Lights and Darks, Value.
Montana Horse Gallery, Donna Allen Weber, Fine Artist
Use value to your best advantage.
Do you see the painting in the first white square below? It's of a grazing horse. She has her head down, her tail is flying in the breeze. She's a beautiful little horse! I suppose you think I'm crazy!? There's no horse there? How do you know she isn't white, in a blizzard, or covered with toilet paper? There are no clues to tell you what's going on in this painting! All you can see are the edges. To give your audience a clue as to what's happening in a painting, use the values of light and dark. If you want something to stand out, you have to put a darker or lighter value behind it or around it. Value is one of the most important tools an arist has for conveying a message.
Now, when you look below this text, you can see a horse. I used a light background behind her. On the horse, you can see her muscles and her shape from the values I used. She has light highlights, medium tones and very dark tones to give her shape and let you see her form.
We use value to show where the light is striking an object. Light rays come from a light source in straight lines. Lines in direct approach to an object create a highlight, the lightest point on your painting. In places where the light doesn't reach an object, you have very dark shadows. As the surface of an object turns away from the light, you'll have your medium tones.
Another trick for creating a good painting, is to save your lightest color in a painting and place it next to your darkest color to create what's called, the "center of interest". The human eye will be drawn to that place as that is where the highest contrast is to be found. Choose which part of your painting will be most important, and place this center of interest there.
Colors have value. But these values are relative to the strength of the color. Blue can have a full range of value, it can be so light, it's almost white, it can be so dark, it's almost black. Yellow has a relatively light value. It's hard to make yellow become terribly dark. If you're painting happily away, and stand back to look at your work, only to see nothing showing up...you know you have to change values around or on your object. A good way to see the values in your paintings is to stand back and squint at the work. If nothing there stands out at you, your values are weak. This is also one time when it's good to be near sighted. Take off your glasses and stand back. If you see an image, you've done a good job of choosing values!
To make an object stand out from it's surroundings, there are two ways you can go. Either make your object lighter than the surroundings, or make it darker. Say you have a horse against a background of trees. Where ever your horse has a dark value, place a light value in the trees where it touches the dark value of the horse. Reverse this process when you have a light place on the horse. Place the darker value in the trees there. You'll learn to do this instinctively the more paintings you create.
Next: Harmonious Color Schemes
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