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As I was just thinking about values in painting, I am wondering if I should be painting the darks darker than I see them.
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NO - just the opposite. If you start out with dark dark areas there is no place to go....
By this I mean that if you are glazing color into shadow areas that are already dark, you end up with a really dark dead mud color at the end.
When you start out with the "dark" areas lighter than you intend them to be at the end....(we're talkin' relative here) there is plenty of "room" to add numerous glazes in pure color and thus deepen and enrich the final shadows without getting them too dark.
Attached is my underpainting copy of Mme. Ingres after an Ingres portrait. I never bothered to add color so you can see how I underpaint. Note that there are NO real darks here...and there are NO real lights here either.
Underpaintings are meant to be a very narrow range of values. In theorey, you are starting in the middle. You build light in the light areas and they get lighter. You also glaze and the shadows get darker and more luminous.
I hope that you are not thoroughly confused by now. A good artist to copy is Vermeer....I think that he teaches the clearest lesson.