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The Use of Value Sketches in Digital Watercolour Painting
The Use of Value Sketches in Digital Watercolour Painting Many of the painting books and online art instruction sites recommend doing a Value sketch and working out the value, and shapes in painting before working out the colour. I’ll have to admit I only do it occasionally. Funny thing is, the ones I have done them for are the better paintings (in my opinion)…so why don’t I always do it? Well, because often I can’t make it past that part, and I start adding colour thinking I may as well…It’s starting to sink in that, if a value sketch doesn’t work, the finished painting won’t be right either. So, I have done one for a painting I’m working on. It is of typical northern Ontario small dirt road. Wildflowers grow on the verges. Tall coniferous trees offer patches of shade from the hot sun. You can hear bees and other insects as well as further away bird calls. It is very pleasant and adds excitement to the treat at the end of the road.
 Illustration One Using Value Sketches in Summer Walk
 IllustrationTwo Using Value Sketches in Summer Walk
Step by step instructions to paint a Value Sketch in Digital Watercolour
· Open a document 9.5 x 7.5 inches and 200 dpi (this is a size that is easy to increase or decrease proportionately) · Using grey scale colours sketch your scene lightly with a pencil, chalk, or charcoal, variant. · Starting with the darkest values first, paint the different areas loosely with a digital watercolour variant. Simple Water would be fine. · Mask any areas that you want to remain white (as necessary). In this painting I wanted the daisy heads to remain white, so I used the Lasso Tool to select the areas. Make sure you use the + selection to allow you pick multiple areas at once. · There are so many colours of green in such a scene that it really will help to have the lights and darks worked out, not to mention some of the shapes. · When you are done, drop the layers, copy the canvas layer by selecting all of it, paste in place which gives you a copy on a new layer. Select all of canvas again and delete it from there. Lock the Values layer. This is really important because you want to use this as a guide for your painting, but you don’t actually want it in your painting.
Note: A tutorial on this painting “Summer Walk” is in a separate blog post. Look for it in the Search Bar or under Digital Watercolour Painting Demonstrations
Related postsCommentsJoan said: Thanks for your comment John and the link to a drawing site. Is that a hint? lol!
Saturday, March 6th
John Garrett said: Ha!
Saturday, March 6th
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John Garrett said:
Thanks for that post about value sketches. I learned about doing that through a drawing site: http://www.drawing-tutorials-online.com.
That is a powerful technique and you are right it does tend to put you off certain compositions when you do the value studies.