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Devin Korwin

16 Feb, 12 tweets, 5 min read

New thread on values! What does pixel art have to do with value grouping in painting? It’s all down to a concept I call *dithering*. We are naturally very good at seeing small differences, and this is not helpful for painting, because we need to see differences *between* things.

Have you ever done a study of a painting and found yourself zooming in, only to zoom out and find that it was only getting worse? This is because of focusing on small differences too early. How do we even get started with all of these patterns and materials here?

When we make this painting tiny, notice how all of the detail in the tapestry blends together, and we can easily compare that group with everything else. The whole complex tapestry area is the same value group as the shirt! Now, the image consolidates into a few simple groups.

We are painting someone with a B&W checkered shirt, how do we show all of that complexity? We could literally paint every single square, and have the light mix in the viewer’s eye, *or* we could compare how this pattern relates to the big picture, and mix the pattern into a grey.

Let’s look at this pixelated image again. This is only using two values, and when we are zoomed in, we see all the small changes: the checker pattern becomes clear. But when we zoom out, and see the big picture, a gradient appears: more information than is actually present.

Try making a study of a complex image as simply as possible, keeping the relationships correct. If you are working digitally, zoom way *way* out to see them! If you are working from life, squint down and compare how every small contrast relates to the whole.

Notice that when we zoom out, the complex value shift in the sky is actually two values, and all of the interest in the water is just one value group!

Thinking this way allows us to paint complex images, with a variety of patterns, materials, and colors that all cohesively work together. It is a liberating way to work from life, and you can take that knowledge into work from imagination, giving it an incredible sense of truth.

Artist credit: Maria Fortuny, Vasily Polenov

If you enjoyed this, check out my two ebooks! They are all my previous tutorials, greatly expanded upon, and have lots of bonuses like a glossary, recommended reading, and all the artist names right there with the examples. Here is volume 1: gumroad.com/l/YPtf

And volume 2: gumroad.com/l/cfv2

Stay tuned for in-depth video tutorials coming this year as well!

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More from @devinkorwin

Devin Korwin

@devinkorwin

18 Nov 20

Tip about highlights in painting and drawing! Highlights show structure in the lit side of an object, and they are just as useful as shadows for showing form.

Highlights like to hang out in corners because there are a lot of angle changes there, and therefore more chances for the light to be reflected back to your eye.

That doesn't mean that specular highlights can't show up on flat planes, it just means that you have to find the one perfect angle to do so, like this camera angle here.

Read 12 tweets

Devin Korwin

@devinkorwin

5 Nov 20

Thread on values! Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning!

Values (and color, and edges, and drawing) are all about relationships. Let’s use this scene as an example. The cloud definitely reads against the sky, but it is just a temperature change, not a value change. We want to look for the big similarities and differences first.

When looking at this scene in real life, the goal is to compress a lot of information into groups while keeping the relationships consistent. This makes it easier to paint and allows us to design. You will rarely ever need more than 4 groups to do this.

Read 15 tweets

Devin Korwin

@devinkorwin

28 Aug 20

Thread on how to do composition studies! The secret is to look for the big relationships. We are not painting objects, but rather designing an abstract composition that has the feeling we want. Zoom way out, look for big value shapes, and compare across the whole painting!

After we have our black and white study, then add temperature information on top. Don’t use layer modes like color or overlay, but rather paint directly and opaquely right on top. This will help us gain an understanding of how color relates to value.

Dean Cornwell is great to study for this because we can see his decision making. Look how the value of the dark blue cloth is the same in light as the white dress is in shadow. These are the big relationships to look for, and then naturally the small differences group themselves.

Read 8 tweets

Devin Korwin

@devinkorwin

21 Jul 20

Thread on color part 3! We've gone over a lot of the science, but how do we use all of this creatively in our paintings? How do we make a black and white image look natural? The secret and key to the whole thing is in a property of color called Chroma.

Chroma is distinct from, but related to, saturation. You can have a highly saturated yellow hue at a dark value. This would mean that it is a pure color, but at a low intensity. That color is not high chroma, because it appears brown and not what we would describe as yellow.

Yellows have a high chroma at bright values, reds at middle values, and blues and violets at dark values. At extreme values, it becomes harder to have a high chroma for any color. Instead of copying a scene without direction, we can control our values to show the colors we want.

Read 16 tweets

Devin Korwin

@devinkorwin

6 Jul 20

Thread on color in painting part 2! How do we know how to confidently decide on colors in the infinite lighting situations that we can imagine? We’re going to dive deeper this time into how light works, and what determines the color we actually see when light reaches our eyes.

First, materials. They all reflect the scene, just differently. Diffuse materials absorb/scatter some wavelengths beneath the surface while reflecting the rest, some metals reflect all of the light, and others are colored due to uneven absorption and emission by their electrons.

The more pure and strong the reflection of the light source, the further the shift in color towards it. The direction of hue shifting depends on the material. A yellowy-green grass will travel through the greens when reflecting the blue sky, while skin will go through the pinks.

Read 14 tweets

Devin Korwin

@devinkorwin

30 Jun 20

Thread on color in painting! This will be a 3-part series with everything you ever wanted to know about color. What actually is color, and how do we use it? How come it is so hard to make a painting look natural if we start in black and white and then add color after?

Let’s start at the beginning with the basics in this thread. First, color is a 3D space that you could imagine yourself walking around in. We know this because there are 3 variables. If we plot only 2 of them, for example value and saturation, we can easily see that this is 2D.

This 2D space is familiar to us, we see it in the Photoshop/Procreate color picker. Once we add a third variable, hue, we have depth to our graph. Value is the amount of light, saturation is the purity of the light, and hue is the wavelength of the light (more on this later).

Read 11 tweets

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