Number 1 reason paintings don’t “work”
The other day, I was watching Beau Lotto speak about visual perception. (Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist and world-renowned expert in perception.) Neuroscience is not my field, but I am intrigued by it. Whenever I get in touch with neuroscience, I wish we, non-scientists, knew more about it and used it in our lives to a greater extent. It would help us immensely.
But this time, I heard Beau Lotto saying (and quantifying) something artists have known and been using for centuries. And that is…
Visual perception is informed at 90% by black and white (grayscale) visual information.
Have you ever worked on a painting, looked at it, and looked again, and it didn’t feel right, but you couldn’t say why? Of course, there are so many possible reasons for that, but chances are that you messed up your values.
Values are the first thing you should think about and check.
But how can you see something you haven’t seen before and don’t have a mentor near you who can point it out to you?
A simple way is to use your phone camera. Find “color filters” (maybe it is called a bit different on your phone) and put “grayscale” on. The screen of your phone will instantly turn black and white.
Now look at your painting through the screen of your phone camera. The camera will help you see beyond hue, warmth, and saturation. It will “turn these color properties off”. And you will see just the color values.
So it will be much easier for you to find the areas of the painting you need to work on so you can fix the whole.
How about that? (And no need to be a neuroscientist to do it;)