Why Should I Mass Values?

After yesterday's post, Ca.Via.seattle asks: "WHY is value massing so important? I’ve read your entire blog, including everything about shape welding, read Arthur Wesley Dow’s book on notan studies, and have generally scoured the internet, so I know HOW to mass values, but still don’t have a deep understanding as to why it is so important and powerful. Can you possibly elaborate?"

Howard Pyle

Good question. The reason value massing is so important is that a simple tonal design has much more impact. You can tell at a glance what's going on, and it reads from across the room or when reduced to a tiny size.

The parts of the scene that are less important can be relegated to the light-on-light mass or the dark-on-dark mass. The parts that you want the viewer to notice are highly contrasting.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret

Here the wedding dress connects to the tablecloth and the female figures behind, while the people dressed in dark clothes join together to make a simple shape. 

Here's the YouTube video demonstrating value grouping. (Link to YouTube)

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Previously: Shape Welding
Plein-Air Tip: Grouping Tonal Values
Books: Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color
Composition tips in: Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

Clustering

I couldn’t move on from the recent posts about shape welding and the Pyle school without mentioning one other quality of the Brandywine tradition that I so admire. Again, there’s no name for it that I’ve ever encountered, so I propose the word “clustering.”



Clustering is the method Pyle used so often to arrange a tight group of detail in one interest area, in contrast with large blank areas. This composition, called "Extorting Tribute from the Citizens," packs dozens of faces in one small section in front of the arch, while keeping the wall above and the street below completely empty.



Anyone but Pyle would have painted this scene from "Sinbad on Burrator" with the figures spaced out evenly, each silhouette separate from the others. By clustering them all together, the eye sees them as one shape first and wants to go in and sort them out.

Shape welding and clustering look easy, but in my experience it takes real determination to pull them off. I have to fight the lunkhead instinct which wants to line up the toy soldiers, spread out the cookies on the table, give everything equal importance, and define every edge equally.

I can't wait until this Friday, when we'll bring you via this blog to the Delaware Art Museum, home of Howard Pyle's originals.

Cure for Middle Value Mumbling

If your work suffers from “middle value mumbling,*” here’s a cure.

1. Bring your sketchbook to a restaurant, bus station, lecture hall, or waiting room.

2. Draw the scene very lightly in pencil, just to work out the shapes. You’ll erase these lines later.

3. Choose a drawing tool that only makes black shapes, such as a wide calligraphy marker or a water brush filled with black ink.

4. Define all the shapes as either white or black. If the scene is strongly lit, you can make the shadows totally black and the light areas white.


5. There are two rules:
    a. DON’T DRAW OUTLINES. Let one black area run into another. Let white areas merge together. Resist the temptation to draw boundaries. You can see I started to forget this rule and outlined the top of the head and the base of the stool at right.

   b. The other rule is DON’T DRAW MIDDLE TONES. This is hard to do. I desperately wanted to put in halftones and transitions in the man’s back.

5. Now erase the pencil lines. The result will probably look nothing like other drawings you’ve done. It might have a startling realism.

The viewer will have no trouble understanding the scene. The mystery can work very much in your favor. It’s excellent practice if you’re learning to paint, because these grouping decisions are a key to good tonal composition.


It’s also wonderful for giving your work more punch or more mystery. Dean Cornwell (above) in his early career was very interested in this kind of thinking.

*Middle value mumbling is the common tendency to mix all your colors in midrange tones, rather than pushing them to either the light or the dark. We all fall into this problem. It takes conscious effort to avoid it.

Previously on GurneyJourney:
Krøyer's Hip Hip Hurra
 High Contrast Shape Welding
“Shape Welding”
Concert Sketching


Related concept called "notan" explained at Empty Easel.com

High Contrast Shape Welding

Following on the previous post, and Eric’s point about how this all this applies to drawing, I thought I’d share a couple of studies from life where I was trying to pursue this idea of shape welding using high contrast form lighting.


