Ok mark in your vids u say to paint areas that are darker than Blk.
But I see color in those areas..I am painting the folds on my second Stilllife and getting confused.I have always painted from photos not from life.I dint know they could be darker areas darker than Blk..
Thanks
Alex
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Your eye simply has WAY more range than black paint to white paint.
Once you use the method for a while, you can experiment with putting some color into those areas, but if you dont know what you are doing and you just simply lighten all the dark areas, things could look wonky.
If you finish a painting and you find that there is too much black, and you wish you could see more detail in the shadows, next time you set a still life up, be sure to use the color checker with some black paint on it to do a preliminary "shadow check" (or whatever Mark calls it). There are things you can do to add fill light so that the shadow areas aren't darker than black paint.
For the last seven or eight years, I have been painting free portraits for parents of young men and women killed in the war. This means that I work exclusively from photos, and sadly, often from very poor "grab and shoot" photos taken by the family before he or she left for the war zone. Cameras/film/digital photos are notorious for clumping values. The darks get lumped together as do the lights. My experience is that I have to manufacture these two value extremes. Generally, I lighten the darks, and darken the lights. One thing that helps is to tape your photo to the edge of one of those desk lamps so that light from it will penetrate the photos, thus lighting the darks. It's not perfect by any means, but it will help. It also helps to follow the general rule that cold light produces warms shadows, and vice versa.
I mention this backer than black technique, but in all honesty, I very rarely have an occasion to use it as I do not make my darks black. When using very much black in a painting several things can happen. First it lowers the key. Meaning your lights will need to be darker so the painting is not to "contrastly." Sargent and many other great painters only use a range of five values in most of their paintings. This negates the contrasty look and makes a more natural and cohesive painting.