Welcome to
The Painting Lesson
by Linda Carson
big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com
Value, or Tone
Value is a quality of colour, how light or dark that colour is. If you took a black-and-white photograph of the colour, what shade of gray would you get? That's value, also known as tone.
Colours that are light in value are sometimes called high-key or pastels. Colours that are dark in value are sometimes called low-key.
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For example: If we took a black-and-white picture of the Mitten painting, we'd just see the values of the colours (not their hue or saturation). |
Variations in value are important cues to seeing the three-dimensional form of an object. The difference between a disk and a sphere isn't the shape—they're both circular. It's the shading, or changes in value. You might also hear an artist refer to shading as "modelling" or "rendering." Subtle modelling of value is sfumato. Dramatic, high-contrast lighting situations call for chiaroscuro.
Back to the main lesson?Art & Text (C) Linda Carson 2002
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