Watercolor Web

Value does all the work; color takes all the credit.

I saw this quote on a bulletin board a while back, and it has become one of my favorites. There are so many times people have looked at my work and said: “Oh, the colors are so great.” The truth is that I pay very little attention to color, but I pay a lot of attention to value. If the value structure is strong, you can do pretty much whatever you want with color.

Handprint has an striking example of why value is so important at http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color11.html.

He displays two modifications of a watercolor by Winslow Homer. On the first copy, he leaves the values intact but makes the colors the same — essentially a black and white picture. On the other copy, he retains the original colors and makes all the values the same. The second copy — with everything set to the same value — is virtually unrecognizable.

Here’s another example of a Sargent watercolor. There’s no way the shadow under that umbrella was bright viridian. No reflected light from the grass is going to bounce that much green into a shadow, and yet it’s a very convincing image.

Now, look at it in black and white. The color is wild, but the values are right on the mark.

Hopefully, these examples will convince you of the importance of strong values. So, now the question becomes how to think in terms of value. Ultimately, you will have to resolve this question for yourself. Books and other folks can share pointers and advice, but no two people will do it exactly the same way. It’s an ongoing journey. However, here are a few things that have helped me:

• Try to arrange your painting into no more than 12 shapes of 3 or 4 values. The fewer shapes and values the better. I usually try to think of 3 values: light, middle, and dark.

  We recently had a Andrew Wyeth exhibit here, and I was astounded at how simple the compositions were. Even with all the details and the drybrush technique, he only used a handful of shapes.

  As a rule, a scene will have a lot more than 12 shapes. And sometimes you won’t be able to get it down to 12 shapes. All the same, it’s always good to think about how you are going to join and minimize your shapes.

• The eye is going to be attracted to the area of greatest contrast, so I try to put my lightest light and my darkest dark near the center of interest.
• I try to establish a very definite value — sometimes a middle value and sometimes a dark value — at the start of my painting. (And I usully try to establish this area in some place that I can adjust later if necessary. In otherwords, I rarely start off with a complex shadow shape that will look overworked if I have to go in for a second pass at the value.) Establishing a strong value up front breaks the white of the page and gives me something against which to judge all my subsequent values. You tend to see values relative to other values, and if the only value you have to compare to is white, then it’s easy to misjudge a value. You’ll think something is a nice, middle value, and then you realize later in the painting that it is actually very light.