When a fork in the river comes along, sometimes you’ve just got to point your boat at it and see where it takes you. I won’t go into all the details but the river forked, my husband I took that new direction, and all of a sudden we find ourselves moving to Buchanan, Michigan.

Buchanan is about 30 miles from where we live now and we’re in the  middle of  sorting through, throwing out, packing up, and moving twenty years worth of “stuff” one carload at a time.

Most of my drawing supplies are already there, but I am keeping some sketching supplies in my big “Movin’ On” bag which has become a portable office. My art is taking a backseat while I coordinate this move, and that’s ok because this whole process gives my creativity plenty of exercise.

I need to do less so that I can do more.

I’m taking this time to change a few other things too. I’ve turned off drawing class registrations until Autumn, closed my online drawing club, and designed a new look for this site that I’m working on bringing online between packing and toting sessions. If you’re a creative, you know how difficult it is to let go of projects and I really struggled with these decisions. It turned out to be exactly the right time to let go though, because I need all that energy to navigate these new waters.

Take Away: Trust the Muse

As things stand right now, I’m very busy, very stressed, very tired, very happy, very much in the flow, and that odd mix of emotions keeps me moving along at a quick pace.  After all these years though, I know I can trust the Muse when she points out a new direction. Although I miss having time to make my art and write about drawing, I’ll get back to it with re-focused energy after we’re re-rooted in our new home.

To All My Friends From The Drawing Club

I miss you all very much and I hope our pencils cross again someday.

It’s best to begin manipulating key after you know how to shade reasonably well but want more control. There are several reasons why you need to know how to control value.

Alter key to:

1. Express mood
2. Balance the composition
3. Create a focus
4. Indicate color differences in gray scale

To alter the key of a drawing in a realistic way, keep the values the same number of steps apart on the scale (gray scale), or nearly so. There’s always a little wiggle room available for artistic interpretation though.

Change the Key Of A Reference Photo

Alter a reference photo’s key in a photo editing program by adjusting the contrast to alter all the values at the same time, or use “curves” to alter shadows, mid tones, and highlights, separately.

Here are some instructions for Photoshop, but the controls should be similar in all image editing programs.

Always make a copy of the image, and work from the saved copy.

How To Adjust Contrast In Photoshop

1. Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast

2. The Brightness slide makes the entire image brighter or darker.

3. The Contrast slide evens out the values at one extreme (think mud), and separates the lights from the darks by many degrees at the other extreme (think posterized).

Sometimes a small adjustment with one of these sliders is all it takes to make a good reference photo into a great one.

How To Adjust With Curves In Photoshop

1. Image > Adjustments > Curves

2. You’ll see an angled line over a grid.

3. One end on the line controls the darks, the other end controls the lights, and the middle part controls the middle values. Grab one end or the other and see what happens. (You can always put it back the way it was.) Grab the middle and bend the line into a curve, first one way and then the other, and watch what happens. (Your eyes should be sparkling with glee at the possibilities about now.)

I usually lighten the darks or the mid-values, but sometimes I lighten the highlights too if I want the image to have a contrast-y sparkle and punch.

Change the Key After The Drawing Is Done

It’s easy enough to darken values by hatching over them, but lightening them can be tricky. I try not to get into that situation by building the values slowly so I can sense what’s needed and change them as the whole drawing evolves. Art is always unpredictable though, so here are a few techniques that might work for you if you have to lighten.

1. Pinch a kneaded eraser into a big rounded shape and gently tap the area until it lightens evenly. Some people like to roll the eraser in a log shape and then roll it across the area. Either way, you’ll have to touch up after you’re done. In particular, the darkest shadows usually lighten too much and need to be re-darkened.

2. Use a clean flat brush to “lift” graphite from very dark areas. Gently flick it across the dark area and the bristles will lift and remove the graphite.

3. If area is already on the light side but needs to be even lighter, try dabbing it with a clean chamois cloth. Graphite smears easily so dab, roll, and lift — don’t pull and drag or it will smudge.

The Big IT

Value is the “IT” for graphite artists. We have to do everything with it, from creating textures to indicating mood. Your own artistic sense will give you clues about what a drawing needs, so listen closely to inner prompts and act on them. If you do, somewhere along the way you’ll learn to trust yourself and build a more surefooted and agile drawing technique.

Gray Scale Inspiration

For inspiration and ideas about how to effectively use key, look at photos by Ansel Adams, classic black and white movies, or any artwork by J. D. Hillberry and Mike Sibley.

