jayme del rosario | sketchblog

[...] a simple rusty ladle. It’s under artificial lighting, and you can check out the poster study here. I’m attracted to the simplicity of the object, its colors and the old, rusty texture of the [...]

I never heard the term “poster study” . Comes from what?
Nice paintings by the way.

John, I believe the term “poster study” came from Ted Seth Jacobs. I haven’t studied with him, but I’m one level removed and study/studied with students of Ted. It’s when you try and simplify your study to several flat patches to represent the forms you are going to paint. Each patch should be distinctly different from the one next to it. They are usually thumbnails, pretty small and should be done in roughly 30 minutes. When you step back, it should look like a finished painting if you made some good decisions in the study but in no way are you making a small painting and blending things.

A good example is if you take a photo into photoshop and do a “posterize” effect or filter. You’ll see an example of how something is posterized. You can posterize it to 7 values/color or 30 but the point is to make a simple and quick assessment, so less is more. If you don’t have photoshop, imagine a cylinder. A poster study with three stripes next to each other, one representing the shadow, another strip representing the mid-tones, and the third representing the lightest light would suffice for the poster study. If you wanted five values, perhaps add a patch of abstract color/value to represent the cast shadow and the fifth could be the surface which the cylinder is resting on.

[...] of this month, I haven’t had any time to actually post it on my blog. I started with a poster study (which also served as my compositional study). Since it’s a very simple/elementary set-up, I [...]