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Value Woman Portraits Sketch Oil Painting Waterhouse by Michael Malm

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Write your awesome label here.

Importance of Value in Portraits

🔥As Michael puts it: "Value does all the work, but color gets all the credit!" While the strongest paintings may not have a million colors dancing around the canvas, they always have strong value patterns. 


You’ll learn how to:
🎯 Build strong value patterns beneath your color—so your portraits have structure, weight, and clarity. 
🔍 Relate value to shape and form—understand how value shifts define structure in a believable head, even before color.
🖌️ Paint a full demonstration head in monochrome, showing how value, edge‑work, and “seeing shapes” come together. 
🎨 Carry these value decisions into your color work—so when color arrives, you’re working from a rock‑solid underlying structure.


Ideal for portrait artists who want to deepen their foundational understanding—move beyond “what color should skin be” and start working with “what value must it be” for a painting that holds together.🕒 Runtime: 3+ hours

  • Michael Malm

    Instructor

  • Fundamental

    Difficulty
Meet your instructor

Michael Malm

Michael lives in the beautiful Cache Valley of northern Utah with his wife, Juanita, and their four children. The surrounding rural communities and setting provide backdrops for his figure paintings and inspiration for his landscapes. His serious study began under Del Parson at Dixie College where he completed his associate’s degree. He then went on to Southern Utah University where he had the opportunity to study with Perry Stewart, and completed his formal education at Utah State University where he received a Master of Fine Arts Degree studying under Glen Edwards. Workshops have also played an important part of his development studying with such master painters as Richard Schmid, Burton Silverman, Daniel Gerhartz, Quang Ho, Ron Hicks, Michael Workman, and Jim Norton.

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