Exploring Secondary Colours, Tints and Shades
Senior 2 · Fine Arts
Exploring Secondary Colours, Tints and Shades
Lesson 3 of 4
20 min
Take a photo on a phone and switch it to black and white. The picture still makes sense, because what tells us the shape of things is mostly light and dark, not hue. Artists call this value. If you can control value, your drawings look solid and your paintings look deep, whatever colours you use.
A value scale is a strip of boxes that goes step by step from the lightest value (white) to the darkest (black). Artists often use nine steps, with middle grey at step 5. The steps must be even: each box should look just as much darker than the one before it.
Every colour has a value too. Among the secondaries, orange is light to medium, green is medium, and violet is dark. Yellow is the lightest pure hue. To check the value of a colour, squint: half-closing your eyes blurs the hue and leaves you seeing mostly light and dark. If two colours next to each other have the same value, the edge between them almost disappears when you squint, even if the hues are very different.
Habimana draws a football lit by a window on the left. He uses his value scale to plan five areas: (1) the highlight, a small spot of paper left white (step 1), on the side facing the light; (2) the light side, steps 2–4; (3) the core shadow, the darkest band on the ball, where it turns away from the light, step 7 or 8; (4) the reflected light, a slightly lighter strip at the very edge of the shadow side, step 6, caused by light bouncing up from the floor; (5) the cast shadow on the floor to the right, darkest (step 9) where the ball touches the ground. The flat circle becomes a sphere.
The French artist Georges Seurat (1859–1891) made drawings entirely from value, rubbing conté crayon over textured paper so that tiny white specks of paper show through. In this drawing of two figures, almost everything is a dark value. Only one shape is really light: the shirt of the figure on the left. Where does your eye go first? Strong value contrast, the lightest light against the darkest dark, creates the focal point, the place the viewer looks first.
Tip
Squint to see value. Half-close your eyes and the colours fade away, leaving the pattern of light and dark. In an exam drawing, show at least five clear values, including a highlight and a cast shadow.
On a 9-step value scale where step 1 is white and step 9 is black, which step is middle grey?
Solution: step 5, halfway between them, with four steps on each side.
Place the three secondary colours in order of value, from lightest to darkest.
Solution: orange, green, violet.
Name two ways of making a hatched area look darker without pressing harder.
Solution: put the lines closer together, or add a layer of cross-hatching (lines crossing the first set).
A student shades a ball with only two values, white and black. Why does it look flat, and what should be added?
Solution: a round form turns gradually away from the light, so it needs gradual steps of value. Add middle values on the light side, a core shadow, reflected light and a cast shadow.
Remember
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