MODULE 4 OF 8
Value & Light
Value does the work colour gets credit for. Learn to see light as shapes before you learn to paint it.
4 LESSONS · ABOUT 40 MINUTES EACH
LESSON 14
The Five-Value System
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.
Intermediate · 50 min · Photoshop or ArtRage
LESSON 15
Form Shadow vs Cast Shadow
There are two kinds of shadow and they behave completely differently. A form shadow happens because a surface turned away from the light; a cast shadow happens because something blocked the light. Once you can tell them apart, and once you stop letting the shadow family leak into the light family, your forms start looking solid instead of smudged.
Intermediate · 55 min · Photoshop or ArtRage
LESSON 16
Rendering Form
Rendering is the controlled journey from a flat block-in to a finished form, and the thing that controls it is edges. This lesson gives you a repeatable order of operations, explains what makes an edge hard, soft or lost, and shows you how to blend by choosing values rather than by smudging pixels around.
Advanced · 60 min · Photoshop or ArtRage
LESSON 17
Value Composition & Thumbnails
A picture has to work as an arrangement of three value masses before it can work as anything else. This lesson teaches you to read and design that arrangement, and then hands you the skill almost nobody teaches explicitly: thumbnail iteration. You are going to make twenty bad thumbnails, and that is the entire point.
Intermediate · 50 min · Photoshop or ArtRage
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Colour