teacher, Edgar Payne (1883-1947). One thing consistent in Payne's work was his genius of merging shapes within value fields. Check out how he did that in his painting, The Harbor, Douarnenez, France If we reduce this painting to black & white, we can see more clearly two distinct value fields. A value field is a cluster of images grouped into a single value range. Take a
look. To make it even more obvious to see, I've reduced the composition to a notan, using gray rather than black to represent the shadow field. Now, look at the close value range among all those values within the shadow field. And you see the same idea in the light field (aka not in shadow), except here the value range is even tighter. No, that wasn't what was Payne was looking out, betcha. But it was his seeing how all those images could be transposed into two value fields. That transposing created a unified composition. Images, rather than
being defined separately, are merged visually within a close value range. That's the magic of merging shapes into value fields You can access the archive of all my newsletters at anytime by going HERE. |
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