Class Notes - June 16, 2010

• Painting while tired
• Don't crash your painting 
• Recognize & acknowledge that you're tired.
• Set small specific goals.  Take your time and do them right.
• A thought from Gus about painting tired-
• Come up with a series of questions to ask yourself when you're tired.  If you can't answer them, or answer slowly, think about limiting what you work on.
• "Holding the local"
• The modeling factors for each form should be assigned values such that the form as a whole reads as a form with the correct local value.
• The upshot of this is that the modeling factors take on values relative to the local color of the object.
• Thus, the shadow area for a lighter object should be lighter than the shadow area for a darker object.
• In the end, you should end up with a hierarchy of values within each modeling factor across the various forms.
• Searching for information
• An easy and very helpful place to start is the lightest and darkest spot in the painting.  Find the darkest spot, and estimate its value.  If it's not dark enough to use a value 0, then make a mental note that whatever value you choose is likely to be the lowest you will use for the painting.  Same for the lightest value- if it's not white (value 10), then a little alarm bell should go off if you ever find yourself reaching for pure white.
• After establishing the limits of your value range, use this information to make estimates about the values of other spots.
• Illusion of reflected light on cylinder with black background
• Shadow area was one flat color, but appeared to have reflected light due to simultaneous contrast.
• To make corrections on an area that is still wet, use more paint to cover it up.  If there's already a lot of paint on the area you need to correct, scrape it down with your palette knife before correcting.
• Examine how you hold your brush
• What grips are conducive to what kind of strokes
• Don't let your grip dictate what you can & can't do
• Switch up for different situations
• Modeling factors as cross-sections
• In three dimensions it's more obvious that the terminator, for example, goes all the way around the form.
• On a sphere, half of the sphere is actually in shadow, and half is in light- but we often only see a portion of the light and a portion of the shadow.
• Think of modeling factors as cross-sections- imagine cutting with a knife.
• The first time painting is like the first time on a unicycle.  You're just getting used to the physical act.