Hello Steemers!
Welcome to another week of Art School! – Week 3 - !! We made it..
This week we are going to follow through on the previous week by staying on the subject of negative space but now we are going to add in ‘value grouping’.. It is sort of what we did last week with the simplification of portraits.
No we are stepping up our game! It becomes a tad bit more difficult!.. I hope you are ready!
I also hope.. That you (if you participated in the previous weeks) pick up exercises from those weeks and redo them this week..
So you can see if something changes.. if the speed or accuracy increased or that you are now able to just make it look a tad bit better than last week/s!
Please do know that you can join the art school on every week! There is no entry point.. If you feel like jumping in with everyone else.. Please feel free!
I do have to note that if you join in.. please do the homework.. all of it or at least most.
It is very hard for me to give any meaningful feedback when you just do 1 thing. ☹
Alright!
Let’s get to it!
Last week we sort of reverse engineered a portrait.
We went from a photo back into simplicity!.. Simple shapes of value!
This week we do the same but instead of lines we are going to use values.
Which will hopefully make things a bit less abstract for some of you! :)
As an example:
I want you to take a photo (can be black and white.. perhaps easier)
And create a the shapes in their own value that make the face.
The portrait on the left is actually pretty much the same as the portrait on the right.. It is a better of refining but it 90% there.
Another example of how the homework can look:
So what I did here is to take the simplified portrait, take those shapes and group the together in the right value range.. now you see i have almost created the same image as the photo.. but just by the value shapes.. No need for details on how to draw an eye or a pair of lips.. You can get really close to realism without ever even knowing or trying to understand how you draw an eye..
That really only matters when you want to draw it from mind.. Then understanding is key.. But for now we are not going there yet!!
As a next exercise we are going to do the same but with a still life object..
I am going to show you the steps on how to approach this.
(as im currently packing and moving soon I didn’t really have a nice way to set something up so I took a photo.. I encourage you strongly to just put something down in front of you and draw it!)
I took this photo from the internets!
I first start off by creating a negative space drawing of the thing.. I draw the outline of the pot and table it is on resulting in something like this:
Step 2 is for me is to fill the shape with a base value! .. The base value is the overall value from the object RELATIVE to its surrounding..
The overall scene/photo here is fairly dark.. there are only a few highlights and even those are not 100% white.. So the base value was around 80% black..
Step 3 for me is to find the dark shapes in the overall image. I paint those in the pot, the table and the background.. All at the same time.
TIP - When working on an image try to work on the whole image at the same time.. don't lose yourself focussing on just 1 bit.. it will make 10 times as hard to eventually bring it all together in 1 cohesive image!!
Step 4 is to paint in the lighter values.. As you can see MOST of the base value is still there.. The lighter values I am painting in right now are NOT the highlights! We leave them for last! .. Just as the dark shapes, I now try to spot the light shapes and paint those into the picture.
At this point I turn of my linework layer or have drawn over it so it almost disappeared!
Step 5 is for the highlights!
The image you see is not fully rendered and cleaned up.. This took about 10 minutes for me to paint.
But this is the perfect base painting for me to start rendering and cleaning up so it becomes a full beautiful piece!
I hope this helps! (if you have any questions please feel free to leave them below or contact me on discord 
This weeks HOMEWORK!!!
-- Paint AT LEAST !! 1 Value grouping portrait!! FOR every 2 EXTRA - I will send you 1 SBD
-- Paint a still life in the way described above! (please do save out your steps so i can see the progress!)
For every extra still life i will send you 1 SBD!!
GAME ON!!!!
Do you best! <3
Cheers
Rogier