Value Thumbnails 2

Top: pencil, 2012
page 11" x 8.5" (27.94cm x 21.59cm)

Bottom: Black ink, 2012
page 11" x 8.5" (27.94cm x 21.59cm)
NSF

Here are a couple pages of thumbnails.
The benefit of thumbnails is you can immediately see the stronger designs, throwing out or improving upon the weaker ones.

The idea is to use only 3 values and focus on the design or arrangement of lights and darks as a whole.
A dark, a mid tone and the white of the paper usually, although sometimes I will use a fourth value by indicating the next value from white.

A couple of the pencils have 4 values which is ok provided you don't lose sight of the original purpose of doing them. In this case it was to identify where the brightest lights would be, the sunlit sides of the white tanks in the third row down and bottom left last row. In this way I am refining the lights a bit more and can be sure the shapes within the lights work against the compositional whole.

The bottom nocturnes, painted with a brush in ink, force you to work very thoughtfully and direct since ink goes down dark and permanently. I like doing these for that reason, it exercises a different set of (mental) muscles. The challenge is to not over think them and lose the freshness.

Using a brush means I can lay down wide swaths of blacks quickly and not get too fussy. Perfect for doing nocturnes.181

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End of the Line?

"Warehouse (w/ Lone Train Car)"
oil on panel, 2010
5" x 7" (12.7cm x 17.78cm)

A warehouse near the LA Harbor. A warm bright day. The old train car sits at the end of the tracks, huddling against the side of the cool toned warehouse, it's skylights like giant ice cubes.

The tracks in the lower right curve away in a different direction, seemingly avoiding the outdated rail relic. Has the train car been forgotten? Is this the end of the line for it?82

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Clarity

"Rails, Bridge, Refinery"    SOLD

oil on panel, 2009

8" x 10" (15.24cm x 20.32cm)

For a small painting I managed to squeeze a lot of info into it. Some call it detail, I prefer to call it clarity. It may be, but I'm not loading up the image with detail just for detail sake. It is a matter of articulating really. Clarity speaks differently than mere detail. Clarity is an Ansel Adams print, detail is, for me at least, description without much to say.

In this image all the crispness, clarity (or if you must... detail) is jammed into the upper left corner, the foreground is left, in relative terms, with much less. The edge treatment in the foreground slightly softer too.

The bridge is on a downward slope to meet the visible tracks around the corner, which break sharply to the right. All the 'first reading' lines converge and compress in the upper left corner taking your eye's first to the densely packed refinery then around the corner to the unseen merging of tracks which is supported by the 'secondary reading' lines of elongated shadows angling towards this merge.

The slightly tilted horizon also contributes to the rush toward the upper left corner as well as giving the image an edge of tension. 22

Click on image for larger view