This experiment isn’t my idea. It’s based off something Jeff Larson does during his still life painting workshop at The Atelier. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I watched him do something similar during the workshop demo but wasn’t able to take the hands on portion of the workshop. So here’s my attempt.
Paint is limited in how it can reproduce values. I wanted to explore values and how they need to be adjusted in a painting to create the illusion of value relationships as they are in nature.
I started with the shiny gold ball, then added the matte one, then the deep red one. The idea being that I would have to change the value relationships. What appeared dark on the lighter ball would no longer appear as dark when the darker red ball was added. So I had to adjust the values a bit to get the value relationships to mimic nature.
I should have started with the matte finish ball since it doesn’t reflect as much light as the glossy one. I would have painted the matte highlight as light as I could. Then if I added the glossy gold ball next, it would have forced me to change the highlight value even more than I did. Oh well. Next time. I did have to adjust the darks though as I added the darker ball. I still got quite a lot out of it: understanding value manipulation, and especially the enjoyment of slinging painting around.
Here’s the finished study
Have a great new year!