Mastering Grayscale and Color Value - Part One

1. Introduction: Welcome to my class on Skillshare. I'm Chris Carter. As an artist, I found that I learned new skills and master existing skills more easily and enjoy the learning process far more. When I begin with small steps and limit the choices I have when it comes to choosing which tools I use and how I use them when exploring new realms of color, I find it easiest when I limit my palette to one, each of the three primaries, a yellow, a red, and a blue. From there, I expand slowly into the realm of pigments with a strong foundation upon which to build greater understanding. I continue even after decades painting to return to a limited palette when exploring a new facet of color. In this series, I will guide you through my process of exploring and understanding color value and how to use color value to create more work that is personally expressive and masterful. All of the lessons in the mastering gray scale and color value series are designed for intermediate and advanced artists, either representational or abstract. I have another series on gray scale and color value that is more appropriate for beginning artists. This is part one of mastering gray scale and color value. This course, I begin by refreshing your understanding of the importance and considering gray scale first before making your color choices. I want to clarify that I'm not suggesting you concentrate first on gray scale when you're sketching in your sketch book. Eventually, when you're sketching quickly in your sketch book or in a scrap of paper, you will intuitively be responding to the color value you see in the world around you. This series of color value courses is focused primarily on work that you plan to develop into a resolved painting. A painting that is developed with strong design and composition in mind. The project and part one is to create three colored diamonds, each with a different color palette. You may work in whatever medium you choose. I'll be working in watercolor throughout the series, you'll see examples of various color charts created with oil, acrylic, pastel, gouache, and watercolor. The principles apply regardless of which medium you use. This series is a culmination of five decades exploring the mysteries of color. And finding that with each mystery I solve, the world of color becomes even more magnificent, more fun, and more challenging. There's always something more to understand and to master when it comes to color, understanding color value is an important step to take. Along the way. I've included templates to download and print for making your color value diamonds. I've also included several downloads of information I've found useful over the years. Please post your completed projects, whether you create 12 or all three. If you get hooked and create more, please continue to add them to your project post. I also asked you to take the time to post a review of this class for two reasons. One, so that the class will continue to be available to other artists. Reviews are important to maintain the presence of classes here on Skillshare to so that I can continue to improve lessons in this series. Your feedback will help me do so. I also encourage you to both ask and answer questions posted in the discussion area of this course. The value of taking live workshops is that we learn so much from the other artists in the live workshop online. We don't have the opportunity to do that. The way we learn from one another online is when we participate and enter in the discussions within the class. Thank you for taking my class. I'm Chris Carr. 2. Why Focus on Color Value?: This series on Skillshare is an abbreviated version of a much longer and more in-depth course on color value. Color value is an essential skill to master and a very difficult one to comprehend. I believe that the experiments that are presented for you in this mini-series can provide you with the basic skills that will put you on a path to mastery of color value and dramatically improve your drawings and paintings. This is important, this is a very, very important skill to master. As an artist, you want people to notice your work, the work you create. That is if you, if you create art and presented to the public, I mean, if you don't ever presented to the public, It's fine. It's just an expression of your experience and you don't ever have to show it to anyone. But if you do if you do hanging on a wall, you're saying look at me. And an order for people to look at it. Their attention needs to be grabbed by it. And that's where design comes in. Design is what brings the viewer to your piece, and then all of your technical skill in application and composition, drawing, color. All of those things come into play. But first, someone has to look at it. And understanding color value is the core, is the foundation to grabbing people's attention. It can be a subtle call or can be allowed Call. It doesn't matter which it's up to you, but it has to be a call. My hope for you is that you get a grasp on how important it is to understand color value and how the doors are flung wide open. When it comes to creating color and imaginative color. Based on the value of it. The video you're about to watch, a video I made several years ago prior to teaching a live workshop on color value. I think it's still very relevant. And the examples shown in the story told will be a good foundation to build on. For this series of color value classes, the human eye can distinguish anywhere 100000-10 million variations of color. Yet it can only distinguish approximately 30 variations in value or tone. That's totally fine, understandable since thousands of color variations fall within the same range of value. When working with paint pigments, it's difficult to mix more than ten discernible values to simplify the painting process when making value decisions, many artists can find themselves to thinking in either a five-step value scale, a seven step value scale, or attend step value scale. It's through the choice of value not colored that we