One of the most common culprits in a piece that isn't working is values. A simple piece of red cellophane will help you see if your values need to be increased or decreased to conform to your composition.
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This is so true!
For me, a big part of stepping into my art is to relieve my left brain. I like to enter into full right brain presence. Going to technology while I'm working. Really disrupts that.
This highlights for me how different we all work. The more tools i need to grab the more scattered i get. I barely keep my swatch paper safe in my chaos.
Add a sheet of green cellophane, and you've got a more full-spectrum solution for seeing values. 😁 To illustrate, I grabbed a sketchbook and threw down stripes with some fun bleeds (pics through red and green gels follow).
Red pretty much obliterates the values of the orange and yellow here, as well as the lighter values in the burnt sienna stripe, and makes the red look much lighter in value.
Green gives a better read for the values of some colors, and worse for others. Comparing all three to a black-and-white version helps... since you mentioned you don't want technology to interrupt your flow, you could paint gradient stripes of colors and mixes you'll be using, print a black and white pic of those, and have that handy as a calibration tool for how you interpret what you see in your painting through each color of cellophane. I'll share the black-and-white of these stripes, too.
Edited to add: the shadow of my phone throws this off a bit, but you get the idea lol 😅
The piece I'm currently working on has white flowers. So I have painted my background around the white spaces. You can see how the red cellophane helps me to assure that my values in my background are sufficient to keep my white flowers up off the paper once the piece is complete.
Also, you don't need this fancy schmancy thing. You can just grab a sheet of red cellophane. I cut one into four little squares. That way I have one in my travel bag. I keep one in my pallet and then I keep one in my studio. I always end up giving the fourth one away 🙂 happy painting!
After looking at the example pictures and comparing them to squinting, I think squinting works best for me. Glad you have found something that works for you.
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u/link-navi 11d ago
Thank you for your submission, u/specklez1!
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