>>5843973In stage 3 the roughly blocked in shapes and values give a better sense of depth and form, whereas in stage 4 they added a lot of detail but didnt pay attention to the actual details itself. Within the roughness there is more room for the brain to fill in the blanks, but in the finished product the use of badly placed highlights (bright values) betrays the illusion of depth that an artist (usually) strives towards. The illusion is destroyed because the brain now "knows" that the painting is indeed flat, that it is wrong and not lifelike. That anon sort of revealed his lack of attention or lack of knowledge when they didnt work closely along the reference material and started to just randomly use highlights which only served to flatten everything as they did not appear in unity with the rest of the image. The details are physical entities just as much as everything else, every single stroke of the brush is information and that information can either serve your painting or detract from it. We are all, as artists, creating something from nothing and that something will have to look convincing in some ways, even if it is completely unrealistic in its subject. I dont know if I explained it well, but in essence remember this: always work from rough shapes to smaller shapes, but dont treat the smaller shapes as less important. They all must work in unison and if you paint a perfect nude figure before painting a super 2D fabric ontop of it, it will still look like shit, because you buried your actual knowledge under the muddy, flat fabric.
Light is essential in sofar as that it covers everything and the values it creates give the illusion of depth even when you only paint them on a 2D plane (your canvas)
Look at Dechardins work here, everything is quite simple in the way it is setup. I think to best understand how light and values and forms work, you should study actual masters of light. Like Dechardin, like Sorolla, like Rembrandt.