achieved the illusion of light being cast on objects of reflections and shadows. When we choose the value, well, it really doesn't matter what color we choose to express that value. We still achieve the illusion of light that we're trying to express. To be honest, I didn't completely believed the previous sentence until I conducted an experiment, painting on plain air in task in Maryland. I set up my easel early in the morning as the light stream through a straight row of tall pine trees on a piece of property owned by a paper company. I planned on presenting a color value lesson in a workshop and wanted to have an example to show the class. I squeezed yellow, green, red, and blue oil paint from the tubes onto my palette. For the first time, I was actually concerned about being visible as I painted more often than not, when I painted in this rural area of the eastern shore of Maryland, one or two pickup trucks would stop by throughout the day to see why a lady from New Jersey would be on a dirt road in the swamp? The curious driver would stop to ask what it was that brought me to this month to paint in what he thinks is the most beautiful place in the world. But others often don't feel the same way. He chat forbid, share his mother's recipe for muskrats, do and then move on. An hour or two later the pickup truck would appear again. The driver would check up on me and see how the painting was coming along. Those are some of the young men had traveled the world and the military they couldn't think of calling any other place home. I thought for sure that anyone who saw me painting this day might think I was on drugs. My plan if anyone's stopped, was to casually swap the painting with the painting I've done the day before, one that had a more normal color palette. I painted the entire painting using only those four pigments straight out of the tube. Yellow as my light tone, red and green as my middle tones, blue as my dark tone. I used both red and green is middle tones to illustrate that they're generally the same value when they fall opposite on the color wheel. Maple leaf green, and a fire engine red, not a yellow green and a red violet. A half-hour had gone by without a passing vehicle. I just concluded my first fairly frightful oil sketch experiment. As is my habit, I walked about 30 ft back to view it from a distance. Before I could return to my easel, a pickup truck pulled in. The young man hung himself out the window, his mouth agape. I've never seen a painting capture the light coming through the trees like that. I've never seen such a real-looking painting in my life. That's amazing. I thought he had to be joking, yet he seemed totally sincere. You don t think the colors are a bit strange. I asked, hello, know, if you got to use those crazy colors to get that sunlight shining through the trees. I guess that's what you gotta do. I really like it. You don't mind if I send a few of my buddies by to take look to you. You'll be painting here for awhile. I painted in that spot for another 3 h, continuing to experiment with these basic colors, three more pickup truck stop by and let me know that their friends suggests they come by. They all liked the bizarre little paintings and came back once or twice, or to see how things were going. I never can predict the people all need are the words that will be spoken. When I paint outside and the City, Mountain, remote, rural area. When I returned home, I painted a few more example paintings in my studio so that my students wouldn't see that it didn't only work with landscapes. What's the point of telling this anecdote and showing you these examples. I want to bring your attention to the importance of making value-based decisions. Remember, it's through the choices of value dot color that we achieved the illusion of light pink cast on objects of reflections and shadows. It's our choices of value that determined the shapes of viewer notices. And those the viewer doesn't notice. Our paintings will be more masterful when we hone the skill of determining excellent value choices. 3. Template Files: The project for this class is to create color value diamonds similar to this. However, there are two other kinds of charts that I think will be very useful to you. And it will be easier to create them all at the same time rather than mix all those colors again. It's just a way to make more reference materials for you. So you can choose to make them or not make them. But I will show you what I do when I pick a new limited palette of three colors to play with and to explore. The information that you glean from creating. These three different references will be extremely useful to you. In this video, I'm going to go through all three of those. And it's up to you which ones you choose to do, 12 or all three. And you can come up with other methods for yourself too. You will find the PDF files for the grids. To create these. In the download section of this class. I'd like to go over some of the files that I have put in the downloads folder for you. The first two I'd like to talk about are the full page. These are letter size pieces of paper. The full size color value diamonds. And you'll see that there's one that's totally blank and one that has gray scale values in it. Or you can work either in a full page size or also in the downloads. Are these files where you can work smaller, cut them out, and then you can take this with you as a very easy reference for the color palette that you've chosen. And there are four on here. I've asked you to do three different ones. It's just easy to have four up on a page and you can of course, print as many of these as you want. Now, why do I have two different versions? Well, I'd like to explain why. Now we all have different printers and we have different paper that we print on, and we have different abilities in working with our computers and printers and files. So if you are unable to use the files and print them out properly, then please ask a friend to help you with it. I have set it up so that you can print if your page is set up to a half inch