Value and Color – These two elements are interestingly linked. One is clearly more important than the other. While Color is nearly always the first to be seen, Value humbly takes a secondary role.
It’s often said, ‘Value does the work, while Color gets the glory.’ So, in trying to better understand the relationship Value has with Color, I’ll use a simile to help make it stick. Let’s make Value Love and Color Beauty.
Value, like Love, is mostly hidden within Color and rarely shows itself as itself. You have to look for it. You see Love at work in relationship to other Love areas within the same piece.
Color, like Beauty, stands out, is seen first, and its impression lasts the longest. Love is always present. Beauty is seldom forgotten.
You can have Love without Beauty (Value without Color), as in a Value study.
But you can never have Beauty without Love. (Color without Value)
Love is in everything. It’s the stronger of the two. Its importance within your composition carries the load. Love has the power to make or break your work. If your design has weak Love, no amount of Beauty will make it work. Love should come first when designing your composition. Beauty comes second. If your painting is to have any Beauty at all, the Beauty needs to come second, always after the Love.
If you have the Love right, any mistake or mar in Beauty is overlooked.
Understand the importance of how Love and Beauty work in your art and you’ll understand how important it is in creating art that moves the viewer beyond words. This is the essence of making your art remarkable.
Value and Color are inseparable. Value, although mostly hidden, is the most important part. Color will demand attention, but never lose the fact that Value always comes with Color.
Another way to think of Value and Color is as music.
Painting a scene in a single color with multiple Values (think a Charlie Hunter painting) is like a solo instrument, i.e. piano, guitar or a violin. By itself, it’s beautiful. There is no need to add any other colors or instruments. A duo-tone or tri-tone adds one and two other “colors” to your song.
Four colors and you have what most bands are playing these days. A full orchestra (a full palette of colors) brings every opportunity to hit each note as it should be played to complete the score.
Plan the work and work the plan.
Take the extra time to do a simple value study or two; don’t rush to paint so soon.
Slow down and make sure your plan/value study is solid.
Even in the grayscale sketches, think temperature, shapes, and value.
Simplify scenes to background, middle-ground, and foreground shapes.
Use the light, mid-tone, and dark shapes assigned to these three grounds to describe and set up your Center of Interest or your “Hero” for success.
Your Hero’s success is achieved by using one or more techniques to help it stand out from the rest of your scene, i.e., hardest edge, highest contrast, brightest color, etc.
The Three Grounds
In visualizing our “Opera” scene we started from the Forms post, here’s a general steelyard composition (Edgar Payne calls a big foreground object on one side, balanced out with a smaller object on the other side a “Steelyard”, like cranes in a steelyard, I suppose). This composition is divided into three spaces or distinct depths by using a light, middle, and dark value occupying the 3 grounds of foreground, middle ground, and background.
This graphic shows all six variables possible in mixing and matching these combinations.
When the three grounds are not clearly seen, this is where your artistic license comes into play. Make some decisions to unify the sameness of areas to understand the Value structure of these three grounds. Use exaggeration and embellishment to these shapes to make your design navigable. Where things are confusing, simplify. Where shapes seem disjointed, floating, or unconnected, connect shapes up. Simplify to make it stronger. Trust that the value structure is strong enough to carry the painting more than any details you could possibly add. If you do this right, any detail added to an already strong value structured painting is simply golden strokes. If you have a flimsy valued structured painting, any detail added with the intent of making it more impressive is just adding noise to an already chaotic scene.
When using the quick sketches as a tool to rough-in the best compositions, see your scene as simply as you can. Remembering detail is not what you want to focus on at this moment. There is a better time for detail and this is not it. Think big shapes and connections. Separate your scene into these three grounds, using the three values. If your painting is using color, start to think in big temperature shifts of cool vs. warm.
A quick note on Color (color will be covered next week): if you want your colors to be vibrant, know how and why to mix all kinds of grays. Use these grays with your colors. The eyes will do the mixing and matching. A great gray, placed next to a pure color, makes that pure color even more vibrant.
Squint to see values; Open your eyes to see color.
This is a good time to introduce Perspective as a Design Principle. We’ll cover Perspective in more detail in a future post, but here, as it relates to Value, Atmospheric Perspective and Value go hand in hand.
Below is a graphic I made that helps us understand atmospheric perspective.
It was initiated from a question a student had at one of my watercolor workshops. This student had a challenging time understanding the graying down and cooling off of colors the further you are from the shapes you are painting. I sketched a simplified version of this graphic on a whiteboard. When I returned home, I made this up in Photoshop.
One other thing that we need to discuss and understand in Value is the deceptiveness of our own eyes in telling us information within our scene to effectively help us make right choices when we are making our art. Our eyes are amazing instruments for capturing light and detail and relaying this information to our brain for us to make life and death decisions. When we look into the dark shadow spaces, the irises open up for us to see into these dark shapes, to see if there’s any danger lurking within the shadows. Likewise, when we are looking at brightly lit areas, our eyes close down and limit the amount of light coming in, so we’re able to see darker shapes residing in the light. For any artist relying on capturing these true values and colors, based on what our eyes are telling us is out there, it is nearly impossible. With that said, it’s important when painting a scene to keep your shadow shapes separated from your light shapes and, as Kipling said, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” In other words, when you are painting shadow shapes and light shapes in your painting, make sure the darker parts in the light shapes are slightly lighter than the lighter parts in the dark shapes. Likewise, the shadow shapes will occasionally have lighter parts, so make sure these lighter parts in the shadows are still darker than the darker parts that appear in the light.
If you get this mixed up, you run the risk of confusing yourself and the viewer on where your shapes begin and end. And if you are following what your eyes are telling you, you’ll paint the darker shapes lighter and your lighter shapes darker, because that’s exactly what your eyes are telling you is there.
Here’s a graphic that shows this from an actual photograph.
