I cannot stress the importance of mastering values enough. Ninety percent of the realism in your painting is created by achieving accurate values. Value is much more important than color (or more strictly, "hue") in this respect.

In addition, if you do not master values completely, you will never be able to master color in your paintings, since no matter how accurate you match the hue, if the value is not correct you will not get a good color harmony. This is because there is a strict relationship between the colors on the light and shadow sides of objects. If you get this relationship correct, the object looks real. Get it wrong and the person looking at your painting will know that something does not look right.

In this course unit you will learn exactly what values are, and some very simple techniques that you can use to help you see them accurately to start you along the road to getting your paintings to look more realistic. If you learn nothing else about painting, study this topic carefully.

In this course you will learn:

• what is value and why is it so important
• value scales and how to use them
• how to master the critical skill of comparing values and how to build a value comparison tool that will help you do that
• how you can use your computer to help you learn values faster

Total number of assignments: 6

Total number of pages: 12