I did this little pencil sketch in a room lit by a single lamp. The goal was to squint down and just state the biggest masses of light and shadow, shapewelding all the lights together, and the same with the darks.


On this one I experimented with painting from a model with just white and black oil (on chipboard sealed with shellac), ignoring all the middle tones and transitions. The shadows are all shapewelded together. I could have even left off that hint of an outline on the shoulder. It’s amazing how much the brain automatically seeks out unseen contours.

Tomorrow, another of Pyle's compositional devices: "Clustering."

Shapewelding

The best pictorial compositions are simple. Simple shapes are easy to recognize and remember. Busy pictures with lots of little separate shapes have less impact. My own work stands improvement in this area, so I’ve been trying to figure out how the masters did it. Below: Mermaid, by Howard Pyle.



Achieving simplicity doesn’t always mean restricting yourself to just a few minimal forms, like one apple against a blank background. You can have plenty of elements or figures and still have an uncluttered picture. The trick is to cleverly arrange the elements so that adjacent tonal shapes fuse together into larger abstract patterns.



According to Charles DeFeo, Howard Pyle used to say, “Put your white against white, middle tones (groups) against grays, black against black, then black and white where you want your center of interest. This sounds simple, but is difficult to do.” The picture above is by Mead Schaeffer, a grand-student of Pyle through Harvey Dunn.

You can unify shapes by losing them in an enveloping cloud of shadow, and the light areas can spill over into each other. The Lincoln picture below is by Pyle.



This automatically sets up unexpected larger shapes with great abstract beauty and expressive power.

To my knowledge there’s no word in art theory for this idea, so I would like to suggest the term “shapewelding.”



Shape welding shows up not only with Howard Pyle and the Brandywine School, but also with academic painters like Bouguereau (above). All these artists were clearly thinking about shape welding, but I don't know what they called it. The only word I’ve run across to name it is the French word “effet,” which in the academies meant the large overall pattern of light and dark.

Maybe someone reading this blog will know other terms that have been used by artists to describe this principle.

Krøyer’s Hip Hip Hurra!

The Arken Museum in Copenhagen is presenting an exhibition called “The Skagen Painters —In a New Light,” currently on view until the first of June, 2008.

The principal work in the show is called “Hip Hip Hurra!” by the Danish/Norwegian painter Peder Krøyer, the ringleader of a group of genre painters who gathered in the fishing village of Skagen.

Krøyer, like the Juste Milieu painters in France and the Newlyn painters in England, blended the insights of Impressionism with the skills of traditional academic craftsmanship, which he perfected in Leon’s Bonnat’s atelier in Paris.


The small color study above shows how the design looked as it was almost fully crystallized. Between this sketch and the final painting he removed the hat from the man with the glasses, and he added a man with a light jacket leaning into the picture at right.

The current exhibit in Denmark examines how Krøyer achieved the feeling of a spontaneous, offhand composition in “Hip, Hip, Hurra!”, which in fact was carefully staged and arranged. The painting took him over four years to complete.


The detail of the final painting shows a principle Krøyer would have learned from Bonnat, namely to be careful not to violate the lights. The large light area composed of the tablecloth, the girl’s dress, and the woman at right is skilfully shape-welded together, with no dark accents interrupting it. This unified structure makes a strong, simple mass that holds the painting together despite a prodigious amount of detail.


Here I’ve taken the final painting and exaggerated the underlying tonal structure. The light shape is an abstract unit that looks something like a butterfly. The light woman’s arm extends upward from it at right, and the dark woman’s arm comes into the shape at left. These two gestures are given compositional salience and they help us recognize the theme of the picture immediately.

Two smaller light shapes float like islands in the dark background of foliage: the head of the woman at left, and the cluster of revelers in the distance.