margin, however, not everyone's is set up to a half inch margin. I suggest you make a test print on regular printer paper to make sure that the entire diamond is showing on your paper. And once you have that done, then you can run your watercolor paper through your printer. And I use a 140 pound watercolor paper. It runs through my printer just fine. I don't know if it will go through your printer. Alright, now, what I want to mention is this, is that not all printers are going to print the gray scale in the same way. This is my original 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 step gray scale that I created long time ago using oil paint. It's nice because it doesn't shine. So it's really easy to prepare. Decide what values are what. Now I photograph that to share with students. And these, some of the results that I got. You can see they're very different. Now this I don't know if you can see the shine to it. I laminated this one. I suggest you do not laminate your gray scales because it's almost impossible to really compare the gray scale. When this is on a reflective surface. This is on a matte surface. Here's another. Now, this, you can really see the printing is so completely different. I flip that around. You can see here that depending on how much ink I had or the printer I was using, the very same file, the photograph I took of this printed up like this in one case and in this in another case. More importantly, I want you to see that the black, the darkest dark in the printed version, is nowhere close to the black, the true black in the oil paint. So you'll have to see for yourself, if when you print it up, you get a full range, you'll have a white. But do you have a black? Do you have a black that's not quite black. My suggestion is if the rest of them are okay. I would then go into this last diamond and either painted in black with gouache or watercolor. Acrylic might be too shiny or ink so that you really get a black. Even if you leave it here, I just, I would always add the black. And you'll see a little bit later with the samples that I've done that. But this is the reason that you may or may not want to print this one out. If this ends up so much lighter than what it should be, you will want to lose this one instead and create your own gray scale. Either with paint or with soft pencils, whatever you choose to do, that's up to you. But that's why I gave you two versions. If they're not printing well, then you want to create the entire thing yourself. If you don't have the ability to print, you can just make one of these, draw one of these up for yourself. Okay. So I just included those files for your convenience. Those are for the color value diamonds. Here's another quick example, two different colors. This one also is very reflective. So that's very hard to judge by. It also is very different if it's even if it's not reflecting. You see that this is much darker than that. This is much darker than that. Those are the templates that you need for making the project, which is the color value diamonds. However, since you're mixing colors, I suggest that you also print out this and this. Now here, you also have the choice of doing it large or doing it smaller and having smaller pieces that you can slip into a Ziploc bag with your travel kit. I'll go over this one first. This is a tenth scale. If you count, this is white up here. If you want to just extend the lines, you can do that. Say you have 109-87-6543 21. You'll want to block in that one in when you determine the value of your yellow, which I'll be showing you how to do shortly. Then you can also put it right in here. That's the purpose for this. And since you're mixing those colors anyway to put into your color value diamond, why not get more information to carry around with you? Lightly? I mean, it's just a little piece of paper and put them in here at the same time. And since you're doing that, while you have that color mixed, I don't like to waste. You can print this out and create for yourself a color wheel. These are templates that I use for my color scheme game. And I'll show you that later too. You can create your custom color wheel using the three pigments that you've chosen. And you will see what you can do. The colors you get, the color schemes you can create. With that limited palette. Why would you make a custom color wheel while you're doing your diamond? This is the color scheme game that I invented for myself a long time ago. And these are 12 different color scheme templates. This is the master color wheel, and this is the template maker. Notice that the circle is the size of the inside so that you can read the colors on the outside and you can easily turn this. The way this works is that you pick a template. This is color scheme number ten. To try out with split compliments. Put a pin through it, cork through it there. And then this will show you all the colors schemes. If you're using a palette that doesn't give you that orange, it can be very deceiving. So my suggestion is that you create your own custom color wheel with the pigments that you're actually using. So that you can see the colors that you can actually get with the pigments you're using. And if you have six pigments, a warm and cool of each, you would create your custom color wheel. This, this outer one, using those six pigments. Or for pigments, often I'll use a cool yellow, a warm blue, and a warm and cool red. And I create a custom color wheel with those pigments. And it's easy to do by using this template. All right, now as I said, the circle that I caught is larger than the circle. That's on the template. What I do, I use a compass, the pin through, adjust to the size of the circle. And then I go further. I go about that far. And I do laminate my color wheel when I'm done because I'll take it with me when I travel around. And that way it doesn't matter if it gets wet. And I don't really want to have to make new custom color wheels. And then I generally label it around because it's real easy to put things in the wrong place. You'll see that the templates fit