One thing that seems hard for a beginning artist to get a handle on is determining the correct values in a painting.
There are so many things to learn in the beginning that painting light and its effects on a composition seem way down the list of things to do.
Most novice painters concentrate on the local color of a scene or composition and fail to understand that the lights, darks and the juxtaposition of the two are really what makes or breaks a painting.
The Importance Of Color Value
Value is the relative darkness or lightness of a color. It defines a shape and produces spatial illusions to create a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface.
The contrast of values separate shapes in the compositional space. This gives the viewer a sense of dimension and depth. Meanwhile, gradation of value indicates contours and mass of an object to give it a three-dimensional appearance.
Pay Attention To Lighting And Its Intensity
Assigning values to components of your composition is sort of like making a blueprint of your painting. If you understand and specify where your light source comes from, you can develop a plan of where to place the light and dark areas of your painting.
Don’t just sketch out a composition and start flinging paint at it. Spend a little time thinking about the light source of the scene. It’s easy to forget this step – it’s exciting to begin laying in the colors and see how the actual painting stacks up against what you imagine it should be.
But, you should take a bit of time to think about the direction and strength of your light source. A strong light will produce sharp shadows, while a weak light source will minimize the contrast of values and diminish the shadows.
Start With A Monochromatic Layout
A good way to handle mapping values is to begin with a monochromatic blueprint of your composition. This can be either a sketch on paper or a grisaille on your canvas.
Using a monochromatic design allows you to ignore that pesky problem of color and allows you to focus entirely on the light or darkness of an object or area in your composition.
For example, one may think of yellow as a light color, but depending on its pigment, it may actually read as quite dark in your painting. The lightness or darkness is also affected by the color that is placed adjacent to it.
Getting The Bugs Out
If you’re in the beginning stages of composition, doing rough charcoal or pencil value studies may suit you. You may use watercolor for a speedy way to cover large areas, and you can quickly and easily lay in all the light and dark areas of your composition.
When you’re in this stage of design, you’ll be able to see strengths and weaknesses that you may otherwise miss with just a contour sketch. Place your sketch on an easel or tack it up on the wall, stand back and study your design. Squint your eyes to blur the images, so you’ll just see the light and dark masses of the composition. You’ll be able to see if your composition holds together or if there are areas that need improvement.
It’s a lot easier to finalize your composition at this stage than finding out halfway through your painting session that the design has major problems.
Start Your Painting With A Grisaille
If you’re sure your composition is basically arranged, you can do a grisaille directly on your canvas. This saves time and allows you to get started with your painting more quickly.
A grisaille is a monochromatic painting that defines the light and dark of a composition without using color. It can be shades of gray, or you may choose to use another neutral color like burnt umber or even burnt sienna.
This foundation painting is the basis for building up glazes of color to complete your painting. This may be only one or two layers of paint, but it can also be many translucent layers that build up a sense of depth and inner illumination.
Don’t Let Your Palette Fool You
When you’re looking at your paints on your palette, you’re seeing individual colors on a stark, white background. Seeing the hues there and transposing them to your painting is more than just daubing green paint on the branches of a tree to fill in the foliage.
You need to consider the color of the sky in the background, the other trees around it and the intensity of the light source reflecting off the leaves. What looks great on the palette may not be exactly right on the painting.
The arrangement of colors on your painting plays a part in how you mix your hues, and as you learn about color theory, the task of blending the correct colors gets easier.
Don’t be over-anxious to get color on your painting. The time you spend laying out the light and dark areas of your composition is well worth the effort. The colors on your palette are sort of like the icing on a cake. If you don’t have a good recipe to make a tasty cake, the frosting can only cover up so much of a flavorless recipe.
