Hello 

Welcome to the FLOAT-YOUR-PIGMENT Newsletter #118, Value Pattern

What a wonderful surprise and honor it was to get an email last week from TWSA (Tranparent Watercolor Society of America) telling me I had won the People Choice Award for this years 2017 exhibit. The exhibit was up for over a month at the Kenosha Public Museum. Anybody visiting the show could vote for their favorite piece from the 81 works displayed. If you voted for me, thank you so much, this just blew me away. Thank you!

Is your arts club ever looking for a demonstrator or workshop instructor, if so, please give them my name or you can contact me and give me a name so I can contact them. I love doing demonstrations and teaching others about this medium of watercolor. I have a lot of bookings for 2018 but can always squeeze in a demonstration if I am in an area, so don't think that I am to far away, sometimes I may just be a few hours away and I love a good road trip. david@davidrbecker.com

Today's newsletter goes into breaking down you photo into black and white to see if it has a good designed value pattern.

Yes to Class at the Civic Center Libertyville, Thursday Aug. 17th 1:00 to 3:30pm
Yes to Class at The Antioch Fine Arts Foundation, Aug. 17th 6:30 to 9:00pm
Yes to Class at The Studio in McHenry on August 19th 9:00 to 11:30

While I was in Canada a couple of weeks back I had a great revelation when it came to teaching total beginners about design and value patterns. I was teaching my cousin and other family members what to look for when viewing ones photographs and to see if the photo has a good design.

When looking for a good designed pattern you need to squint your eyes and look at the photo and by squinting it turns a colored image into more of a black and white photo. Eliminating the colors lets you see the large value pattern. 

A way that is even more effective is to take a photo app or program and turn the colored image black and white

and then posterize it into a black and white pattern. Do not use 3 tones of value, just 2, black and white.
Middle grey tones can be part of the light or the darks so it doesn't help to have them in the posterized image when figuring out the black and white pattern.

Below you can see a colored city scene, I now want you to squint your eyes and see if you can eliminate the colors from the image and while still squinting look down at the posterized image to see if you can't make them both look like the black and white posterized photo.

This is a great exercise in learning how to squint at a photo and seeing the big black and white posterized pattern of your photographs. It even works if you are plein-air painting, just look at the entire outdoor scene that you are thinking about painting and then look at it with squinted eyes to eliminate the colors, letting you see if there is a nice simple pattern to paint. 

Try to keep the pattern simple, the more complex and scattered the black and white patterns the harder it will be to make the painting work and have a nice design. Think about the yin and yang symbol, it's the simplest design but so effective as a simple design. 

Happy Squinting

David

Below is a photo that has too much stuff and the black and white pattern is all over the place. This image would need some work to simplify the pattern so it can be better and easier to paint. This happens a lot with photos that are shot with overcast lighting. With sunlight you get the shadows and the places that the sun hits, with overcast lights you get the local color of things along with textures and patterns making everything very close in value. The trick is to turn the middle tones, textures and patterns into either black or white and try to do it so big areas are either a black or a white. See below to compare what I did with this complicated value pattern.