on this perfectly. I have included in the downloads the whole series of templates for you and the directions and the cart, everything you need to play, the color scheme game is in the Downloads. There's a separate class for that, but I think you can figure it out on your own. 4. Procedure: Another way to keep track of the color value of your palate is to print out a gray scale and then just test your colors and add them next to it. There's so many ways to do it. Whatever works best for you is the way to do it. I'm painting in this bottom section with Mars Black. I want it to be really black, black. And I'll also paint in this little part. Now I'll go over the procedure. First, I dampen my pigments and then I will test for the value. And I don't want it to be opaque because it's watercolor, but I do want it to be as dark as possible. And I'm putting it right up to the edge. I'm now going to let that dry. I want to compare the value of the dry pigment, not the value of the wet pigment. My pigments are dry and I'm going to test the value. I will test the value against this. Now it has to be matte. It can't be reflective or you won't have the the correct values to test. And I squint, I have to squint. And I ask myself, is this lighter or darker than this? If it's lighter, I'll move up. Is it lighter or darker? Is it lighter or darker? And I do that all the way up. And it's really pretty surprising what the results are. Ok, so this to me, the, the green is looking a little bit lighter than this. I go up there, it's actually looking a little bit darker than that. So it's probably between those a bit. It's definitely darker than that. It's darker than that. But it's, it's in the green is certainly in this lower section. Surprising, isn't it? Okay. Now the blue, the blue is pretty dark. That's darker than that, so I'm going to call it the black. The full saturation blue would fall into the black which is the one because I'm going 123-45-6789. And then ten. So the blue is going to be a one. The red. Now the red, red is really tricky because it always looks lighter to me. But I squint very, very carefully. It could be that one. I think it's darker than that's definitely darker than that. I'd say it's a two. And the yellow well, okay. Darker, darker, darks, darker. Definitely darker. They're a little bit darker. They're about the same there. I'd say it's about there. On here. I'm using the tenth scale, so I will put the yellow. I decided that the yellow was going to be the seven. I'm going to leave room. Remember it's watercolor so you don't want it to be opaque and leave room at the top to label it so that I know what pigment it is. I'll also add the yellow because this isn't about value. This is just about the spectrum I can create with these pigments and all of that. Now here, this is seven. I'm gonna gauge it either against these, these are seven, or I can gauge it against my seven here. Let's see what I come up with ongoing to go. According to this. Start at the bottom, It's definitely lighter. Definitely lighter, definitely lighter. It's getting close there. I'd say it's darker than that. Certainly darker than that. It looks to me as if it's right in here. And because there's a big difference between these two, I'm not going to fill in the whole area. You can do this any way you want, whatever makes sense to you. But I'm gonna leave room for some variation. Now because it's yellow. I want to put the yellow on both sides because yellow usually would be at the very top. So I'm gonna put and you'll see why I do this. Very shortly, one side is going to be cool and one side is gonna be warm. But my lightest light in my palette is the yellow. And the yellow. I'm painting on a white piece of paper. And I'm painting in watercolor and leaving some white that is going to be a lighter value. So I'm going to see exactly what I can get with the palette I'm using. And since this is the same as this, I'm going to paint in number seven here on my little one. My travel. I'll do the same as I did here. And there's room around here for me to label. So I don't need to leave room on my diamond. When it came to the blue. I'm putting the blue down in the one, but I'm putting it just on this side because this is my cool side and my red is going to be over here. So the violet should be the very darkest. I'm leaving the point for my violet mix. And then going up this way It's going to be mixed with reds. So the blue is not on both sides, it's only on that side. That's important. I'm just putting the value of the pigments I'm using. And this is going to be the blue, the pure blue. So whichever blue I'm using is going to go in there. And the red we decided was going to be I think we decided that was going to be right in there. Going to be on this side. And I'm going to leave room for the reds and the red violet. Now another way to paint this in is by doing it as a graduated wash. And that way, you also get information about what the dilution is and our color wheel isn't anything about value. So we can dilute it so that we can see a little bit more information about that pigment. So whichever way you want to do it is absolutely fine. So with our three primaries, we have the color wheel beginning. We have our large diamond beginning, or small diamond. Our value scale, different kind of chart. And we have our test strips. These two charts are complete. I just want a record of what the three pure pigments that I'm using are and where they fall. I know that I can dilute any of these this I can dilute the blue to be any of those values. I can dilute the red to be any of the values above the red. And I can dilute the yellow to be any of the values above the yellow. The yellow can't get any darker. I can mix a red or blue with it, but it's only going to darken it. And it will no longer be yellow. As soon as I put a tiny touch of red into the yellow, it becomes orange. If I put a tiny bit of blue into the yellow, it becomes a green. So there is no darker yellow that I can get. Pure yellow. With these three pigments. I can lighten the alizarin crimson by