LESSON 14 · VALUE & LIGHT

Value is how light or dark something is, and it does more work in a picture than colour ever will. This lesson gives you a five-step system, teaches you to squint, and shows you how to lock your digital palette down to five greys so you are forced to make decisions instead of blending everything into mush.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L7, L9

• A blank 2000x1500 canvas
• One high-contrast reference photo with clear light and shadow
• Your Artist 12 at a fixed, moderate brightness in a room that is not dark

WATCH

Brent Eviston — The exact system this lesson is built on, demonstrated end to end on a real drawing.

Aaron Blaise — Shows how far you can get with even fewer values - a good reality check on how little you actually need.

Proko — Turns the theory into a fast, repeatable exercise you can run in ten minutes a day.

THE LESSON

Value is how light or dark a thing is, with the colour stripped out. A lemon-yellow and a mid-grey can be the same value. A navy blue and a dark brown can be the same value. Your eye reads value far faster and far more reliably than it reads hue, which is why a black-and-white photograph is perfectly legible and a photograph with the values flattened out is not.

That has a blunt consequence for painting. If the values are right, the picture works even when the colour is mediocre. If the values are wrong, no amount of beautiful colour rescues it. Take any painting you admire, convert it to greyscale, and look at how much structure survives. That structure is the thing you are learning to build in this module.

It also explains why this whole module comes before the colour module. Colour is easier to learn once value is automatic, and much harder to learn while you are still guessing at value.

Squinting is not a folk habit, it is a deliberate reduction of information. Narrowing your eyes cuts the light reaching your retina and throws the image slightly out of focus, which destroys detail and forces neighbouring areas to merge into a few large value shapes. Those large shapes are what you need to paint. The detail was never the picture.

Do it constantly - at your reference, and at your own canvas. The most useful moment is when you squint at your painting and the shape you spent twenty minutes on disappears, because that tells you the shape had no value separation from its neighbour and was therefore invisible from the start.

Digitally you have two extra versions of the same tool. Zoom out until the canvas is a couple of centimetres across on screen, which does the same job as squinting and is easier on your eyes. Or duplicate the file, blur it heavily, and look at what remains. Whatever survives the blur is what a viewer sees from across a room.

The system is simple. Value 1 is your lightest light. Value 5 is your darkest dark. Values 2, 3 and 4 sit evenly between them, so 3 lands in the middle. Every part of your painting has to be assigned one of those five, and nothing is allowed to sit between two of them.

That restriction feels absurd until you try it. Its purpose is to force separation. When you have unlimited values available, the natural instinct is to keep nudging things closer together until nothing is clearly lighter or darker than anything else, and the whole picture goes grey and soft. Snapping every area to one of five steps guarantees that adjacent shapes actually read as different.

Reserve the ends. Do not spend pure white and pure black early - they are the only two values you cannot push further, so save them for the one or two places that genuinely need maximum contrast. A painting where the darkest dark appears in forty places has thrown away its own punchline.

Build the five greys once and reuse them forever. A workable set is roughly 90 percent, 70, 50, 30 and 10 percent brightness - as hex, #E8E8E8, #B4B4B4, #808080, #4C4C4C and #1A1A1A. Paint five squares of them across the top of your canvas and save them into your Swatches panel in Photoshop. In ArtRage, colour sample collections are saved as .col files, so you can keep the same five greys and load them into any painting.

Now work with the eyedropper rather than the picker. In Photoshop, holding Alt on Windows or Option on macOS while the Brush is active turns the cursor into an eyedropper for as long as you hold it, so you can pick a value off your five swatches without ever leaving the brush. Assign that to one of your Express Keys if you would rather use your thumb. The rule for this lesson is that every colour on the canvas comes from the swatch strip. If you did not pick it, you cannot paint with it.

To check yourself, put a Black and White adjustment layer at the very top of the stack in Photoshop, via Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Black and White, and toggle its visibility. Later, when you are painting in colour, that single toggle will be the fastest way to catch a value mistake. A Threshold adjustment layer is even more brutal: it crushes everything to pure black or pure white at a level you choose, showing you instantly whether your big shapes hold together.

One practical note about the hardware. The Artist 12 3rd Gen covers 99 percent of sRGB with a Delta E under 1.2, which means the values it shows you are accurate - you are not fighting your monitor. What you can get wrong is the environment. Judging values on a bright screen in a dark bedroom will make you paint everything too dark, and the same file will look muddy on someone else's monitor in daylight.

So fix your conditions. Keep the room lit, keep the display at a consistent brightness rather than nudging it every session, and check your work occasionally at a smaller size and a different brightness. Consistency matters more here than any particular setting.

PRACTICE · 40 MIN

1. On a 2000x1500 canvas, draw five squares in a row across the top.
2. Fill the first with your lightest light and the last with your darkest dark. Now fill the middle three by eye so the steps look evenly spaced. Do not use numbers yet.
3. Use the eyedropper and the Info readout to check what you actually made. Most people bunch the light end together. Correct the steps until they are even, then save all five to your Swatches panel or a .col file.
4. Open your reference photo. Squint at it and decide, out loud, which of the five values each major area belongs to.
5. Paint the reference at small size - no bigger than 800 pixels on the long edge - using only the five swatches. No blending, no soft brushes, no intermediate values.
6. Repeat with two more references, ten minutes each.
7. Put all three studies side by side, zoom out until they are thumbnail sized, and see which one still reads clearly.

Done when: An even five-step scale saved as swatches, plus three small studies painted with those five values and nothing else.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.