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2D & 3D / Re: Value Studies
« on: August 12, 2017, 02:42:58 pm »
Great article. Thanks for sharing your experience.
It also sheds some more light on the wisdom of the old masters in oil painting.
I have read often how they would remind their students to emphasize pencil practice even as oil painters.
This had many reasons of course: The sheer volume of quick practice, the difference in the costs of it, and I also suspect the importance of learning Value, simply by the pencil's nature of not allowing for Hues. You had no other option than to develop an eye for seeing Value, make use of Value to draw the scene, and learning how to use a pencil for creating Values.
The masters did not need to recommend Value study, they recommended Pencil study. Better focus on Value was implicit to the correct choice of tool. When trying to drive a nail into a wall, you don't choose a spoon or a sponge, you pick a hammer. And that's true for how you study an aspect of art.
And the simplicity of the pencil was unambiguous in what matters, what you would practice. Today we face a different problem: our tools seem almighty and very complex. For learning, it is difficult to discern the order of things. But I believe there is a hierarchy in every domain of knowledge, and understanding that helps you learn it faster.
Thus nowadays, it becomes more about understanding the conceptual system of art, and reducing the functionality of our tools to our given needs accordingly. Facing all these possibilities right from the start, you need to learn what to focus on and what you can meanwhile ignore, for a given task. The idea of Value Study reinvents the old pencil practice within a powerful image program. You better know how to tune your tool towards a focus study.
With colour, we can observe that when trying to create an image only by Hue it is much harder to make an advanced scene than by trying to create it by only Value. So clearly, Value takes prescedence over Hue in the basics of what it means to construct an image, and it's the fundament of understanding colour. This reveals the treachery of the HSV name, since it implies the importance of Hue coming first. But sorted by priority, it should be named VSH.
Recognizing the importance of value does not mean Hue is easy, though. In nature, objects and light sources have both archetypal Hues, but it's much more complex than Grass = Green. This in itself is subject to intense study, especially how all these objects and lights interact for the final Hue. For example, one common mistake is trying to create daylight change only by Value. Thus, after you learned to understand the world by Value, you have to rediscover the world of Hues.
In terms of what practice has what core meaning compared to other practices,
You might even say that classic painting basically focuses on Hue Study.
Pixel art is basically focus on strict Pattern Study.
It also sheds some more light on the wisdom of the old masters in oil painting.
I have read often how they would remind their students to emphasize pencil practice even as oil painters.
This had many reasons of course: The sheer volume of quick practice, the difference in the costs of it, and I also suspect the importance of learning Value, simply by the pencil's nature of not allowing for Hues. You had no other option than to develop an eye for seeing Value, make use of Value to draw the scene, and learning how to use a pencil for creating Values.
The masters did not need to recommend Value study, they recommended Pencil study. Better focus on Value was implicit to the correct choice of tool. When trying to drive a nail into a wall, you don't choose a spoon or a sponge, you pick a hammer. And that's true for how you study an aspect of art.
And the simplicity of the pencil was unambiguous in what matters, what you would practice. Today we face a different problem: our tools seem almighty and very complex. For learning, it is difficult to discern the order of things. But I believe there is a hierarchy in every domain of knowledge, and understanding that helps you learn it faster.
Thus nowadays, it becomes more about understanding the conceptual system of art, and reducing the functionality of our tools to our given needs accordingly. Facing all these possibilities right from the start, you need to learn what to focus on and what you can meanwhile ignore, for a given task. The idea of Value Study reinvents the old pencil practice within a powerful image program. You better know how to tune your tool towards a focus study.
With colour, we can observe that when trying to create an image only by Hue it is much harder to make an advanced scene than by trying to create it by only Value. So clearly, Value takes prescedence over Hue in the basics of what it means to construct an image, and it's the fundament of understanding colour. This reveals the treachery of the HSV name, since it implies the importance of Hue coming first. But sorted by priority, it should be named VSH.
Recognizing the importance of value does not mean Hue is easy, though. In nature, objects and light sources have both archetypal Hues, but it's much more complex than Grass = Green. This in itself is subject to intense study, especially how all these objects and lights interact for the final Hue. For example, one common mistake is trying to create daylight change only by Value. Thus, after you learned to understand the world by Value, you have to rediscover the world of Hues.
In terms of what practice has what core meaning compared to other practices,
You might even say that classic painting basically focuses on Hue Study.
Pixel art is basically focus on strict Pattern Study.