One of the most important things to get right in a landscape, figure painting, or still life, is to get the basic light and shade patterns working for a realistic three dimensional painting. For each local color there is one pair of color spots that you need to get right. These are the two adjacent color spots created by light and shade on the object. The good news is that you only need to get a few of these relationships right to get a great painting. The bad news is that it takes a lot of work to get them just right! This is because there are about a million potential combinations very least!. This 15 minute color study uses just a few light/shade color pairs: the hair, the shirt, and the legs and face. That is all that is needed to create a convincing illusion of form.

In this course unit

In this course you will learn:

• how to represent form using the two-value statement – a critical stage in painting a form. In fact for many paintings, where the subject is in the middle distance, this is as far as you need to go to convey the illusion of a solid form
• how to select a viewpoint for your painting that will maximize the illusion of form
• how to use geometric solids to make sense of the complex forms of nature
• how to use the squaring-off technique to make your rounded forms more convincing
• the critical principle of general to specific
• how light reveals form — the basics of light and shade

Total number of assignments: 5

Total number of pages: 19