Creating form with value in paint

1Making flat paint look solid

Paint lies flat on the paper, yet a good painter can make it look like a round orange, a shiny pot or a folded cloth you could almost lift. The secret is the same one you learned with pencil in Unit 1: a light side, a shadow side and a cast shadow. In paint you build them with tints for the light, the pure colour for the middle values and shades for the shadows. Working in a single hue is the best way to learn this, because it forces you to think only about value.

2Painting in one colour

A painting made from one hue with its tints and shades is called monochromatic ("one colour"). With one primary plus white and black you have everything you need to show form.

3Step by step: painting a ball

1. Draw and plan. Draw a light circle, a line for the table edge, and an arrow for the light. Mix a ladder of five values before you start: two tints, the pure colour and two shades.
2. Middle value first. Paint the whole circle in the pure colour.
3. Shadow side. While it is still damp, work the first shade into the side away from the light, following the curve of the ball.
4. Light side. Work the tints into the side facing the light.
5. Blend the joins by feathering: with a clean, slightly damp brush, stroke lightly back and forth across the edge between two values until the change is smooth.
6. Finish. Darken the core shadow with the darkest shade, leave a lighter band of reflected light at the edge, paint the cast shadow on the table and the dark contact shadow beneath the ball, and add the highlight last with a small dab of white.

4Other ways to build value in paint

• Hatching with a fine brush: strokes of darker paint laid side by side, like pencil hatching. Painters using quick-drying egg tempera built whole faces this way.
• Dabbing (stippling): small dabs of tint and shade that the eye blends.
• Dry brush: a brush with very little paint dragged across the surface, leaving a broken texture: good for rough materials.
• Thinning: with transparent paint or ink, you make a lighter value by adding water so that more white paper shows through, instead of adding white paint.

Worked example: a blue enamel mug

Keza paints a blue enamel mug (a cylinder) lit from the left, using blue, white and black.

1. Outside of the mug: she paints upright bands: a tint on the left, the pure blue next, then the darkest shade about three quarters of the way across (the core shadow), and a slightly lighter shade at the far right edge for reflected light.
2. Inside the mug: light from the left falls on the inside right wall, while the inside left wall is in shadow. So inside the rim, the light and dark sides swap over. Getting this right makes the mug look hollow.
3. Shine: enamel is shiny, so she adds one narrow, sharp white highlight running down the left band.
4. Cast shadow: a dark shade on the table to the right, darkest where the mug stands.

5Make it: a monochrome still life

1. Set up two or three simple objects (a ball or fruit, a cup, a box) lit from one side.
2. Choose one primary colour. Mix a five-value ladder and paint it as a strip along the edge of your paper, so you can match values as you work.
3. Draw the objects lightly, then paint each one: middle values first, then shades, then tints, then blend.
4. Add cast shadows and, last of all, the highlights.
5. Check: squint at your painting. Can you see a clear light family and shadow family on every object?

6Look closely

This tile was painted in Italy around 1535 and later set into the front wall of a house in Delft, in the Netherlands. It is maiolica: clay covered with a white glaze and painted with colours made from metal oxides, then fired in a kiln. The painter could not rub anything out, because the glaze soaks up the colour at once.

• Most of the modelling is done in one primary, blue. The forehead and cheek facing the light are left almost white; the shadows under the chin, down the side of the nose and round the eyes are painted in stronger blue.
• The painter made the paler blues by thinning the colour so the white glaze shows through, the same way watercolour works.
• The other two primaries appear too: yellow for the hair and dress, and an orange-red for the cap and the straps of the pouch on the left.

7An artwork described in words

The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) painted almost entirely in blues between about 1901 and 1904, a time now called his Blue Period. In The Old Guitarist (1903–1904, The Art Institute of Chicago), a thin old man sits hunched over a brown guitar. His face and hands are modelled from pale blue-grey tints to deep blue-black shades, so the figure looks solid even though almost the whole painting is one colour, and the cold blues make the mood sad and lonely. Picasso's works are still protected by copyright, so the painting is not shown here: look for it in a library book or on the museum's website.

Practice