Munsell Neutral Value Study

These Value Studies are designed to help my still life paintings improve. I’m finding them quite a bit more difficult than I had thought.

I asked a carpenter friend of mine to help. He agreed to cut up some 2×4 into 2x2s. Only after he did that he mentioned that the only 2×4’s he had came from old wood 2x10s that originally were part of a 3 hundred year old barn! So the cubes had once been part of a tree that was approximately 300-500 years old! It felt like a sacrilege but it was too late.

This turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be. Two of the cubes are OK, the white-N9 and the yellow-N8 are not too bad.

I’m quite unhappy with the N5 cube and the ground. They were both supposed to be N5. It doesn’t look like it is! So either my Munsell student book N5 chip is really an N4 or my ‘neutral grey’ palette paper is N6!

At any rate, I did learn that I was not able to paint the black dark enough for the shadow side of the N5 cube.

Another thought: These are really boring!!