Grayscale

Working to improve your skills is a daily chore for an artist. You can sketch, experiment with color, go wildly abstract, take classes or make prints and all of these things work, because there’s just no such thing as bad practice.

My favorite writing coach says, “Writers write.” It works for painters, printers, potters, carvers and all of the like, by doing you improve your ability to see and then translate that sight into something on the canvas, or the wheel or the page.

But often we find one technique which works and we stay with it never trying anything new. This will make you a master at that technique but it won’t help you develop new skills. Hey, doing what you’ve always done is comfortable and safe and there’s nothing wrong with safe and comfortable.

But art is about getting outside your comfort zone.

So why not try some grayscale practice? What? Grayscale, it’s what newspapers do to make photographs ready for the press and it is something every artists should try, if only to discover that it isn’t for you.

So how do you practice grayscale? You did download Faststone Image Viewer like I told you? If so grayscale is only a few clicks away. Take any picture, one of your own, something you’ve downloaded from the Net or something you’ve scanned in from a book or magazine, run it through Faststone and use the Edit command to find the Grayscale converter. One click and you have that image in grayscale. Now all you have to do is use your best skills to copy it.

Now why would I want to waste time doing something as silly as that when I could be creating a new work? Because working in a monotone, any monotone will teach you things about light and shadow that you would never see in color. And its demanding, you use color to get separation and give depth to your composition, but if suddenly there is no color how do you do the same thing? Maybe you should try it?

The eye is a wonderful and complex thing, it can see close up and across the vast reaches of space and still read those tiny instructions on a bottle of pain reliever, it can do all of that, but it is a lazy thing. It only does so much as the user asks it to do. Making it see in a different way trains the eye to explore space in a new way.

We have been trained by popular magazines to accept the wide angle camera lens as normal, editors love the bold look of a wide angle lens and the fact that everything from the tip of your nose to the horizon is in focus doesn’t hurt either. But what if you see specifically, the drops of dew on a leaf, an insect sunning before it takes flight or a pattern of shade and sunlight across and empty beach? Can you capture that image without being able to see the shadows and empty spaces? Maybe a day of grayscale painting will make all of the available darkness speak to you.