Guide

Value studies: seeing the structure before the colour

A painting with correct values and mediocre colour reads as solid. The reverse never does. Here is how to see them, and why your camera is not helping.

Value is how light or dark a colour is, independent of what colour it is. It is the first thing a viewer reads, the thing that creates form and depth, and the thing beginners get wrong most often because hue is so much louder and easier to notice.

The old teaching order holds: value first, then temperature, then colour. A painting with correct values and mediocre colour reads as solid. A painting with beautiful colour and muddled values reads as flat, and no amount of correcting the colour will fix it.

Why your reference photo is lying to you

A camera has far less dynamic range than your eye. In a high-contrast scene it compresses the darks into a single flat mass and blows the brightest lights to pure white. So the shadow that looks like one uniform black in the photograph contained four distinguishable values when you were standing there.

Painters who copy the photograph faithfully end up with dead shadows and a chalky light, and often conclude they have a mixing problem when they have a reading problem. Lifting the exposure on the reference to see into the darks, then deciding for yourself how much of that separation to keep, is closer to what your eye actually saw.

Grouping into value steps

Simplifying a reference into a small number of flat value steps forces you to decide which shapes belong together. That decision is the painting. Detail added later sits on top of it, but it cannot rescue a structure that was never there.

• Two or three steps answers the composition question, and is essentially a notan.
• Three or four steps is the useful range for planning a block-in. Big shapes, clear decisions, nothing to hide behind.
• Six to ten steps is for checking a specific transition, for example whether your midtones are separating properly, once the big structure is settled.

Grey, umber, or colour

Looking at the value structure in pure grey is the honest test, because nothing distracts you. Looking at it in umber is closer to the experience of working over a toned ground, and often easier to translate to a canvas that is not white. Looking at it posterised in colour keeps the hue while flattening the value, which is useful for seeing that a passage you thought was one colour is actually three.

How to read value at the easel

1. Squint. It removes chroma and detail and leaves the value pattern. Do it every few minutes, not once at the start.
2. Compare, do not estimate. Asking "is this lighter or darker than that" is a question your eye answers reliably. Asking "what value is this on a scale of one to ten" is not.
3. Find your darkest dark and lightest light early and put them both down. Every other value is then judged between two fixed points instead of drifting.
4. Check the halftones last. They are where paintings go grey, and they are easiest to judge once the extremes are established.

Written by Soren Ulsig. Last updated 2026-08-29.