Determining Values

[Michele Rushworth]

In another thread I posted a graphic that many people felt helped explain a principle about rendering values to get a three-dimensional form. I was asked to repeat the example in a separate thread.

An artist had posted a painting and a reference photo in one of the critique sections. The face in the painting lacked a three-dimensional quality because the values were much closer overall than what the reference photo showed. The left and lower parts of the whole head needed to be darker to create a sense of roundness. The upper right needed to be much lighter.

I put the painting and the photo in Photoshop, set them both to monochrome and did some value comparisons. Using the Photoshop eyedropper tool, I grabbed the grey from the lower left and from the upper right areas of both the reference photo and the painting. Then I made a box and filled it with the tone that the eyedropper picked up in each of those areas.

It