Why should I start painting in black and white?

When we look around everything is full of color, shadows, lights and shines, the painter intends to capture reality and translate it into a flat and opaque surface I mean it hasn’t have light, which is our canvas and on which we want to recreate a reality with Colored pigments. There are three important factors that come together to recreate reality in our canvas, drawing, volume and color, training ourself drawing every day allows us to represent things proportionally and real, the volume gives us The three-dimensional effect of things and color gives life to everything we see.

The first thing is the drawing, but I will not talk about it now, since the subject tofay only focuses on the volume.

To begin we must train our view, we must be able to reproduce the tonal values of the objects we observe and the only way to see the tonal values it is necessary to start painting white objects, because these do not have color and that just leave us a scale of grays, this means that we will only concentrate on reproducing the different values or grays we see, when we master with a certain ease this, we will have managed to reproduce the volume, then we can think about color, which is a very broad subject that requires a lot of study and practice, and if you do not master the color theory do not expect good results either.

From my own experience I know that most art students want results already, nobody wants to wait, we all want to see our art works come to life immediately, but the reality is that there is a lot to learn in painting.

We can start by putting together a still life with a white cloth and some geometric figures painted white, if we can not put together a still life then we look for black and white photographs, lokk for the ones with appropriate illumination with not frontal illumination, we must choose images with contrast,where you can see easily the passage of light into the shadow and therefore the tonal values involved in this value scale.

The continuous practice painting white objects will train us in the way to achieve the appropriate volume and then when we will paint objects with color do not lose or confuse us.

To start you just need black and white colors from then you need to create a value scale of 6 tones at least, you will ended up with a lot more of gray tones, from there the point is try to match the value of every side of the image, it is going to take a little bit of work mixing but it is going to really great when you master volume.

You can try with cubes if you are a beginner, if you have some experience try with this image:

But if you have some time painting but you are not getting the volume ok yet, then try with this image, you will need to be more accurate with the values and have some experience blending the paint.