Month 2, Day Two; Dark/Light Pattern

Block in for Long Shadowed Tomatoes,  24x24, oil on board

I missed the lecture for the second day, but had started my next painting last week. I was able to get the tomatoes blocked in but wiped the shadows off a number of times so decided to put them in thinner until I could get the shapes right. You can see the outlines of where I have been. I will miss the next two weeks so you will get a break from instruction. Here are my notes on dark/light pattern.

Light shape and dark shape-one shape will be a pattern (in my project above it would be the dark shape that is creating the pattern). Each shape should have different proportions within the bigger shape. The key thing to keep in mind is the uniqueness of each shape within the whole pattern.When defining the pattern it does not necessarily have to be the dominant shape (see Andrew Wyeth's Wolf Moon below).

Wolf Moon, by Andrew Wyeth. the light is creating the pattern that takes your eye through the painting, yet the dominant shape is the dark.

One of the two shapes will be more tied into itself which will aid eye-flow (or how the eye moves through the painting). In the painting of Andrew Wyeth's, the middle value of the hillside and shadow on the house tie into the dark shape. One way to think of this is that if the main pattern were cut out of contact paper, you could lift one corner and pull the whole shape off in one piece. The shape does not have to necessarily connect in one piece physically as long as it connects visually.

Only two values will be visible (as talked about in previous post). Gradation of values is okay, but that middle value will be tied to either the dark or the light and will not read as a separate value. Right now, even though my shadow shape is lighter than the tomatoes, it will be tied to the tomatoes as one large shape when I am finished. I did talk to Kevin about this today and he said it would be okay to keep the tomato color true to life, just to then keep the shadow that same value. I had planned on going rather dark red on the tomatoes to tie into the dark purple shadow. I think keeping the values lighter will actually be more of a challenge for me.