Cool Painting Techniques On Squinting

Cool painting techniques are available at your disposal when you paint. Let us talk about squinting! Squinting friend of foe? This is what we are going to tackle and discover for today. Squinting is a way to simplify edges and values to make them manageable when painting. What happens is if you take a picture or a photograph it normally has a value range of ten. The whitest white to the darkest dark is a value of ten. So you have ten values available to you. Then that’s the same as to what you have available to you when you paint. You know from bright light to black paint that’s ten, and that’s about ten value range as to how we determine it. Now if you took that picture and you look at your ten value range, You took it and held it underneath your table or underneath your desk, now you’ve got it in shadow, but there’s always another extra ten value range now you’ve got yourself a value range of twenty. Let’s take it back underneath and bring it back to the light and hold it next to the light bulb so again you have another ten values! So automatically right between being indoors you have a value range of thirty that your eye can perceive! Now take that photograph outside and hold it in the sun you’ve got another ten values! You know, over and beyond what you had there, hold it in more direct sunlight you have another ten values. So outside you may have a thousand values that your eyes are capable of perceiving five hundred thousand I don’t know and inside maybe fifty maybe even more!

Various techniques available at oil painting workshop by Dan Edmondson!

So how do you simplify that down to ten values of your painting medium because that’s all you’ve got available to you.

Squinting is one of the ways that you do that! So when you squint down what essentially happens is you darken everything! So if you look at this, see how it darkens everything and it simplifies this background all into one value and all this into a value so it simplifies all these things down to just one value and that’s just one value. Now of course this isn’t the perfect translation because this is already ten values but by reducing it down to maybe to five values we get an idea of how it does that. So, that’s how you do it for value. Now, for edges let’s look at this and say that right now we can see edges everywhere, all over the place, all over these grapes around here, all around these guys, the edge here they’re all pretty sharp.  

Lets say we squint at it right and then we kind of blur the thing and see that all these sharp edges here went away and even this edge is not really all that sharp anymore but this stayed pretty sharp and most of these edges went away but this edge stayed really sharp so that would tell you these would be your pre dominating edges maybe these first two and maybe these would be the next sharpest edge and finally this and this and this. So that’s what squinting does for edges! So, what it does is it gives you the order of things. And that can really help you a lot when you’re trying to simplify! Now the downside to squinting is it has a tendency to want to obliterate everything and some people will even go and say only paint what you see when you paint. Now, that may be good for some people but obviously isn’t the best answer for everyone because someone might put a sharp edge somewhere for a dramatic effect that you don’t see when you squint or they’ll say don’t put any detail in that you don’t see when you squint but you know when you squint someone’s face you don’t see their eyes, you know some real nice things in their eyes that you may want to put in. So that becomes a personal choice what you decide to put into your painting and what you want to keep out. Sometimes you’re going to want to put in different edges and change the value structure to make the best possible painting rather than just duplicating what’s in front of you.

So squinting is a great jumping off point and I don’t think it’s the complete end all! So just be careful with that! And really ultimately you’re going to paint what you want to paint! And paint what you think would make the most absolute beautiful painting for you! You know, for your work! Continue to watch more Painting Videos/DVDs to get better at oil painting today!