Double Overpass - Urban Art - Street View Oil Painting - Cityscape - Freeway Art - Bridge Painting

"Double Overpass" | 8" x16" | Oil on panel

Available at ChemersGallery.com

©2015

A while ago a very talented painter friend of mine, Terry Miura, wrote an excellent post on his blog about painting tonally. Click here to read it. After reading it I realized that I had never tried using any of the methods he described. With his permission I decided to share his lesson with my students. First however, I needed to paint using one of the approaches he detailed in his blog post.

I have a mix of beginners and more advanced painters in my Monday night studio class and I decided to go with the simple approach Terry described using three gray values mixed with black and white. I chose a violet hue for the overall color scheme and added various amounts of that color to the three gray values I started with. This way of working allowed me to add more or less of blue and red as needed to each mixture while still keeping the overall color harmony going. It was amazing how easily the whole painting came together and of course it was primarily because I was painting in value with subtle hue shifts.

How did my students enjoy the lesson? Many of them struggled through it and there was a lot of grumbling about their paintings looking "too gray." It was a challenging lesson for them but one that I hope taught them how important value is.