>>7611232
>>7611239 is not me (>>7611221) btw
>I think you're discounting just how much contrivance goes into good value composition.
i'm not. notan is incredibly useful for composition blocking and even make great finished pieces, but students aren't doing notan as a finished piece; they're doing it as a learning experience. all i'm saying is hatching should not be used in the exercise, and the exercise is itself. whether the values when doing the exercise are "perfect" is irrelevant, since not only is no one claiming that the studies are ever perfect, but they also require abstraction in themselves anyway, since light obviously is not a binary scale and you need to use your gut to decide where light and shadow, or light and dark, make their transition, which is never a perfect process. you can get very fine and detailed textures with just black and white if you make details small enough, which again, plenty of pen and ink artists do, but hatching is a midtone abstraction by its nature.
>Just because you're perfectly separating the values on some photo doesn't mean the photo has values worth separating.
"values worth separating" is purely a factor of taste, which students may not have developed yet. it's both subjective and difficult to teach.
>"It's counterproductive" and "It's sometimes good for learning value basics, and character silhouettes, and maybe composition..."
in his defense, he did say they're "mostly useless", operative: "useless", in his OP and not what you've quoted, but i get that this phrasing can seem weaselly. idk man, the full thread is there if you want to read it. bradley seemed both reasonable and willing to level with the people that responded to him.
we can agree to disagree on this one and leave it at that.
i really don't want to derail the thread anymore anyway, since i'm not going to be posting work.