Value: the skeleton of every painting

If you remember one idea from this course, make it this one: value does the work, color gets the credit. Value is how light or dark something is, independent of its hue (red, blue) or its chroma (how intense it is). A painting with correct values and odd colors still reads as light falling on real things. A painting with beautiful colors and wrong values falls apart. That is why value blocks everything else in your path through this course.

The five-step scale

The world has endless values, but a painter needs a small, controllable set. We use five: white, light, middle, dark, black. Five is enough to describe light on any form and few enough to judge by eye. You will paint the scale yourself, in gray pastel or in oil with Titanium White PW6 and Ivory Black PBk9, so the steps live in your hand and not just on a chart.

The hard part is even spacing. Most people make the light steps too close together and jump to the darks. Your target: each step clearly different from its neighbors, and the middle gray sitting halfway between white and black.