Understanding Value with Sarah Sedwick (Part 2 Mini), Ep.60 [Transcript]
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Kelly Anne Powers 0:00
Welcome to part two of my conversation about values with Sara Sedwick. In part two, we move from SolidWorks preparatory studies into how she thinks about value in her full color paintings. All right, here we go. For your students, when someone is moving like, alright, they got it. They did their three value sketch, it looks awesome. They love it, they do their five value painting. Oh my gosh, they still love it. They're so excited. And then they move into color. That's a big jump. So what are the biggest challenges that you see your students facing when they move into color? And where do they hit obstacles that may trip them up in that transition to color?
Sarah Sedwick 0:40
It's true, it's it's a shift, it's a mental shift. And I'm all about saying that the thumbnail sketch and the value study are not drawing practice, but they kind of are their purpose is not to be drawing practice. But you have already looked hard at this subject for quite a while at this point by the time you move into color, and you have muscle memory on board to from having done the sketch. So your transition to your painting should be made even easier. Because you've already looked at it so much and so deeply and done that drawing practice, even though I don't want to call it Drawing Practice it is but what kinds of struggles do I see, the main struggle that I think I am seeing with students is going dark enough in their color, it's pretty easy to go dark enough in black and white, especially if I only give you five values to play with and tell you to start with the second darkest, as you're beginning your painting. It's like locate your darkest darks, fill that in with four, that's your second darkest tool, and then just proceed up the value scale from there. But when we paint in color, that's not necessarily how we paint. That's not how I paint. When I paint in black and white, I start with the darks, I work toward the lights. When I paint in color, I start with my lightest most saturated color and work away from that saturation. So I can preserve that clear, strong beautiful color that I want. And also, that's the benchmark that I'm setting, where's my most saturated color, and I put that down while everything's clean. And then I do the rest of the painting. judging it against that it's a little bit of a different thing. One of the biggest struggles that I see is students will do a beautiful black and white value study in oils. And then when they come to color, they have difficulty both mixing the dark value colors, and also being bold enough to go darker. It's like I said earlier, when people encounter a value problem, a value relationship that's not aligning with life that's happening on their Canvas, the inclination most often is to try to fix that by lightening something. And that's a problem because things get chalky, you lose your hierarchy of values, you lose your access to the highlights, and everything starts to feel very pastel. That's what chalkiness is. And we talked about mud. And we talked about choppiness and you know, all chalky means is you added too much weight to something and now the value relationships are wrong. And you've lost your your Chroma. And mullet is the opposite mode is leaving Koroma by going too dark having too many things in the mix too many ingredients in the soup and you no longer can identify that color anymore.
Kelly Anne Powers 3:04
So it sounds like you are really and some of this is probably subconscious now based on your skill level. But it sounds like you are really aware of when in the painting, you are going to start adding white to your pigments. Yeah, yeah. So in your mind is to where you start adding weight or three is where you start adding weights. But for you sort of trust like you might use an opaque color, but you're not adding white to anything.
Sarah Sedwick 3:33
Well, yes and no. So there is often a little bit of white in even your darks unless you're painting, maybe with transparent pigments and kind of leaving some of those brushstrokes open to the under painting or to the canvas or the board beneath them. Your darkest darks in a color painting are probably still going to have a little bit of white in them. It's an important thing to talk about. I do a lot of pre mixing of my paint before I started painting. And I also paint high key a lot, which means I have a lot of light value stuff in my paintings a lot of the time including the negative space quite often, which means that I am using a lot of white mean you can't paint light value things without using white. But it's very important to get in the habit of knowing where that white is on your palette at all times. And like I said, even in the shadow colors, you probably are going to want some white particularly because with darker, cooler colors, adding a little bit of white is going to illuminate that Chroma when you just add a little bit of weight and so it's actually helpful. So knowing where your white is at all times on your palette and how much white is in your mixtures and with practice and thinking about it. It isn't that hard to keep track of it. I'm probably pre mixing maybe between eight and a dozen piles of paint in the center of my palette before I start working. And what I'm most concerned about regarding the white is it has to do with color saturation. Really Chroma that's where I run into trouble. It's not thought that I want to be sure I'm not adding any white. If I'm mixing for a shadow or for a dark at the painting, I want to be more sure that I'm not adding any white, when I'm mixing for a spot on the painting that is very chromatic like that light side of the orange like that light side of the lemon, I probably don't want any white in the mixture for that, maybe. And this is what can be kind of hard. That paint color where the the color is chromatic stays close to the tube, there aren't that many things mixed together in that paint. But then as we go down toward the shadow, we do want to mix in more things. And it's quite possible that I might have even a little bit of white in the color that I mix for a shadow on a lemon, because white is going to help me neutralize that mixture. Just a little bit of wit mind you, because I do want the value to get darker. I need the value to get darker. But yeah, the most critical place to keep the white away from is where you want your colors to be saturated.
