Learn to See Beyond Color. See Values.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard artists say “Value does the work, and color gets the credit”. And despite knowing it, sometimes I’ll overlook checking my value structure when I’m trying to fix a bad painting.
Occasionally, I remember to take a photograph of my work, and convert it to grayscale where it becomes clear that my values are off. If you’re not already doing this, give it a try.
Learn to See the Value of a Color
To teach myself to see the value in a color I decided to create a simple exercise. I would take a simple subject like a brush cleaner jar and paint it several times using a different palette each time. Then convert each one of those paintings to black and white. The goal is to have three paintings of the same subject that, when converted to grayscale, would all appear the same.
Value does the work, and color gets the credit
How I Came Up with the Idea For this Exercise
The practice sketch above was done with Van Gogh student grade gouache. The color was not what I was going for at all. I used burnt sienna and ultramarine blue to try to achieve a nice dark but no matter what, it always ended up too brown or too violet. I mostly use M. Graham gouache and achieve beautiful darks easily with that color combination. Oh well, I guess you get what you pay for.
However, even if this wasn’t the color I was going for, the sketch still worked because, converted it to grayscale, the values were reading correctly.
So that made me think; forget about trying to match the color to what you’re seeing. Use different palettes to paint the same object and see beyond color. Just try to get the values to read correctly no matter what colors you use.
Two colors can have the same value. The difference is one color will be warmer or cooler than the one that you are comparing it to. So color is bringing emotion into the painting. If the value of the color you are using is off, you’re whole painting will be off.
The Results of the Exercise
I painted the brush cleaner jar three times using different palettes each time and next to each painting is a copy of the grayscale version of it.