Start 27 and 28

I'm not sure these are technically Starts, but I'm going to count them.

It's so grey and drizzly and depressing, I'm having a hard time painting. Apparently I'm not the only one; Mike Rooney writes about the same thing. So I took his advice and did some value studies of other artist's paintings. Since he's one of my favorite painters, I did a couple of his. The top one is hanging in my living room; the bottom is one of my favorites of his larger works.

These are limited-value studies: I used 3 shades of grey; white; and black; so there's not as much variation as in the real paintings, naturally.

I learned that he paints mostly in the mid-tones, with the lightest and darkest values for accent. There's a lot of sense in this: you can draw the eye toward a focal point in the scene, even if the compositional shapes are complicated or conflicting, by using the brightest or darkest spots there. Which is making me reevaluate the painting I was going to post today; I think I need to make a couple tweaks.