values

are the backbone of successful paintings

What are values in painting?

Values are the variation of light and dark colors. The value scale has white on one end and black on the other end with greys in between.

It’s fun painting with colors, but values are what make successful paintings. Use light and dark colors to create strong, attractive paintings.

Bluebird painting makes a good use of values. art by Carol May

The lights and darks make a painting sing!

As an affiliate of Amazon I earn from purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Learn More

how do we use values in our paintings?

Divide a painting into about three different parts, foreground, middle ground, and background.

When you are planning your paintings, concentrate on getting three different tones into the painting.

Good composition says to vary the size of the elements of your painting. Repetition is boring, so make each part a different size.

Each part will also be a different tone; light, medium or dark.

The dark elephant is the largest.
The light background is the medium size.
The foreground of medium tones is the smallest area.

Composing a painting with at least three different values.

The Elements Are Different Sizes

learning to see

What if our paintings were all the same tone? They would look very flat. Without a difference between lights and darks, we could not see any of forms in a painting.

In order to see the lights and darks, squint your eyes and look. All the details will disappear and you will see only the light and dark tones.

We ladies don't need any squint lines, so we just lower our eyelids.

Look at the left image. Do you see the lights and darks? You may see it better in the gray-scale image.

Squint your eyes and look.

Gray scale of the painting Two Stripies by artist Carol May

Did you see this?

practice seeing

Lower your eyelids and look at the things around your room. Notice the light and darkness of different things in your room. Train your eyes to see the light and darkness of the things around you.

Look when you are going down the road - as a passenger of course. Things will suddenly become more alive as you.

Duplicate what you see into your paintings. It is lots of fun.

what do we see in nature?

In nature things get lighter in the distance. This is called aerial perspective.

Particles in the air reflect light, thus making the distant objects appear lighter.

On a very clear day you can see farther because there are fewer particles in the air.

In the painting at the right the mountains in the background are much lighter than the foreground.

Aerial perspective is doing its job and we artists duplicate it in our paintings by adjusting the tones.

Springtime painting by Carol May shows aerial perspective.

We paint the aerial perspective by adjusting the tones.

the value of colors

Different colors reflect or absorb more or less light. Yellow reflects the most light of any color. The light bounces back off the color into our eyes. This makes the color look lighter to us.

Purple is the darkest color. It adsorbs most of the light rays. Very little light bounces back to our eyes. So the color looks very dark to us.

There is no rule that says a person has to paint something its actual natural color. A painting will work as long as we use light against dark.

Dolphins are actually gray. Plain old gray is boring to me. I painted these dolphins pink and purple instead.

We don't have to paint nature colors.

gray-scale of Born Free dolphin painting by Carol May

Grey-scale showing the light and dark colors.

painting with values

The focal area is the place to use your lightest lights and your darkest darks. The strong contrast of lights and darks automatically draws the eye to that area.

We also use more saturated colors in the focal area.