ANNOUNCEMENT:

Something is always going on here in our world.  Right now, we're on the countdown for the February workshop on Simultaneous Contrast. Oddly, we still have three spaces available, so if you are interested in how simultaneous contrast can work in your painting beyond getting luminosity, check it out. Oh, by the way:  You'll learn how to get luminosity, too!

What comes to mind for you when you hear the words gradation and contrast?  My bet is that you might think that these two words describe something you have to remember.  But what if I told you they refer to action, that each of these is doing stuff within every painting.

Of course, we make that possible by things we do.  If you've been a subscriber for more than three years, parts of this post might sound familiar because I addressed it in 2022, but concepts like these deserve revisiting from time to time.

What do you see in this image? One thing for sure: you don't see any gradating or any contrasting either.  This is just a blank, blah, monotonous monotone rectangle.

Now, with just a bit of value contrasting and a little bit of gradating, we can get this.

The value contrast is about as close as any value contrast can be, so not much gradating can happen because the distance between the two values is so close. It feels lazy and incomplete because so little contrast and gradation are happening. It's like listening to a long, boring talk.  

But when we extend that range to a lot more values, we experience them contrasting and gradating, sometimes close, and sometimes to their maximum capacity.  We become more interested in looking at the image.

We can allow contrast to take the major role and give gradation a minor part and get another interpretation.

And we get another different interpretation when we allow gradating to take the major role.

We can think of gradating as a bridge that allows the eye to flow between values. And we can think of contrasting as a stop and go action that causes our eyes to pause at one value and go to the next.  One gets our attention and the other leads us from one place to another.

Working with gradating and contrasting like this can be a game changer!

Light and Shadow: The one thing that lets our eyes see.
Visual Movement: What our eyes do when images are visible.
Seeing Beyond the Image: The possibilities beyond just describing what our eyes see.
Freeing the Artist Within (Curiosity): Finding our individual interpretation to what our eyes are seeing. 
Composing:  Finding ways to put together all that we discover.
Drawing:  Searching the potential of images.
The Craft:  Continually forging our skills to visually communicate what we continue to discover with our eyes, mind and soul.

And the eighth:

The Art:  The results when all the above are working together.