Today was the first day of a 5-day Peggi Kroll-Roberts at l’Atelier aux Couleurs in Petaluma.  Peggi has a wonderful unique style for painting the figure, so I’ve looked forward to studying with her for some time.  She’s also a lot of fun.

Today, we started simple: gray scale paintings.  These are done, much like Notan sketches, to both build compositional skills and learn to simplify.  This two-scale gray study clearly separates light from dark.  This is a great exercise.  Normally, I’d do something like this with a black sharpie on white paper, but painting this just gives you that much more experience handling paint.  It also let’s you make corrections in drawing as you go.

Throughout the day, we kept adding levels of gray.  I was able to get to 4, in this study.  While some students went on to color, I actually liked spending time on these a lot.  Removing color from the equation, and simply focusing on value and composition is somewhat liberating.  I’m happy with the way this turned out.  If I can keep to values this accurate in color, I’ll be a happy camper.

I painted all of today’s study on a single large board, which I simply divided up into 6 areas for my studies.

Tomorrow, we get to paint the figure!  I believe she said we’d start that in shades of gray first, then graduate to color.  Stay tuned.