Further Reading
Related Gurney Journey Posts: Shape Welding, Juste Milieu, Color Sketches
More on Skagen painters, Link.
More on the exhibition, Link.
OutdoorPainting.com feature on Peder Krøyer, Link.
Thanks to Armand Cabrera for telling me about the Skagen painters.

Forsberg's "Death of a Hero"

A secret to good composition is to group and simplify the tones. But the tonal organization must serve the story. 

Let's look at an example, along with my pencil sketch.

Nils Forsberg (1842-1934) La Fin d’un héros (Death of a Hero) 1888
Oil, 300 x 450 cm, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum

Story

At the moment of his death, a war hero is slumped on his improvised bedding. The setting is a church. A priest gives him last rites. His wife or mother grieves at the foot of the bed. His fellow soldiers pay last respects. On the left are other wounded patients laid out on other beds.

Tonal structure

The dying hero is the crux of the design. He is a light shape surrounded by the light-toned bedding. Those light patches are shape-welded to the illuminated vertical column behind his bed. 

I don't know if it was intentional, but that column ascends like an elevator to heaven. The only other light-toned figures are the altar boy with the candle and the attending priest. 

The rest of the mortals are mostly dark. The ailing figures on beds on the left are enveloped in darkness. Wherever possible, dark tones are grouped into large shapes to simplify the design. 

Perhaps I'm reading into it a bit, but the light seems to be associated with spiritual life or afterlife or redemption, and the darkness seems to be associated with mortality and suffering. The point is that tonal organization isn't just a design issue, it's also a story issue. 

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Previously: Shape Welding

Harold Speed Chapter 5: Tone Values

Today we'll take a look at Chapter 5: "Tone Values" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.


1. Beauty in tone values comes from tones that are large and simple.

Speed points out that this isn't the only kind of pictorial beauty, but it's an important one. What he means by large and simple tones is big, unbroken shape of tone. We've talked about this principle in terms of "Shape Welding."

It also has do do with the modeling of form, where the light areas are grouped into close values to give a sense of a flat poster-like appearance, even if there is subtle glazing and variation, as in the Velazsquez below.

Portrait of Cardinal Camillo Astali Pamphili - Diego Velazquez

He makes the analogy with music often in this chapter as he has done elsewhere, comparing the "big tone" approach with a pure note on a violin. He also mentions that using opaque paint gives greater tonal control. In fact with opaques it can be a challenge to get variety and color change.

2. "The thick atmosphere of our towns simplifies the tones, and is responsible for much of the beauty our artists find in such unexpected places of manufacture."

A nice side benefit of smog from coal in London 100 years ago, where the air was so polluted you couldn't see to the end of the block.

3. Tone beauty not important to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB).

Speed isn't knocking them exactly, but just saying they were after other pictorial goals. Ruskin, a friend and champion of the PRB and other super-naturalist painters, was a great fan of microscopic detail, and also an advocate of gradation, rather than the flat-tone approach of Whistler, Brangwyn, and the Newlyn School. Speed makes a few exceptions among PRB painters, such as the Blind Girl by Millais, which is reproduced in my book Color and Light.

4. Velazquez was the great master of tone values.

Carolus-Duran, Sargent's teacher, was also a huge fan of Velazquez, and much of Sargent's love of the big tone approach came from him. Pyle of course in this country was a big tone fan, and I've talked about that on this blog quite a bit.

5. Head of Aesopus (Aesop, i.e. of Fable fame) probably painted with warm and cold black, burnt sienna and white.

Here's the image Speed is referring to. Has anyone tried this? By the way, I love using a warm black and a cool black in watercolor, too. A cool black might be Payne's Gray, and a warm black might be Sepia, for example.

Vermeer, Lady at the Virginal

6. Vermeer's technique
I don't have time to recapitulate Speed's points here, but maybe some of you who have experimented with the methods Speed is talking about would care to comment.

7. "Strongly contrasted schemes of tone had been in use since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, but used chiefly to augment the expression of form; whereas Rembrandt used it as an expressive thing in itself, giving it aesthetic value."

