Seeing Values

Values are the lightness and darkness of things. What you may call “shading” when you draw. It’s how your eyes naturally see things. Without the colors, you basically see things in values, not as lines. It’s what your eyes catches first when you look at things, so it’s what you can interpret on your paper most spontaneously.

Try this exercise (see below video demonstration) to ONLY draw with values (by shading) . Forget about making cleanliness or lines but just use scribbles to rapidly scribble in only the values that you see. This is is to train your eyes to be sensitive and become adept at seeing and interpreting the values . This will enable you to quickly see and draw with values.

I recommend you use a simplified black and white photo to do these exercise from. Such as a washed out old photo of Charlie Chaplin etc. You can use master drawings also but I find photos to be more helpful for learning realism. In the beginning, it’s good to copy 2 dimensional works and it’s what they did in the past as well when there weren’t photos, whereby they copied master drawings and paintings.. There are criticisms when painters get picky on how photographs aren’t actually as realistic as paintings but it’s obvious that photos are pretty darn realistic and would make a good practice before transitioning to drawing from life.

Try to keep a sketchbook and fill it up with these value scribbles . If you feel comfortable with it and have done pretty good looking shady-drawings, great, but if not it’s ok. Continue on to the next lesson , Seeing Shapes. You can always come back and do more of this exercise.

Important: You can sketch anything you want, a face, a dog, a house, landscape, flowers, etc., but do not look at them as such but just patches of values. For example, if you are sketching the eye of a face, don't look at it as an eye but focus on seeing just the lightness and darkness shading of things. If you have more time and patience, pen and ink stipple dot drawing is also a great exercise, to see and treat everything as dots.

Don’t measure out anything or do any light under lay ins but pick anywhere to start scribbling at and gauge the distances between this value to that value and try to achieve accuracy that way . It helps to pick a darkest spot to scribble in very dark at first to quickly judge by contrast between that dark and the white of the paper. 

PS. If you have too much of a difficult time with this, use the grid method.