Kelly Anne Powers 5:53
Right? Because when we're first starting out, we think of white as a Lightner. And what I hear you saying it's like yes, it also is an option is a way to help lighten your paint. But for you you're really thinking about it as a chroma issue.
Sarah Sedwick 6:07
Yeah, if you want to lighten warm colors, one of the best things to do is to start with maybe a little yellow, try yellow first, a nice opaque cad yellow or cad yellow light. Adding a little bit of that to red, for example, is a great way to light in red. If you add a little bit of white to your red, you can get a little bit of a pink outcome, aren't you, if you don't want if you want light red, that's not pink, try a little bit of yellow. And then what you do is you just darken the darks accordingly. Darken the darks to make those light value chromatic colors feel lighter. The eye reads Chroma as light. And that's why it's tricky to really understand just how dark something like a saturated orange or a saturated red really is think about painting a red delicious apple, there's probably not any white in the red that you're using for the lightest spot at all. Or also it would be pink. And so you have this paint this red paint that's pretty close to the tube pretty close to maybe straight cadmium red. And then you darken your darks to make that feel like human eye experiences. But we don't see any color in the dark I mentioned going out in your garden in the night, you know, you've got flowers out there, but you may not be able to tell what color they are. So we don't see color in the dark. And so we read Chroma at like light. And this is how that can benefit us. So we all maybe we all don't know what reflected light is, but we probably do. reflected light is light that lives inside the shadow. So you've got a sphere and you've got the shadow side of that sphere, there's probably light bouncing up from the ground into the shadow. And that's reflected light light that's getting reflected off the ground light that lives in the shadow. And so what I really like to do is paint reflected light, not by lightening a paint color unnecessarily of that shadow side, not just taking my shadow mixture and lightening it with some weight, but actually making the reflected light, more chromatic than the color that I painted the shadow side with making it more colorful, not lighter. And the eye experiences that as light. That's a wonderful trick for adding more color into your paintings.
Kelly Anne Powers 8:03
Do you think for someone who is working on getting values, right? That pre mixing at least starter pools of color helps that and why does pre mixing help an artist focus on value. So pre mixing
Sarah Sedwick 8:17
is not everybody's cup of tea, a it takes some time and many of us we've got our canvas ready, we've got our subject set up, we just want to get in there and start painting. And for me time spent mixing really is time spent painting, you are going to spend that time somewhere along the line. If you're going to brush mix, if you're going to mix every brushstroke all the cards one at a time, as you're going along, you are going to spend that mixing time just sort of spread out through the painting process. Or you could take some time upfront 10 or 15 minutes in pre mix some colors of paint and save yourself that time later. So it's not paint by numbers, though I'm not pre mixing and then just say okay, well this I mixed for this spot this I mix for this spot. And then first you have to remember what you mix everything for and then it's kind of takes all the fun out of it. And I'm mixing a general starting off place, I want to make something for the light and the shadow of all the major hue families that I see in my subject. So let's say I've got a lemon on a blue plate, I want to mix lemon, the light lemon in the shadow, I want to mix blue plate in the light blue plate in the shadow. And along the way, I'm probably going to hit it on some mid tones. And as I say, as I'm pre mixing, if it's beautiful, I tend to keep it even if I don't really know what I'm going to do. color mixing is not a science and it's not a recipe book. And those are both things that are wonderful about it. But as far as comparing my values when I'm pre mixing I absolutely am. So like I said I want to mix something for the light and something for the shadow of these colors that I see and I can compare them to each other on my palette. I mixed on a white palette. And that's also not everybody's cup of tea people mix on wood pallets people mix on gray palettes there is no right or wrong. Most artists use what they use because that's what their teachers used or that's just what they got used to. At some point. You know there isn't any right or wrong. No matter what kind of palette you're mixing on. You can Use the palette to judge your values. So I mix on a white palette, I'm just very used to that, I can compare my mixtures to the white of the palette. And sometimes I will even take a mixture