Structural planes

As a painter, it's important to see objects as being constructed with flat planes, or structural planes. Often, as a student, its a common bad habit to thoughtlessly blend your strokes over and over again. This exercise will help you see the overall structural mass of an object and help you to not over-blend when building an object. It will dictate the direction of your brushstrokes, help you simplify values without blending, realize the source/direction of the light source and help you understand the object as it appears in perspective. In this exercise, I observed an apple and imagined how it would look being constructed entirely of flat planes. To help me do this, I envisioned what it would be like to sculpt this apple out of a block of clay using a knife. By being forced to make edgy deliberate strokes with a flat brush and not allowing myself to blend (especially a round object such as this apple), I could better make thoughtful shapes that had purpose. Now, imagine what it would be like to apply these principles to a face or head.

Understanding how tone affects color

This is a valuable exercise that uses only gray with a given color. It is interesting to see how gray (Titanium white and Ivory black) affects color. A variety of tones are created depending on how much black vs. how much white is in the gray mixture. I recommend doing these tone charts with all colors on your palette (primary and secondary colors).  I also recommend doing these charts again with using brown instead of black. Also, note how cadmium yellow is light in nature and appears higher up on the value scale. By the same token, Cadmium red is intrinsically a darker color and appears lower on the value scale. Be sensitive to the innate lightness or darkness of a color that comes directly out of the tube. Because of this, cadmium yellow can sometimes be used to lighten a color–just as, Ultramarine can be used to darken a color. Helpful Tip: try printing-out (in black and white) any color, stripping it of its color information to see where exactly it would fall on the value chart. 

Class demo

This portrait demonstration of a live model utilizes the two principles: building an object seeing structural planes and using tone with color.