How to Decorate Using Grayscale, Value charts, and Value Relativity

Posted on by

Creating a grayscale in painting means that you are creating value charts that determine the relativity of blacks to white in your painting. This type of value relativity goes from black at the weakest intensity to white at the strongest.

Grayscale images are also called monochromatic images. This is because they do not contain any color at all. Images that contain only black and white are known as binary images or bi-level images. The grayscale is more identified with photography than it is with painting.

Monochrome palettes only have some shades of gray and do not deviate that far from black and white. A monochromatic palette might only have eight, sixteen or 24 colors in it. Monochromatic graphics typically have a black background with a white or gray image but the opposite – a white background with black and grey graphics is also possible too.

Even more limited is a two bit gray scale which consists of only the colors black and white and two shades of gray. A four bit grayscale consists of black and white and fourteen shades of gray. We often see the four bit grayscale at use in primitive computer graphics.

In oil, acrylic or other types of painting the purpose may be to convert color images to grayscale. This can sometimes be done on a computer using pixels. The pixilated image then can be referred to by the painter to create a painting out of tones of gray or a monochromatic painting to which the same color applies again and again.

Converting color to grayscale can get quite complicated. It has to do with obtaining the values of the primary colors in the image. This is any of the red, blue or green values in the image. It is 30% of the red value, 59% of the green value, and 11% of the blue value that usually make up the gray scale.

The classic grayscale is a color mode that is made up of 256 shades of gray. These are known as monochrome and RGB palettes. Each palette is represented by aeries of color swatches.

Black and white drawings are sometimes referred to as grayscale drawings but for the most part this is inaccurate. Grayscale drawings must be made up of shades of gray as in a pencil drawing with cross hatching. Line drawings that are strictly made from black and white space are technically known as bit-maps.

How to Create Symmetry and Balance in Paintings and Wall Murals

Posted on by

There are no real rules when it comes to creating symmetry and balance in paintings. A lot of it is “your eye and gut instincts.” However there are some things that just look awkward. For instance the subject of the painting should never be dead center in the work. The subject also looks out of balance if it is squeezed into a little corner. However there are some mannerist forms of painting, such as naive art, where this type of awkward looking composition is actually desired.

There is one rule that is very important. It is called the Rule of Threes. This means that things in a painting look better grouped in threes rather than twos. This is a standard rule of Japanese painting composition but it is a well known contemporary oil painting technique as well. Basically all you have to remember is that an odd number of subjects or objects in painting look better than an even number.

There is a similar rule in contemporary painting composition known as the Rule of Thirds. This rule dictates that one third of the painting should be devoted to dark space, one third to light space and another third to grey space. However there are some experts that would disagree with and would think that you would do things like vary the negative space in a painting. Another rule is “two thirds, one third, and a little bit.” For example, two thirds dark in tone, one third light in tone, and a small area or object that’s mid-tone would be typical of the type of experimentation that would comprise a modern painting.

If you want the painting to look in proportion you should also prevent objects from barely touching. Composition wise this is known as “kissing. This creates a weak looking shape that is unattractive to the eye.

Yet another rule of composition has to do with color. Do not mix warm and cool tones in the same painting. It is jarring to the eye and looks amateurish.

An important part of getting the composition right in a painting is to do some thumbnail sketches first. Make a map of your composition so you can’t go wrong. This is a plan that helps you get what you want to do in the painting absolutely right.