and swipe it up next to my Titanium White, particularly if I'm mixing for white back to that white bowl with the specular highlight on it. If I'm mixing for the light side of that bowl, I have to know that it's dark enough that my highlight will still show up. So I mixed that paint and then I maybe will swipe a little bit of it next to my Titanium White pile. And just just to test it, you know, your palette is the control panel for your painting. Now it's a tool, use it, make sure it makes sense to you before you proceed. And the one way that I do that is as I'm pre mixing, if I'm mixing for the light side and the shadow side of one object, I keep those mixtures together, I call it color clouds. So I'll have these areas, these kind of zone in the center of my palette where I mix, you know, light stuff and dark stuff for my orange light stuff and dark stuff for my blue plate. And those are together. So it's easier for me to remember what I mix each thing for. And I also want to say back to the paint by numbers thing, one of the tricks to keeping color clean. And also one of the tricks to having that really luscious sense of loose painterly Ness in your work is going back to the palette a lot. How many times do you touch the canvas in between trips back to the palette to reload with paint is huge for loose painting for painterly painting for luscious rich feeling paint application, you have to go back to the palette a lot. And every time I go back to the palette, almost every time, I'm trying to do something a little different. So let's say I'm painting the light side of my orange and I'm dipping into my orange mixture that's very chromatic that I made, maybe I will do like one or two brush strokes with that very saturated orange that I mixed. And then when I go back to the palette, maybe I'm still visiting that same premix pile. But I'm going to bring in a little something else with my brush as I'm loading it. So I go back to the same pile, but I amend it. And so it isn't that every brush stroke is different, but most of them are different. And of course, I'm mixing between my premix piles as well, let's annex for light and I mixed for the shadow. And then I want that mid tone, why not just mix those two together with your brush. So I pre mix with a palette knife, and then I brush mix as I paint. But having that starting point, those pre mixtures, it has a lot of benefits, it has a lot more benefits than I've even said here,
Kelly Anne Powers 12:29
when you're doing those subtle changes to the color, you're still making sure that you're keeping in the same value family.
Sarah Sedwick 12:36
Yeah, I want to be pretty clear about whether I'm painting in the light or painting in the shadow at all times. That's really the important thing to keep in mind. Because if you've mixed some colors for the light side of your object and some colors for the shadow side of your object, and then you start painting. And a lot of those best laid plans kind of go out the window because you're painting and you're having fun. But if you notice that you're painting in the shadow family, and you're grabbing paint from the light mixtures, red flag, and this happens, and it's back to that thing with the reflected light very often because reflected light, it's light that lives in the shadow and it is surrounded by dark. And because it's surrounded by dark, the more we look at it, the lighter it starts to feel to our eye because of contrast. And the tendency is to reach for the light value paint to paint that light which feels so light to our eye. The trick is you have to zoom out and really be compare it you have to be comparing the shadow side to the light side at all times squinting, because if you only look into the shadows, that reflected light is going to start feeling lighter and lighter to you. So it takes practice. And it isn't something that you can read your way into unnecessarily or you can't listen to me talk about it unnecessarily 100% Get it, I don't think I did not get this stuff from a book, I got this stuff from painting a lot and observing what happened. And that's the good news. And the bad news is I can hit you with a magic wand and make you understand reflected light. But if you do 100 paintings, you're gonna start to really, really understand it at a deep level. It's fantastic.
Kelly Anne Powers 14:09
And again, this is complicated. And I don't mean like a person can't figure out how to do it. But that when we look at objects as painters, we think like oh, well, it's just an apple on a plate. What's so complicated about that. But it turns out, there is a lot going on in even the most simple painting setup. And what I hear you saying is that you have a process that honors that complexity, gives it a place to figure out so that you can enjoy the painting process like you have a lot of fun painting, and is part of that because you have figured out places to figure these things out so that you don't have to be overwhelmed with them later.
