Tonight I’m motivated by Jana Bouc’s work from the color bootcamp with Bill Perkins on New Masters Academy. She did a great job on the assignments and I really liked the idea of a time limit with these studies. It ended up being more challenging than I thought.
The first part of the color bootcamp is all about value. In the first video Bill gives a lecture on the definitions of Major key and Minor key value compositions.
- Major Key: The proportion of value in a work
- Low: The larger portion of the work has more dark areas
- High: The larger portion of the work has more light areas
- Minor Key: The contrast of value in a work
- High: The difference between the light and dark areas is significant
- Low: The difference between the light and dark areas is slight
Here are some examples of famous works with the color removed.
This Monet painting would be categorized as a High major key and Low minor key.
Caravaggio has a wealth of works that is a great example of Low major key and High minor key.
Wow, this painting really looses it’s power when the color is removed, but its a good example of the change when color is involved. In grayscale I would categorize it as a High major key and Low minor key. But in color I would categorize the minor key as high.
My first attempt at assignment 1 didn’t go as well as I thought, I was rushed through the whole painting but I did as I was told like a good artists and stopped after 30 minutes. Wow this really forced me into working with the simple value range.