Here’s a link to part one of this piece.

I’m drawing three pears from life in this video, and I added the narration afterwards. Hope you enjoy it! (And now you know what I’ve been doing this week.)

In a previous post, I mentioned that it’s possible to realistically change the “key” of part of a drawing to make it work better. Key is the range of values in a drawing and manipulating those values is a little like playing music. If you play the same song in a higher or lower octave, it’s still the same song even though it sounds different. With a drawing, changing the key lightens or darkens its values, but underneath it’s still structurally the same scene.

Here is an example of altered key. The photo on the left is unaltered and I darkened the lower end key of the one on the right. The altered photo has more depth and the bird stands out more too.

Altering the key lets you play with mood, focus, and composition as well as allowing you to draw more sculpturally and differentiate color in gray scale.

Mood

Key expresses lighting which gives us cues about the scene in many subtle ways. Light tells us what time of day it is or what time of year, and time and season are evocative.

Alter the key slightly to express a different time sense and the mood changes slightly too.

Change the over all key to inject emotion into a piece by indicating “lightness” or “darkness” of mood.

Focus

Shift the focus by making one area lighter or darker than the rest of the drawing.

Composition

Modify the “weight” of light and dark values to help balance the composition.

Pushing and Pulling

Extend both extremes of the value scale and you’ll see a more three dimensional effect in the drawing. At the drawing club, we call this “pushing the shadows” and “pulling the highlights.”

Defining Color in Grey Scale

Alter one part of the drawing to differentiate between two colors that are nearly the same value. Red and green are particularly notorious for looking different in color but the same in gray scale. (See this post.)

Cameras See Differently Than We Do

Cameras can’t record all the values our eyes can see, especially at both ends of the scale. They often can’t pick up the detail in the shadow areas and make them too dark, and they usually obliterate details in highlights by making them too bright.

Lighten the key of shadows and darken the key of highlights to correct for your camera’s poor eyesight.

Don’t think about it too much.

Listen to your inner voice as you work. Be sensitive of the need to lighten or darken, shift the focus, or add more detail. That inner sense always knows how to take the next step needed.

In Part Two, I’ll talk about a few ways to alter key.

Dream Bird in Flight

For those of you who don’t know, I started taking depression medication last September. I’m very happy to tell you that after seven months we finally found the right kind and got the dose adjusted to what I need. This took such a long time because when the medications took care of one problem another one popped up. I cycled through depression, severe anxiety, and even OCD a few times before my moods finally smoothed out. (It was a lot like playing Whac-A-Mole, only I was both the whacker and the whack-ee. Ouch.)

I tried these kinds of medications several years ago too, and it was lousy experience. I was working at a factory and had decided to take a quality control position that required me to be very vocal and deal with people all day long. In other words, the job required me to be someone I am not. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I do remember the extra money sounded awfully good at the time. Anyway, I thought my shyness and social anxiety were the only things standing between me and that good paying job, so I decided to try taking anxiety medication.

One after another, each drug I tried caused side effects that I couldn’t live with or else didn’t work at all. My doctor finally prescribed one, out of exasperation I suspect, that made me extremely sleepy all the time. After a few months on that drug, it seemed like the stuff was suppressing my creativity and even though I was willing to do a lot to be successful at that new job, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my joy of creating art.

I quit that job, stopped taking the drug, my creativity woke up again, and my life went along pretty well as long as I didn’t have to do a lot of talking, or be around too many people, or deal with too many new situations. Until last summer. In the middle of that lovely warm season, a huge wave of depression rolled over me and would not leave. I was not that familiar with depression, but I found out that it’s a crushing soul numbing monster to live with.

Eventually I was too depressed to even pick up a pencil and it became apparent that my creativity was at risk again. I had to think long and hard about if it was riskier to try medication again or to wait and see if the depression would lift. Either way it seemed like I was gambling with something very precious. I compromised and tried St. John’s Wort. It didn’t work. I was out of options.

This time around, thank the Powers That Be, we found a medication that works well and the seven months of effort to get here was worth it. Looking back, I think the sleepiness caused by the last drug was the creativity killer and not the drug itself, because this time my creativity has enthusiastically and joyfully increased. Constantly dealing with depression or anxiety takes a huge amount of energy – it’s a lot like trying to run a race while carrying a bag of bricks – and now that I don’t have to deal with them all the time, my creativity has all the energy it needs. My shyness and OCD have improved too, because all these things are related. My load truly has been lightened, and I feel a lightness of spirit that I haven’t felt in a very long time.