I’ve never been a painter that spends a lot of time mapping out or planning paintings. I tend to just dive right into a painting. The majority of the time this tends to work out decently for me, but not all paintings work as well as I’d like.

During a recent plein air class, I was encouraged to finally give value sketching a try, and I honestly really loved it. I made a handful of quick sketches to test out different compositions. The original composition I had planned on jumping into didn’t work as well as I envisioned once it was on paper, so I saved myself some time not jumping into it. Once I found a composition that I liked, I fleshed out a larger value study with a dark, medium, and light tone. This all took 5 minutes, so I didn’t feel like it took away from my painting time.

Moving onto painting, I recreated my value sketch on my canvas. Then started fleshing out the painting like I normally would with color and detail. The painting ended up not turning out, but that is besides the point. The point is that no matter how long you’ve been painting, there is always something new to learn.

As a bonus, it encouraged me to buy a few brush tip markers in various shades of grey, which I wouldn’t have bought otherwise. I still plan on experimenting with other mediums for these sketches, but I liked the markers more than I expected to. I even ended up doing a few raven sketches, I liked the feel of the markers so much. They really reminded me of the India ink drawings I did a few years ago.

The supplies I used for these sketches is a Strathmore Toned Tan sketchbook, Tombow ABT water-based markers (N15, N35, N55, N75), and Sakura Gelly Roll 08 in white. I also did a quick sketch in pastels, but I hated how messy they were. I’ll probably still use the white pastel for highlights in the future because the Gelly Roll didn’t quite live up to my expectations of a full coverage white. I did like using it to add back in light areas that I could then go back over with the markers.