Sarah Sedwick 14:49
Well put Yeah, I think about it like planning a party. You want to plan really carefully so that when the day of the party comes you can relax and enjoy it and that's the painting part is the party and I think it's a a lot more fun when I know where I'm headed. Yeah, I pre mixing colors as part of that and planning my values. As part of that. Like I said, I do not do this process for all my work, but I tend to enjoy my work more and have a higher proportion of successful outcomes. When I do preparatory sketches, they do not have to take a long time. That's that's actually a challenge is when people start drawing, you know, they tighten up and they want to really start rendering and thumbnail sketches, and even preparatory black and white value studies in oil, there's not the places to necessarily start rendering. If you see my black and white oil studies, I'm not crafting forum quite so much. It's rudimentary over time, you get a sense of these kind of things as tools. And one of the things that you're figuring out is how much how much or how little do I have to do for this tool to be useful to me. And for me, that's a pencil sketch with Sharpie, and maybe I spend 10, or 15 minutes on it. And that's enough for me to figure out the things I need to figure out. One obstacle that I do see students run into is they get very detailed with their thumbnail sketches. And that's not only time consuming, it's not that helpful. It's not drawing practice, like I said, the kinds of things that we're investigating and figuring out those decisions don't get made by rendering form, what we need is the format, the shape of the canvas, where things are going to be cropped, where's the focal point going to be? Where's the darkest dark? Where's the lightest light rendering form? Is for later that's for color painting?
Kelly Anne Powers 16:30
Well, then, yeah, it sounds like then, because we've been sort of talking about the value goals for each of these steps, then what are your goals as they relate to value for the color painting itself?
Sarah Sedwick 16:42
Well, I want really beautiful color in my paintings definitely do and I want to be taking some risks with color and having some fun with color, maybe doing some things that aren't quite correct. What are my value goals, I want to keep that program running in the back of my mind, even while I'm getting all carried away with color, I do want to still keep that value program running. Meaning I need to make sure that I have a little bit of the whole value scale presents in my finished color painting. And it's as easy as just periodically, kind of checking in with your work, stepping back from it, squinting at it, looking at it next to your black and white value study, which will be a much more simple version. Because in color, we have access to the whole gamut of values, lots and lots of them. And we can simplify those two, I think one of the decisions that I use these preparatory studies to make is, where am I going to let things go? How am I going to choose my star players and my supporting characters? And what am I going to do to those supporting characters to make sure that they don't steal the scene? How am I going to simplify them? How much work can I let go of detail those kinds of things. But as far as what my value goals are, for my finished work, I want it to not only be colorful, but I want it to have wall presence and wall presence is not created by beautiful color. It's created by value contrast,
Kelly Anne Powers 17:56
you mentioned value hierarchy to someone who is just getting started in painting, what is value hierarchy, and then what makes strong value hierarchy.
Sarah Sedwick 18:09
So value hierarchy is really important, really important. And it goes back to the questions. I'm initially asking myself both while I'm setting up my still life. And while I'm doing sketches, value studies, I'm asking myself, what's my lightest light? What's my darkest dark? And what is my strongest contrast? So those first two questions, what's my lightest light, and what's my darkest dark, that sets the parameters for the hierarchy, that's all it is right there, you find those spots, and then you make everything else in the painting fall into line in between those spots. So if you've already decided where your lightest light is, it's kind of like all your other decisions regarding lights have to get run past that they have to get run past that spot before they can be correct. So that's the hierarchy of values in your painting. And then there's conservation of values, which I also mentioned earlier, and that's really keeping an eye on your lights so that you will have room for your highlights when you get there. A lot of painters lead with the highlights, which is an interesting technique. And certainly a way to to conserve them is to just put the highlights on first, you know, do your underpainting pop the highlights on and then make everything else subservient to that. And that's not really how I paint. Partly because I was raised that way I was sort of brought up with the idea that the highlights were the fun part. And so you really want to save them for last because it was so satisfying. But there's plenty of artists who eat dessert first and just jump in with that highlight and then use that as the benchmark they judge everything else against
Kelly Anne Powers 19:41
in those three value studies. Are you looking for places where you can mass values?
