A few years ago I read a great book on the techniques of Dutch still life painters, and formulated my own version of the dead color approach. The image on the left is the way my paintings look at the start: a carefully-drawn contour filled with solid color. I don’t care for any of them at this stage and like to push them past it as fast as possible. I choose colors that are at the second or third value and that will allow me to build on them. If you study an object for a while you’ll begin to see which colors relate to the large form at each value. The big forms are critical to get correct, especially in the beginning.
The second image shows things as they begin to get interesting. I’ve added values above and below the starting value, working down to the first value and up to the fifth or sixth. It always amazes me to see how fully formed objects appear to be even though they are only spanning half of the possible paint range.
From the seventh value up the impression of light grows stronger, and the object takes on greater density. The right-most photo is the finished image. It was hard to capture the full range of values, so I had to allow the background to come up in value to get the lighter colors.