A Marine's Christmas

I hope everyone is having great holidays and Christmas will be very special. I especially wish the best to our troops overseas and away from home and family. Thank you for your service to our country and keeping us safe and free.

Please go read todays post by Fire and Ice. He is a Marine Corps artist. I wish him the best Christmas and New Year. Scroll down and read the poem about the night before Christmas and the music.

We will not get to see our former Marine for Christmas. David, Lisa and our favorite two grandchildren, Cole and Christy live in Kentucky. We hope they have a great time, too. Here is David and Lisa from just a few years ago. :) The rest of us along with Gene's brother, Roger, will be here in Texas, playing a little golf, eating lots of tamales and posole.

More on value

We were speaking about value in painting in my previous post. The times that I have been teaching, doing a demo or taking part in a workshop or watching a demo, someone is always writing down the colors the artist is using. They are hoping to take those same colors and do an identical color scheme and have their painting look just as great. I suppose it is possible if you copy the painting exactly. But, if you attempt to use those colors in a different context ... they will look different. Richard McKinley calls it simultaneous contrast and speaks to it in this post. He has a great illustration there of value in black and white.


In the example above the red on green and green on red are the same colors reversed. The pink and green are the same. Then you can see in the reds how the bright pure red looks so much brighter next to the dark red and vise versa.


In these samples above the orange circle is the same on the different color squares.

Sixty Minute Artist: "Relative" Value and Color and Demo

I have been wondering where I got the link to look at Jerry Lebo's blog. I can't remember or find it. He works full time and tries to get in sixty minutes a day on his art work. He is a wonderful painter and writes instruction articles very well. This one about value and color is great for me. I always need help with that part of painting.

Sixty Minute Artist: "Relative" Value and Color

At the workshop with Bob Rohm at the end of October, he stressed value changes also. One of his tips for pastel painters was to pick out about 3 values of each color that you are thinking of using in the painting so you remember to use them. This would be a light, medium and dark green for example. Susan Carlin was talking about Helen Van Wyk in one of her comments and Helen uses 5 main values in a painting.

The body color, which is the main color of the item.
The body shadow, where the form turns.
The cast shadow, where something actually casts a shadow.
The reflected light.
The highlight.


To clarify this here is a snippet of one of my tomato paintings.

Original Painting

Helen Van Wyk's five values


My painting corrected with darker body shadow and darker shadow.

In my original painting, I showed the form of the tomato mostly with color. You can see that the painting would be more dramatic with the stronger value changes. If you can't see the difference in the first and last, squint a little. From across the room it would make a big difference. Maybe I am learning something over the years. :)


Maybe you can see the difference better in black and white.