Art 106: Adding Drama with Value

Practice with black and white before you get to color

One of you sent me a very good question about VALUE—how light or dark something is. So we’re going to jump into that today, and I have a free coupon at the end if you want to take a longer class online about value.

Also, I’m going to add this to our list of great drawing exercises for absolute beginners. If you’d like to go back to basics, check out this list!

A few tips about value:

• People see value before they see color. So if your values are right, it’s OK if your colors are a little off!

• Put another way—if you feel like there’s something not quite right about your painting or drawing—it’s probably VALUE. Get your darks dark enough, and your lights light enough, and it’ll probably really help.

• Doing value studies as a PRACTICE will teach you how to SEE values more clearly! So think of this like a workout you do at the gym. You’re training yourself!

• Value studies are much easier if you convert your photos to black and white.

• Start off with only three values: White (the blank paper), gre…