Value is the relative lightness or darkness of a surface. Artists often use this in order to create an illusion of three-dimension on a two-dimensional canvas. The difficulty of this technique often lies in wielding control of the tools used to recreate depth and highlight in a way so that when your eyes travel, it is not perceived as simply flat. For example, when trying to show value in a piece with graphite, a slow graduation from light to dark is key otherwise it would result in a sloppy outcome; unless that is the intended goal of course. Being conscious of highlight and lowlight placement, making sure everything is blended seamlessly without any harsh lines is a hard technique to master. But with more practice, the better your piece turns out.
Starting this project, my list of twenty items that relate to value were:
- Fruits
- Water bottles - draw s bottle filled with water. Water bottles don’t have the everyday value that we see in objects so it might be interesting to study and illustrate that with the word “value” written somewhere on the water later.
- The human face - draw a human face peeking out of some kind of a broken wall paying attention to where the shadows are placed through the hole. Incorporate the word value by inserting it somewhere within the wall cracks.
The human body - in a symbolic way, draw a picture of the male and female body showing value as a different meaning than just art. - Skeletons - Show the value in bones by drawing it on charcoal paper and using white, 2B, 4B, and 6B charcoal.
- Glass
- Cans
- Animals
- Drapes
- Jewelry - incorporate the other meaning of value somewhere in a picture of a woman’s neck with jewelry on it.
- Folds in clothing
- Any metallic device
- Pencils
- Candy
- Show value through photography
- Through cubism, show illusion of cracks and shade each one
- Painting to show value
- Value in buildings
- Shoes
- Dice
- Charcoal - Use white charcoal on dark paper to show value
In the end I didn't make it look unfocused, but rather messy. Overall I'm happy with how it turned out and I wanted to take a risk with this by using white charcoal and a 5B pencil. I don't work with charcoal, but I figured the value would really show up on this paper. At one point it ended up really messy so to solve my problem, I erase it all and worked with the leftover lines. The majority was covered in white charcoal. The blending did not turn out the way I wanted and the messy background doesn't really match the focused face and hair.