Artist insight
Charlie Pickard introduces his top advice for achieving strong values in your artwork to create clear and powerful imagery
Values are, without a doubt, the most vital consideration when you’re creating an image. The full extent of the role that values play in making believable paintings and strong imagery can’t be overstated. They’re the most vital element for conveying solidity, atmosphere and readability within your work.
Much has been said and written on this point in art training, and quite rightly so. It’s almost always the number one area for making improvement in beginner artworks.
When speaking of value, simplicity is important for strengthening our imagery, but this can often be hard to understand and achieve. Here, we’ll go through the basics.
1 THE IMPORTANCE OF PROPER VALUES
One simple way to see just how important values are is to isolate them out, as I’ve done in this image. On the first image to the right, I’ve isolated the value qualities and erased the colour info. Note that while some of the flavour of the image has been lost, the scene itself is still easily understandable, retaining its easy-to-read forms, clear depth and material qualities.
In the bottom image, where the colour has been isolated and the value taken out, it’s a whole different story. While the ghost of an image remains, it’s almost entirely broken. Without the value structure to hold it up, the colours become difficult to read because the value holds together 90 per cent of any image, and this can’t be forgotten. The following are a few strategies that I’ve found helpful in tackling this element of painting.
2 DECEPTIVE VISUALS
One somewhat surprising element of value is that our eyes often lie to us. We’re actually subject to a number of illusions that wreak havoc on our ability to observe accurately. We can exhibit one of these illusions clearly thanks to this image.
It may be hard to believe, but the highlighted black square in the light and the white square in the shadow are exactly the same value! I’ve connected these values together to demonstrate this.
However, you can see, even with this adjustment to the image, the illusion is quite difficult to dispel. We can’t help but see these values as different. This illusion battles against us whenever we settle down to create a painting and it’s incredibly important we understand it.
