About

Every painting starts
as a few flat shapes.

Painters do not start with detail. They start by blocking in, reducing a scene to a few big shapes of value and color and getting that structure right before anything else.

Blocking In is a free tool that finds those shapes in any image and turns them into the studies a painter makes before touching the canvas: a value study of the lights and darks, a flat color block-in, a squint test, and paintable stencils you can print and work from.

The value study

A value study strips a picture down to its design of light and dark, the structure that holds a composition together underneath the color. Blocking In shows it two ways. A notan reduction forces the whole image into 2, 3, or 5 flat tones, so the big shapes read at a glance. A layered build-up then paints that design tone by tone, deepening the darks one coat at a time, the way a graphite study is actually built.

The color block-in

A color block-in reduces a picture to a small set of flat color masses. In Blocking In, those masses are laid in by coverage, the largest first down to the smallest, the same order a painter blocks a canvas so the structure goes down before the detail. Each color also becomes its own paintable stencil, one flat shape per color, so you can mix a small palette and paint along.

The squint test

The squint test is the oldest check in painting: step back, half close your eyes, and see whether the design still reads when the detail disappears. Blocking In recreates it by progressively softening the image to mimic viewing distances, from the easel to across the room. If a picture holds together at twelve feet, its big design works.

Print it for the easel

Every study can be printed as a single PDF brochure: the value studies, the squint ladder, the color key, and the paintable stencils. An optional drawing grid helps transfer proportions by eye, and any study can be tiled across several pages to work at full canvas size.

Bring your own image

Blocking In works on any photo or reference, not just famous paintings. Drop in a JPG or PNG and you get the same value study, color block-in, squint test, and printable stencils. The value study, squint test, and PDF are produced in your browser; for the color block-in a downscaled copy of your image is sent to our server only to compute the result, processed in memory, and not stored. See the privacy page for details.