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.