White on white value study.

A difficult exercise.  A small white vase, at its fullest very sphere shaped and an ideal subject for this sort of thing.  I made an early decision to maintain the relative value difference between the highlight and its surroundings.  Its frustrating when working dark to light to run out of useful range of the paint and find, at the last, that your highlight looks dull gray. Like picking out a melody on a guitar and finding you have run out of neck on the last note.

To retain the sparkle of the highlight all the other values would have to be shifted down , or possibly compressed.  Here I tried to judge them relatively - and they would be in a different key than what I was observing. Ouch.  I justify the decision by knowing that with a white subject against a white background, a strong highlight will have a lot of visual impact.


Here also was the first time I  premixed a range of values on the palette. I found this to be extremely useful in that it gets you thinking  about values and their relationships carefully before even touching a brush.