Sarah Sedwick 19:46
Definitely. Yeah, we talked about lost edges a little bit already. And massing values and lost edges are kind of related. massing values means that where you've got overlapping value areas that are close enough in value, you can turn them into one big shape that supports your other shapes. And we're arranging a puzzle made out of different shapes, different sizes of shapes of value. And it's pretty abstract. When you think about it that way, you know, we're if we're making a realistic representational painting, still, that value structure that's underneath at all is a fairly abstract idea. When we talk about massing value shapes, it can add a lot of strength to a painting. And one of my favorite artists for massing value shapes is take Ah, if you look at a god portraits, I think he did it better than anyone and particularly with his dark, sometimes with whites. But really with his darks, he would make these beautiful, strong, big, dark shapes that would just pop the portrait out in such a beautiful way. But it's a concept that can apply to any kind of subject matter. And so really, it's when two value shapes come together, and they are pretty close to each other close enough that they could be just nudged into being the same value, and then they can create a larger shape a larger shape than they would just be on their own.
Kelly Anne Powers 21:02
If students are struggling with that, is there a certain number of masked shapes that you try to get to? Or someone should sort of aim toward?
Sarah Sedwick 21:12
No, I don't think so. I really don't like to do numbers and painting together. So I know we talked about the 12345 value and how three is my favorite number. And so yes, there's that. But I do try to avoid numbers as much as possible. Rules of thumb are good for when we get into trouble. But we don't need to start with them. So if I say to you, you need at least five distinct value shapes on your canvas, then that's playing a certain kind of game with composition. And it's, it's valid. But I think for me, I prefer to make a composition, be really pushing myself to locate my last edges be pushing myself to just think about massing, and then I might take a step back from my value study and think to myself, what are the kinds of shapes that I'm creating here? Do I have a variety of shapes? Is it interesting looking on an abstract level, you can look at your sketch upside down, you can look at it in the mirror, you can take a photo of it. And you know, there's all kinds of apps and things for looking at value. As an artist, it's better for me to come at it from just doing the sketch first and then checking in with the sketch. And the kinds of questions that I'm asking myself are, have I created at least one last edge? Just what do the shapes look like? What kind of shapes Am I creating in my negative space? Where's my cropping? What's the big dark shape? That's pretty critical. That's silhouette that's being created. And it's subjective, and it's difficult to talk about. So I'm squinting and I'm looking at the big dark shape either in my still life. And then on my sketch, and I'm asking myself, Do I like this really? Like? Is this an appealing Rorschach test of a shape that I've created? That's kind of intuitive. And that way, if someone
Kelly Anne Powers 22:49
is struggling, and they can tell that it's value related? What advice do you give them of where to focus in terms of strengthening their value?
Sarah Sedwick 22:59
I mentioned earlier that one of the big problems that I see students having is that they are having trouble mixing dark colors. And sometimes it's difficult to even understand how dark things are. Your mind has fixed ideas about value sometimes lemons cut lemons are a real good example of this, you know, you cut up a lemon in your mind is gonna go it's late. I don't know why. But it does. Mind doesn't do. But actually a cut lemon, that meat is not light. It's not at all light. In fact, it's often darker than what's going on in the peel on the outside. But our mind doesn't think so. And so one of the biggest obstacles we have to overcome is our ingrained ideas about what things are and being objective with the world and squinting, squinting a lot squinting, and being objective, and being judgmental and comparing things, you know, judgmental, and comparing are two of the worst things that you can do to yourself psychologically, but in art, that's the name of the game. We're just looking at one thing, and then looking at what's next to it and saying is it darker or lighter, and then you go to the next thing and say is it darker or lighter and then when color comes in, and of course it's darker, lighter, warmer, cooler, and things get a lot more fun. But as far as difficulties when students are having difficulties with value relationships, I cannot stress that enough. It is almost always a better idea to solve a value problem by darkening something than it is by lightening something and there's almost always two ways to solve a value problem. The best way is almost always to darken. They say that the best way to lighten something is to darken what's next to it, because if you use white to lighten something, which is the default, you're knocking out Chroma and you are messing with your hierarchy of values, potentially,
Kelly Anne Powers 24:38
you can learn more about Sarah Sedwick including her new book at her website, Sarah sedwick.com and we'll link to everything in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us again today. Sarah.
Sarah Sedwick 24:47
Thanks for having me back. Kelli. It is always great to talk to you.