"The Philosopher" by Rembrandt, above, may be different from the one Speed showed in the book, but it makes the same point. Intriguing big tones. EDIT: The one Speed referred to is below (thanks, Steven).

A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room

about 1628-30, Follower of Rembrandt

8. "What is often called muddy colour is generally the result of bad tone relationships."

A very important point that has come up before and will come up again here.

Next week—Chapter 6: Elementary Tone Exercises

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In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials," and there's also a Kindle edition.

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Threshold Filter

If a painting makes sense in pure black and white, it will also be effective in the full range of values and colors.


Put a painting through the “Threshold” filter in Photoshop (Image >Adjustments >Threshold) and see what happens.

William Liebl’s painting Drei Frauen in der Kirche (Three Women in Church), 1882,  benefits from a strong and simple value arrangement. The book and the hands of the young woman fuse into the light of the near girl’s apron. The dark elements (dresses, head scarves, ceramic jug and carved pew) are all shape-welded together and kept in a mass.

The result is that this painting would speak across a room of a gallery. Its meaning would be clear even from a great distance.
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See this and other images from the 1889 Universal Exposition on Matthew Innis’s blog "Underpaintings."
Previously on GurneyJourney: Shape Welding

Plein-Air Tip: Grouping Tonal Values

An essential composition strategy is to organize values or tones into a light group and a dark group.

In this plein-air painting of a house in Sebastopol, California, my main focus is to create a single unbroken mass of dark for the trees, which then connects to the shadowed parts of the structure and the garbage can.

In this 15 minute video (Link to YouTube) I demonstrate my approach, including a little about perspective, painting procedure, brushes, and compositional design. 

I'm using a limited palette that includes M. Graham watercolor in just four colors: yellow ochre and transparent red oxide, titanium white gouache and black gouache.

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Related post: Shape Welding

Harold Speed Discusses Color and Taste

Welcome to the GJ Book Club. Today we'll cover pages 192-216 of the chapter on "Tone and Colour Design," from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by my comments. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

Veronese—Allegory of Love: Infidelity

1. Veronese analysis

Speed does a diagrammatic analysis of the painting, and notes the large arc formed by the woman's arms and shoulders.

2. Warm and Cool Color

Speed groups the following as cool colors: lemon yellow, green, greenish blue and full blue.

Warm colors include orange yellow, orange, orange red and full red. Purple is on the dividing line.

3. If the colors are very vivid and violent they will tend to make their complementary colors tell in the picture.

Harmony and contrast are not always in agreement. More of one quality makes for less of the other.

4. When the color introduced is of a quieter order, those similar to it in the other parts of the picture sing up in sympathy.

For example, a blue note will bring out all the cool colors.

Seago --Thames Embankment

5. The picture that has a prevailing unity of hue, but is full of color varieties subtly introduced in the tones is one of the most beautiful of schemes.

With all the coal smoke in Speed's day, London subjects were often gray days, mostly monochromatic schemes with subtle color—He advises not to overdo it trying to make a pretty picture. Important to get the sober feeling. The prevailing hue must never be of a very pronounced color, but always in the more neutral range.

6. The selection of too many varieties of colour masses should be avoided....A lavish display is apt to be vulgar. 

Giampietrino Last Supper ca. 1520 after Leonardo

7. Copy of Leonardo's Last Supper. Strong color notes of red and blue brought together in the figure of Christ. 

8. Arrange masses of color so that warm colors are grouped together and cold colors together.
Kind of like shape welding using color temperature instead of value. 

9. "Whenever any composition device becomes too obvious, one's sympathy is alienated."

Speed cautions against making the contrasts too violent, and leaves that for the poster designer.

