Intro to Value Part 1

Let me start today's post with some imagination. Have you ever been in a very dark corridor or room, and opened a door to the outside on a bright sunny day causing you to be temporarily blinded by the light? Our eyes work as an aperture which dilates and narrows to gauge how much or how little light, respectively, we perceive. Understanding how that works is a great first step into understanding value, and how to represent it, which is useful especially in art with the purpose of rendering.

Let's start with cross-hatching because it's a common, and simple, tool often used in sketching to represent values. I will represent the value by adjusting the density, and not adjusting the thickness, of the strokes.

Notice that the far left example is much lighter than the far right example. This is because the density of the lines changes from spread to dense. They don't grow thicker to make the shape darker, they become dense, and the appearance becomes darker. When the space between the lines increases, more of the white paper beneath is visible, and our eyes associate the white (or blankness) as light.

Check out part 2 by clicking here!