Evolve, Week 3
For full context, see the description of my Art Home School Curriculum.
Retrospective
I’m still really enjoying the teaching style of the Evolve program. Painting is taught in such a simple yet logical way that I haven’t seen anywhere else. I’m really excited to see all the steps in between where I’m at now and the final pieces in the program.
Log
Work
Block 1, Part 9
Block 1, Part 10
I’m really happy with the gradients in this one. This painting was featured on “the wall,” which is an area on the feedback site of exceptional assignments. For some reason I couldn’t get the gradients this smooth on the next several paintings.
Block 1, Part 11
At this point we added in reflections and highlights. Within each shadow and light, we are allowed to go a half step darker and lighter. This allows for things like the highlight on the apple and reflected light in the shadow of the sphere. We are not selecting our values, but using a predefined palette. That means that no matter what value the highlight is in the photo, we ignore that and use the only highlight value that’s available to us. We follow a procedure based on the 7 values we have rather than trying to match values exactly in the photos. I love that simplification because it makes it really easy to break down light, shadow, reflections, and highlights, and allows us to focus more on edges.
Block 1, Part 12
Block 1, Part 13
I wanted to spend more time on this, but the paint was drying and becoming unworkable. I’m going to start doing each object at a time to avoid that. My current practice is to paint all of the darkest shadows, then the lighter shadows, etc., but by the time I start blending the light into the darker shadows, the paint is tacky.
I should be able to finish block 1 this week. In block 2 we focus on proportional drawing rather than transferring drawings onto the canvas with carbon paper.