10. Begin planning your color scheme with the broad idea and let the varieties be added to this large intention.

11. White masses always need very careful designing, as they catch the eye. 

Harold Speed -- The Alcantara, Toledo

12. Toledo bridge. Painted in monochrome, allowed to dry, with color added later. 

Sargent Wyndham sisters.

13. Grouping multiple white masses into a larger mass.

White needs careful observing. Beware of harsh chalky whites.

14. When painting outdoors, it's easier to get the overall color impression, but when painting from imagination, it's harder to invent a convincing color statement.

Beware of using blue too much as a unifier.

15. Good exercise: Start with a black and white reproduction and invent various color schemes consistent with those tonal values.

16. Two sources of inspiration: the study of nature and the study of the best art of all times.

These are also the keys to freeing oneself from the fashion of the moment, says Speed.

17. Page 211. "What a better world we might have if real experts were allowed to control the formation of our habits, and were consulted by those in authority when anything demanding taste came up for discussion."

Speed goes on a rant here. He argues that ordinary people end up preferring art of lower standards merely from habit, because they're not exposed to finer things. His appeal for a cultural elite must have seemed like a reasonable bastion against the artistic excesses of his time, but I don't think such a top-down program would work in free countries, particularly given the penchant for artists to defy authority. 

Today the aesthetic standards are largely defined by commerce. In the USA art lives or dies in the marketplace, with art that sells for higher prices or movies that make big box office results being justified on those terms.

However, the Internet has fostered the growth of a citizen band of book critics, movie commentators, and teachers of form and style. And the Internet has also introduced crowd-sourcing as a new model of funding and distribution. This crowd-sourced check-valve on the arts has changed how and why creators do what they do. I wonder what Speed would have thought of it.

18. Art takes patience to appreciate. 
Speed says, "The mind only opens to the reception of ideas and experiences that are beyond one's present capacity." He says that art takes patience and reverence to really appreciate. He tells the story of the young museum-goer asking him to explain the merits of an old master to him. Speed advocates spending time with older painters and "getting past the brown varnish" to understand its retiring qualities.

19. Beware the "one better" type.

He might be referring to Cubists and Fauvists, and he makes specific reference to poster designers, all artists in his opinion who strive for effect by making extreme statements. Speed is always a voice for restraint, reserve, and balance.


Next week—We'll continue with Materials on page 217.

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In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials (with a Sargent cover)," and there's also a Kindle edition.

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GJ Book Club, Speed, Chapter 14: Unity of Mass

On the GJ Book Club, we're looking at Chapter 14: "Unity of Mass" in Harold Speed's 1917 classic The Practice and Science of Drawing. The following numbered paragraphs cite key points in boldface. If you would like to respond to a specific image or point, please precede your comment by the corresponding number.

This is another core chapter of Speed's book, with invaluable advice on tonal organization.

1. The modifications in the relative tone values of objects seen under different aspects of light and atmosphere are infinite and ever varying.
In other words, the color you mix on your palette for a given object can be greatly altered by the light and atmosphere of a given situation. 

2. The painting of flesh higher in tone than the sky was201 almost universal at many periods of art, and in portraits is still often seen.
This is an artistic convention, which makes some sense compositionally, but it doesn't look naturalistic. That's a Tiepolo.

3. A black glass, by reducing the light, enables you to observe these relationships more accurately.
He's referring to a Lorrain mirror.

4. There should never be pure white or pure black masses in a 
203picture.

This is one of the best reasons to mix your "blacks": you get color character in the darks that way. You can't go as low in value, but you don't want to. How often do pianists hit the lowest note on their keyboard? This power in reserve is also true of chroma. "Keep a shot in your locker," as Pyle and Dunn used to say. 

5. Speed continues: "Also, the highest lights in nature are never without colour, and this will lower the tone; neither are the deepest darks colourless, and this will raise their tone."

Keep in mind that highlights partake of both the color of the light source and the local color of the object. Solar highlights with a little cadmium yellow look brighter than pure white.

