Bird and Berries
Just a quick study that I did last night of a bird and some berries. I was trying to focus on seeing areas of light and dark rather than on details.
I think the berries and branches look OK aside from a few funky areas, but the bird is pretty flat. I wasn’t trying for realism, so I’m not concerned about that. For some reason, though, the light and dark values I used didn’t seem to build form or depth in the bird. It just looks like blobs of blue paint instead of like a three dimensional form.
Part of the problem is that I still haven’t quite developed the ability to see things they way they really are. When I look at the photo I used as a reference for this, I can see that I added color changes at the top of the wing that weren’t there in the photo. I think it is because my brain knew that’s where the wing should start, so it tried to paint the top of the wing instead of what I really was seeing, which was a dark mass with no defined edges.
I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but it is sometimes hard to see things the way they really are and to accept that you can’t see an edge when you know that one should be there.
I’ll definitely keep working on building form through the use of light and dark values, though. I think it is an essential skill that can make the different between flat, lifeless paintings or paintings that have a lot of depth and dimension.
