Summer 20014 Acrylic Class

Acrylic Class – Values: Black, White and Shades of Gray

Simply put, value is the light and the dark in you painting and all the shades of gray in between. Value and Composition are the two most important aspects of a painting especially when you are trying to create realistic and/or dramatic paintings. This holds true no matter what form of 2 dimensional art you do and whether you are working in color or black and white, painting, drawing or even photography, if you can get dark darks and light highlights with at least 5 shades of gray in your art, you will see how much more exciting your finished piece will be then if you only have middle tones. It isn’t as easy as that sounds and some of us really have to work at getting the darks in our art.

One of the main reasons we have trouble getting to very dark darks is because our eyes lie to us. When we are learning to draw or paint, for some reason we are afraid of the paper or canvas and many times when I go around looking at students work I will hear that they know that something is wrong but they keep fixing things that are okay and ignoring the elephant in the room which is usually they need to get some darker darks. This is why I had us create a value scale.

The first thing we needed to do is learn how to make a dark, almost black color. The reason I don’t use black is because it can kill other colors when you add black but by using a very dark color that we mix, if we use it with other colors the colors will still be lively though grayed in value.

Please burn these three colors into your head because they make my go to, universal dark color: Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna and Dioxizine Purple. More of the blue than the sienna with just a touch of the purple make a deep rich gray color. A variation of this combination is to substitute Burnt Umber for the Burnt Sienna but in the same combination. If you want to see what the true color is take a little bit and add a touch of white to it, you want a neutral gray color (optimal) or a cool gray color (to the blue side). If the color looks too brown, add more blue and a tiny amount of purple and test it again. It is worth the time to get your mix right before you start so you don’t have to stop and start over again, you will also want to mix a big enough pile so you don’t have to keep remixing, we used this dark color for the entire class.

You can use a strip of paper or a small canvas to make your value scale, I like a strip of paper so I can punch a hole in the centers of each value it makes using the scale easier. You will need enough room for at least 10 squares using the white of the paper or the canvas as your white. If you need to, mark them off, I just used the width of my brush for each square.

Take the black color that you mixed and at one end of the strip of the paper, paint a good solid square of color, that is step one. Down on your palette, separate out some of the dark from your pile so you don’t contaminate the dark with white, and then to this smaller pile add about a fifth as much white (gesso) to the color to create a deep charcoal gray. You want it light enough so you can see a difference between the new value and the old, but it should not be a dramatic change. If it is too light, add some of the dark back into it. Add this new value next to the first dark value. With each step you will add more white to the gray pile making the new color just a bit lighter than the previous color until you get down to the white space and you will be done. You should be able to see a distinct difference between the values when the strip has dried going from black on one end to white on the other, you can punch holes in each segment if you want when it is dried.

Many artists will do a value study of a project before they start a major project, even plein air painters will try to capture the values of a scene so they can see where the light and shadows were when they started their painting because light changes when you are outside. A value study can be a quick painting sketch with little detail, or a pencil or charcoal drawing just to get the “feel” of the scene you want to paint, while it is not an absolute necessity, it is good practice and habit if you want to improve your painting.

With that in mind the rest of the class was devoted to doing quick studies of things around you using only the dark color you mixed and white to change the value.

We will be going over basic color mixing in our next class so be sure to have all your colors with you next time. See you in class.