The Three-Value Composition

Beverly's Barn, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen

I guess I could ditch the "painting tonally" part of my posts, as it has become redundant, and a lot of the things I'm talking about is not limited to the practice of painting tonally.

In a previous post, I talked a little bit about composing with three values. Many a great painters have preached along the same lines, including the great Howard Pyle. It's all about simplifying what we see out there, and organizing the information to just a few distinctive components; light, medium dark. It's just so much easier to break things down to three values than to say, ten. Sure, there are times when you need four or five values, but I don't think you need more than that. Five would be light, medium light, medium, medium dark, and dark.

I am talking about the initial BIG value organizations, the structure of a composition. There are of course lots of smaller value variations within each of the value spaces, but I don't worry about that at the initial stage. As I develop the painting, I introduce value shifts, but always careful to keep these shifts subtle enough that I don't deviate from my original "game plan", unless I have a very good reason to do so.

The above painting was done this week up at my friend Beverly's house. This is her barn. The weather was perfect, and there were any number of views we could have painted, but I couldn't resist the cute little barn.

Anyway, my three-value game plan looked something like this.

This image was actually done after-the-fact in Photoshop, but I typically do this in my sketchbook before I start painting (of course my thumbnails never look this tidy) I don't have the original sketch because I did it in Beverly's sketchbook. Not mine. But no matter, the point I want to make is the same. See how the painting relates to the three value image? Basically, everything lit is "light", and "medium" is the shadows which are receiving ample reflected and/or ambient light, and "dark" are shadow with very little reflected and/or ambient light. See how the 3v image "reads" well, even without any detail or color. Nor does it have a ton of in-between values.

After I know what I'm shooting for, I can go in with colors and paint to my heart's content, but always keeping in mind what the main values are, and not deviating from them. Toward the end, I started to break up the big foreground shape, and some details and accents were added here and there. I just do enough of these things to make my painting look like it has more complexities than it actually does. Color shifts will do that. Edge manipulation will do that too. But the core structure remains the same.

Painting is difficult as it is. I'm all for logical, organized way of looking at the process. You simplify the problem, and you've simplified the solution. You want to go simpler? Try a two-value composition.