Portrait painters
Skin is where value errors show most and forgive least. A map settles the relationships between forehead, cheek and jaw before you commit, and keeps them consistent across sittings.
Use cases
Who this is for
Anyone painting from a photograph in a medium where a wrong colour is expensive to fix.
Devotional and deity paintings
Radha–Krishna and similar subjects carry several saturated colour families at once — blue skin, a purple robe, gold ornament, pink lotus. Hue separation keeps those families distinct instead of averaging them into one another.
Commissioned likenesses
When the client will compare your painting to the photograph, a measured match is worth having. The reported colour difference tells you objectively how close the plan is.
Still life and florals
Petals and glazed ceramics hold subtle hue shifts at nearly the same value. Those are exactly the distinctions that get lost by eye and survive when measured.
Landscape from photographs
Aerial perspective is a value and temperature problem. Mapping shows how little separates a near hill from a far one — usually much less than instinct suggests.
Copying and study
Studying a master’s picture, the map exposes how few shades were actually used and how large each area is — often the most surprising thing about a copy.
Murals and scaling up
Painting large from a small reference, the outline mode gives you shapes to transfer and each shade tells you what share of the wall it covers, so you can mix in quantity.
Teaching studios
A map makes an abstract lesson concrete: here are the seven values in this photograph, here is where each goes, here is how to mix them. Use references you have permission to share with students.
Other media
Nothing is specific to oil except the pigment library. Painters in acrylic and gouache use the same maps and simply substitute their own tubes; the mixing model behaves the same way because all of them are subtractive. Watercolourists find the value maps useful even where the opaque-mixing assumptions fit less well.
Who it is not for
If you paint from life, from imagination, or deliberately away from the reference, this will not help — there is nothing to measure. And if you want a machine to produce the finished image, this is the wrong tool: it maps, it does not paint.
Try it with your own subject.
Whatever you paint, the questions are the same three.
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