Value: Intro to Drawing Bad Art (Patreon)

In this intro to drawing bad art lesson I'll be going over Value. What value is, how to create value relationships, and organize values to convey light and dark.

Value is one of the most powerful tools in your artistic toolkit. I compared perspective in drawing to rhythm in music. To continue the metaphor, value and color are to drawing and painting what notes are to music. 

Value is also the most fundamental aspect of learning color, if you don’t know value, the rest of color theory will be more difficult to understand.

I recommend practicing seeing value by drawing using only 3 values: a value for the light, a value for the shadow and a mid tone. The point is to simplify and to gain control of the values. Organizing values is the key to representing light and shadows on form. 

“It’s not about the note you play, it’s about the ones you don’t” -Miles Davis

Further study:

The Art Spirit

Here is the book I quoted by Robert Henri: The Art Spirit. It is a compilation of letters to students and other artists, lectures and other writings about art. I can’t remember if there’s a lot of stuff specific to value in it. But the quote about the shadows always stuck with me.

It is a very interesting book about both making art and living as an artist. Future candidate for an Art Life & Lives for sure. It’s actually one of the main books that gave me the idea for that video series. It’s where the opening quote from the Rick Rubin Book came from:

“The object isn’t to make art, its to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable”

Marco Bucci-10 Minutes To Better Painting

I pulled heavily from this lesson by Marco Bucci. He really breaks it down. You’ll learn a lot from this.

Proko

This critique by Stan Prokopanko from his Drawing Basics course, is very useful to check out. It’s all about organizing values and how to make choices about which values to use. I've used his drawing basics course and I definitely recomend it. I also recomend checking out the other courses Proko offers. 

There’s a good overview of value in this older proko video about the three elements of art. The stuff on value is really comprehensive. I recomend watching the whole video about shapes and edges too.

Alfonso Dunn Shading in Pen and Ink

For you pen and ink people I recomend this playlist on shading by Alfonso Dunn 

Caesar Santos says "Don't trust your eye!"

here’s a fun video of Caesar Santos talking about why you should trust the value scale instead of your naked eye 

Optical Illusion illustrates value relationships 

This is a classic optical illusion that you might be aware of. I think this demonstrates both how value relationships work and how our eyes deceive us. If you were drawing that checker board, how would you organize the values the represent the lighter checkers in the shadow? 

If going just by our eyes, we might be tempted to use a lighter value. If we trust in our value scale we can overcome this problem.