So, after the first painting I tried to learn from my mistakes and take my time drawing and working on the value.
Overall, I think the more time I spent on this one really paid off. The best improvement here was taking more time on the drawing.
Overview
So, after the first painting I tried to learn from my mistakes and take my time drawing and working on the value. Overall, I think the more time I spent on this one really paid off. The best improvement here was taking more time on the drawing.
My hierarchy of painting importance
- Drawing
- Value
- Edges
- Composition
- Color
Drawing
How can I improve the drawing
The major change from the last painting was that I took more time and set a specific increment for measuring. This increment was the height of the head of the figure. Doing this really fixed a bunch of issues from the last painting. I did notice that the drawing gets a bit worse the further it gets away from the head. The only way I can think to fix this is too create a second increment from the first that is larger, but I would have to make sure that the larger increment is exact.
Value

How can I improve the values?
I have to say, I think the values are very close. There is an inherent issue with paint, basically the bright white of reality cannot be captured in paint totally so a paintings value range needs to be reduced. Even though the values here are different than the real object their relative comparison are correct. I couldn’t achieve the brightest white in the still life so the other values had to drop a bit, but we cannot drop further then black so this is where the limiting of value range comes in.
Although, the second thing I did this painting after setting up the lightest light and the darkest dark was to set the values next to these. And it worked really well.
Edges
Again I didn’t focus much on edges this painting, I will focus more once I don’t break everything by getting drawing incorrect.
Composition
I kept the composition simple and didn’t focus on it at all. The only thing I wanted to do was keep the entire figure in the painting.
Color
Not much of a focus on color here. I just recognized which areas were warm and which were cool and tried to keep them somewhat true.