Value --- The Basics of Drawing

These are the absolute basics, meant for absolute beginners— so this post will likely bore you if you are even a little experienced with drawing.

Drawing boils down to value. Okay, there is a bit more to it than just value, but those things are secondary to the fundamental success of a drawing. This is particularly true for attempts at realism. The reason for this is that the eye does not perceive shapes. Rather, it perceives values and colors— made possible by the two kinds of cells in the back of our eyes. Our eyes are complicated sensory organs with many other fun characteristics that might be worth writing about later (such as the “macula” and how it is our center of focus), but for now let’s focus on the very basics.

This should make some degree of sense; objects in real life do not have outlines unless they have been manufactured to look that way (and even then, they don’t have “real” outlines).

See: No Outlines

Value, for those of you that may not know, means how bright an area of an image is. So, to start learning to draw, you need to look at your subject matter as separations of different regions of value. To actually draw these values accurately, you need to be able to draw a gradient— or a smooth, wide transition from as dark as you can draw to as light as you can possibly draw. For example:

Here’s my best attempt at a gradient on paper using a mechanical pencil with HB, or standard lead.

This can be hard to accomplish if you are just starting out. Keep practicing, because you will be able to make your drawings more realistic when you are able to produce a wider range of values. You should also experiment with things, such as smudging the gradient to help the values blend together better.

That's a little smoother.  Maybe.

The method by which you go about making gradients really depends on the tool you are using, but every artist employs some method of making them in their work. I will discuss different tools in a future post, ranging from the mundane to the most advanced that I have experience with. For now, here are the three that you will most-likely be using.

If you are working with pencils, try drawing as lightly as you can. In fact, you should always draw as lightly as possible when you are starting a drawing so that you can erase any mistakes you make. Everyone probably remembers a time when they “engraved” a bunch of dark outlines into their pages and then were unable to erase them when they realized they had messed up. Drawing lightly prevents that.

Damn it.  Now he's got a ghost limb.

If you are using a pen, you can try to do the same thing that you would do with a pencil (this really only works with standard ball-point pens), or you could try any number of different methods of dithering. “Dithering” is the technical term for blending two different values or colors together by using one inside the other by different amounts. This will make sense in a minute, if you are lost. Two of the most popular methods of dithering with a pen are hatching and cross-hatching. Essentially, you are using lines to put down more ink onto some parts of the paper than others. In the case of hatching, you are only allowing your lines to move in one direction.

Like so.

And in the case of cross-hatching, you are using different angles of lines to fill up the space. Cross hatching tends to both approach total darkness more quickly than the other methods as well as create more visible divisions between lighter and darker values

Like this.  My hatching gradients leave a lot to be desired.

The theory behind either method is that you really only have two colors: the darkest black, and the brightest white. Without being able to produce grays, you have to trick the viewer’s eyes by varying the amount of black that appears in a region on the page. At the left of my gradients, you could say it is 100% black - 0% white, and then it moves right until it reaches 50% - 50% in the middle (though I didn’t do the best job at this, heh) and 0% - 100% on the far right.

If you are working digitally, it will really depend on what you are doing and what program you are using. My advice for now is that you avoid using any preset “gradient” tools. These can be great for wide, smooth areas that need a little bit of differentiation, but they can scarcely be used to create the complex regions of value needed for realistic drawings.

Okay, that may have been a lot to learn in the very beginning. You can make gradients now!… But how do you use them? I’ll show you in a near-future post (probably in the next barring any noteworthy developments). And if you are already experienced with drawing and would like to skip the basics… I’ll be getting that more relevant stuff after I cover some of the foundations of drawing. It just seems necessary.