Art Study: Composition 1 – Values

If you’ve ever wasted time dragging things around until they look good: stop, put the stylish down, take your hand out of the mouse, look at your composition, and try to figure out what’s wrong with it.

As your eye gets used to the visuals you’re creating, it also potentially loses its capacity to notice defects with alignment, proportion, and especially colors. That’s because when we want to make an art piece of any kind, our brain can only focus on the making process. And since our brain is very abstract and the imagination has no real measures it’s only reasonable that the things we envision in our mind can’t be translated into the canvas. Your brain has a lot to do with this.

The right side of your brain is actively working as you start thinking about your artwork, it comes out with ideas and possible solutions that may help you approach the desired result. Your right-brain is trying to be as helpful as possible, speaking out loud ideas to you about creativity. But it also gets highly frustrated the same way you are, after being minutes, hours, days, or who knows how long wondering how to fix an idea you have.

The left side of your brain on the other hand, it’s logical and quiet, and will not be capable of helping you unless you give it the time and required to apply more realistic solution. It works with measures and boundaries, with theories and senses. Reviews the detailed process and steps of your work and doesn’t need explaining, it simply notices what’s wrong on what comes to an artist like a “realization”.

Giving Shape to Ideas

Now, this is where the role of composition becomes relevant in your artwork, because composition gives you an understanding of all the things that are giving shape to your idea. Ideally, you may start with a blurry vision on your mind of something that may want to put into the canvas, and based on your knowledge of art, you may or not see how some parts of that art piece can be created. Let’s say, for example, that with your knowledge of anatomy you have a clear pose in mind.

When you start drawing this pose, even though you may be using some references you know they can’t fail… Your art piece looks nothing like you had in mind. This is because you’re working under the abstract measures of your creativity. You need to take a step back, and stare at it in silence, paying attention to the things that bother you, and specially to the parts that you think that “work” but they are still feeling a little weird. This is when your logical brain needs to check in… Don’t ask yourself questions, just stare at it, as serious and silent as you can. Your eyes will led you to the spots that annoy you.

The effectiveness of this technique is based on the amount of knowledge in composition you have. To help you get through it, these are topics that may seem obvious without context, but as you dive in and start, your brain will start training a critical eye, which you’re gonna need since this is really a complex topic.

Value: The Pillar of Composition

The Value is represented by the pigments of colors in your artwork. It’s the most essential part of any visual work and its the core of the perspective, form and focus of your artwork.

Light

Originally you would want your artwork to have a contrast that highlights the shape and adapts to it. The concept of “Value” holds a weight and strength that is translated by how dark or bright a color is in contrast to its surrounding. Take for example, the presence of the following shades of black and white over this image. It’s pretty obvious that the gray in the middle is flat and unnoticed compared to the white and the black that are on the sides. But the point here is to remark how despite not being the most relevant, all shades are visible, and they all hold a different value, that

When placed correctly. Not only do the colors have a bigger presence, but the color that didn’t have any presence, in the beginning, has a more decent value by being covered by other values that make this spot contrast it.

The values of light play a key role in your artwork. You don’t want a grayscale drawing, you may want some well-defined shapes otherwise your work will look flat despite having a coherent or realistic source of light. Yes, the shadows are pointed in the right direction, there are highlights and shadow areas. But it still looks generally flat, and nothing stands out.

If you analyze how light works in reality, you will notice that every material has its base value as it starts, and has a darker value so it intensifies as a shadow. We may not usually notice these values because under the sunlight our brain understands everything way brighter than it is.

You may want to use a value scale to match their values in art. You may have seen scales of multiple values. However, the desired use of value would be to oversimplify the process to have only a handful of values rather than a big gradient with multiple options. You’re much better off starting with a 4-value scale. In reality, there is an almost infinite range of values but our eyes may only be capable of seeing the different between a few of these, the more simple you can make it, the easier you train your brain to understand the use of values.

Check your values and see if you can add a more interesting contrast, notice if the brightness of your colors is too similar. A way to study this is by painting simple still life and focusing on the mixes of shades you’re using with different objects and shapes, and how changing these values may affect your work.

Color

Now, you probably heard that Value relies only on the lighting and has nothing to do with color, which is true. But as you continue to work with colors you will find that the saturation of your colors, as well as which colors you use have a different value. Here’s a video from Marco Bucci that shows example of this:

Value is affected by Hue and Saturation. I suggest studying the basics of color theory, and just like you apply Black and White colors in value study, use Colors that match one way or another, and study their values by disabling all color channels.

There are some art tips from Yuming Li, that I always refer to when explaining the use of color and how it affects value. They bring some great explanations.