White Subjects

Rick I thought about this earlier today, Sometimes it's hard to keep track of whats what so I split it out. Maybe this will help too.
In the simplest form you can do your blacks then your heavy greys and then scratch ,erase or whatever you gotta do, by the time you finish those two you'll have a real good Idea where your light greys and eye color will go.
blacks.png Greys.png
I only split out the first two.
 
When I painted that owl. I did it in a couple of hours. Mostly achieving the fur using hugely reduced black, and a fiber brush for the fur. However complete realism was not my goal, and I was doing it only as a study.

You just need to get a handle on your value finder. I actually love white fur and stuff, because it is really so little painting to it for huge rewards. Bit it will require some excercising value finding skills.

Most "white" fur has a huge mixture of other colors to mix the value, that is one subject that really can be done with grey and white (other than the eyes of course).
 
The best and easiest thing to do is to forget that you are painting a tiger, a polar bear or a horse, instead like every artist does, you have to understand that all you are doing is painting shapes and puting together lines, dots, daggers, blends and shading using different colours, tones and intensities, where you place all these will determine what you actually end up with, if you tried to paint a white polar bear in one solid colour you would end up with a one dimensional object with an outline suggesting a polar bear, if you put in eyes, nose, mouth and toes you end up with a cartoon version of one, this is how younger children are taught about animals so as not to scare them.

It pays to study an image before even looking at your tools, you scrutinise your image to find the shapes and colours needed to best represent it, and this helps you plan your attack.

WOW!!!!
Malky, you discribed a SBS in five lines!
 
Im not getting the value finder thing.

If you go to Google images and search for "grayscale value finder" you find an example that you can download and print out, it has holes in each of its shades from white through to black, you will have to cut out the holes, simply hold the hole over your image until the value you are looking at matches any of the shades on your value finder card, when you print it out make sure the white is pure white, the file you download will likely be a photo image so it might be darker than it should be so if the white is right everything is.

You can buy the value finder but why bother if you can get it free.
 
Thanks Malky. You have been a big help. Sometime it seems i dont listen but i write everything down that everyone says and i do use it in practice. Im just having a hard time puuting it to projects. Maybe im just not really cut out for this after all.
 
Thanks Malky. You have been a big help. Sometime it seems i dont listen but i write everything down that everyone says and i do use it in practice. Im just having a hard time puuting it to projects. Maybe im just not really cut out for this after all.

It all just comes down to confidence, you are practicing with a new prestige brush, when you do practice you have nothing to lose, but when you try something that matters without knowing it you'll hold yiur brush different or just treat the trigger differently and nervousness sets in causing mistakes, even seasoned artists suffer from this but they usually practice some strokes before each session to get the feel as well as see how their brush is behaving, two days are never the same, in bad days I just walk away and wait for a good day.

You are definitely not alone when it comes to pitfalls, we all have it but those of us in the know try to help those with less experience avoid some of them.

Each time you want to work on your projects, keep some scrap paper next to your work and try out whatever strokes you intend to use on the scrap before going straight to your real work, I had a 3 by 4 foot magnetic white board with my work in the middle and scraps all the way round to test on, this handy especially when you change colours because no two colours behave the same either, make it a habit, if you look at other people's works in progress you will see all kinds if shapes and wierd stuff all around including on their tape, 90% of that is usually deliberate for either resting the brush or blowing out a blockage without having to leave the easel.
 
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