6. Painting light to dark vs. dark to light

Interesting discussion here about painting sequence and value keying. What do you all think of his view of this?

7. These tone values are only to be perceived in their true relationship by the eye contemplating a wide field of vision. 

When he says "wide field of vision," I believe he doesn't mean viewing angle, but rather scope or range of awareness.

8. Light and shade and half tone are the great enemies of colour, sullying, as they do, its purity; and to some extent to design also, destroying, as they do, the flatness of the picture.

Sometimes the strongest color effects can happen when the chiaroscuro of form lighting are minimized, and the objects are shown more or less as flat shapes. He says, "Large flat tones give a power and simplicity to a design, and a largeness and breadth of expression that are very valuable, besides showing up every little variety in the values used for your modelling; and thus enabling you to model with the least expenditure of tones."

9. The nearer these tones are in the scale of values, the more reserved and quiet the impression created, and the further apart or greater the contrast, the more dramatic and intense the effect. 

Strong light and shade divides forms into light and shadow shapes, as he points out, but it also introduces cast shadows. All these things can complicate a picture unless you go out of your way to group values by shape welding.

10 Straight lines = flat tones. Curved lines = gradated tones.

I love the equivalency he draws here, which makes perfect sense, especially if you paint a still life of a polygonal vs. a rounded form. The lines and the tones are related.

11. Watteau created a dream country of his own.

Example above. So did Maxfield Parrish and Dulac and Moebius and Syd Mead.

12. Gradation

Pencil diagrams like the ones Speed demonstrates are a valuable way to study old masters. He mentions the magic of Turner and Watteau for their use of large gradations, and I would add the Hudson River School painters, especially Church and Bierstadt.

He also echoes Ruskin when he points out that these gradations should be looked for not only in large areas, but also in the rocks and leaves.

13. The desire of so many artists in these days to cut loose from tradition and start all over again puts a very severe strain upon their intuitive faculties

An interesting point. He also says that the lack of a traditional system "keeps them occupied correcting things that more knowledge of some of the fundamental principles that don't really alter and that are the same in all schools would have saved them. Knowledge in art is like a railway built behind the pioneers who have gone before; it offers a point of departure for those who come after, further on into the unknown country of nature's secrets—a help not lightly to be discarded."

14. But all artifice in art must be concealed, a picture obviously composed is badly composed. 

This is traditionally know by the Latin line: Ars est celare artem: True art is the concealment of artifice.

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Harold Speed (Dover ed.)
The Practice and Science of Drawing is available in various formats:
1. Inexpensive softcover edition from Dover, (by far the majority of you are reading it in this format)
2. Fully illustrated and formatted for Kindle.
3. Free online Archive.org edition.
4. Project Gutenberg version
Articles on Harold Speed in the Studio Magazine The Studio, Volume 15, "The Work of Harold Speed" by A. L. Baldry. (XV. No. 69. — December, 1898.) page 151.
and The Windsor Magazine, Volume 25, "The Art of Mr. Harold Speed" by Austin Chester, page 335. (thanks, अर्जुन)
GJ Book Club on Pinterest (Thanks, Carolyn Kasper)
GJ Facebook page

Overview of the blog series
Announcing the GJ Book Club
Chapter 1: Preface and Introduction
Chapter 2: Drawing
Chapter 3: Vision
Chapter 4: Line Drawing
Chapter 5: Mass Drawing
Chapter 6: Academic and Conventional
Chapter 7: The Study of Drawing
Chapter 8: Line Drawing, Practical
Chapter 9: Mass Drawing
Chapter 10: Rhythm
Chapter 11: Variety of Lines
Chapter 12: Curved Lines
Chapter 13: Variety of Mass
Chapter 14: Unity of Mass
Chapter 15: Balance
Chapter 16: Proportion
Chapter 17: Portrait Drawing
Chapter 18: Visual Memory
Chapter 19: Procedure
Chapter 20: Materials