adding yellow or by diluting it as I'm adding the yellow. Now when I mix these two, it's possible that I'll get something even darker, something down in this range because they're both very, very dark and you're just blocking out the light waves. And I will get something that's either a violet or brown. In this case, I'll get a violet because there is no yellow in the alizarin crimson, any cadmium red will have some yellow reflecting in it. So it will neutralize the blue and it will go from being a violet into either a brown of some sort or gray of some sort. I've placed the yellow green on the value diamond, and then I made another yellow green that was just a little bit darker for the colored diamond. I did not put the second yellow green in here because I'm waiting to mix a green that's neither a yellow-green nor blue-green. To put on my color scheme, color wheel, my next green will be the green. That's neither yellow-green, blue-green. And that will go, I'm imagining it will go here. I'm going to check the values. And if it, if it's too dark, then I'll end up making another yellow green. But see, I'm learning about this palette all along the way. The blue is a very dark blue. The green green is going to be a darker green. Then if I were using a different blue. I want to have a mid value green. So I think that this green that I just mixed is perfect for right in there. I could use a bigger brush for this would be much easier. So this is a good green for the color wheel. Now, I'm going to move into the blue-green. Again. I'm going to get several, probably a darker green and blue-green and more blue greens into their making my way down. I don't know how many steps I'll do for this, but I'll just decide one blue-green that's somewhere between this and this to put in my color wheel, my segments here, or a little different. I have my green, my blue-green, my bluer green, my blue, my blue-violet, which is very dark. My violet, which I've taken all the way around here, because I'm just going to have one or two variations of red violets here. And then this is my Alizarin crimson, which is a cool red. And I'll start heading into the warmer reds and the oranges and into the yellow oranges over here. I'll have a red violet to put in here. This is my red violet. This is a redder, red-violet. And there's my red. Now, moving into the warmer reds and the oranges, make sure that your pigments are clean. I have to make sure that there's no green on the top of my yellow. So there's my orange, orange, orange. Now I'll make my red oranges and my yellow oranges. Yellow oranges. So here's the finished product. You'll see that my red orange really looks like a nice bright red and not as bright as it could be, because of course, we've got too much blue reflecting from the alizarin crimson, so it neutralizes a little bit. But the red orange here might be comparable to read on a different color wheel. You can see that the red was so dark and the blue is so dark that a lot of the colors really earn the bottom part, we don't have a super light yellow. You can see that it's harder to differentiate the different hues among the oranges, whereas it's much easier to see the differences in the greens and blues. But basically it's nice because we have cool side and a warm site. So when we're choosing the color, we can decide what value we need. Then pick it to be warm or cool. And you'll see that in the next class. We're gonna be doing a lot of really fun painting in, of sketches to see how do we use this information. But this is kind of a tedious part of the process, but it is so valuable. These are references that you can go back to again and again and again. So good luck with your project, and I look forward to seeing the results. 5. Adjusting the Color Value Diamond Template: I'm Chris Carter. I decided that I would make another example of the color value diamond using just three pigments. And I thought that the template that I had posted as reference for you would work well for any number of pigments that you might choose. And you could do custom color value diamonds for whatever palette you were using. Well, as often is the case when I'm trying to clarify concepts and ideas. I discover that some of the tools that I've made for you don't work quite as well as I thought they did. This is a little video showing you the challenges that I ran into, how I've decided to fix them. Here we go. I'm going to share my screen. All right. I used only three pigments. I used a mystery yellow only because it was in a pan already and I hadn't labeled the pan. It looks pretty much like a yellow ochre to me, but I'm not quite sure and I don't know who the manufacturer was. I call it a myster yellow, a permanent magenta, thalo green deep. Now I used my thoreen deep, which is a very blue green. As my blue, my three primaries are mysteryellow, permanent magenta, and thalo green deep. I started off, this is the template for creating your color value diamond. I started out by painting in the permanent magenta. Now what I did was I painted a swatch of the permanent magenta. Looks very purple here. It doesn't quite look that purple in real life. It's just the way that the camera took it. I compared it not to the gradient here, right in there. Because I realized right away that when I printed this out, I printed this on my printer, the black never comes out black enough. This value diamond in the middle. Although the original works well, depending on your printer and depending on the paper you're printing on, it won't work at all or not very well. I am going to be going back into that and adjusting that with a pencil so that it actually works. What I did was I used my one through ten scale to determine what the value of this was. And I painted it not according to what the words are here, but where it belongs on the scale of ten being up here at the yellow and violet being one. Okay? Black would be zero. So I determined that my permanent magenta was right in here. Okay. So you're right there. It still is looking purple because of the digital photograph then I painted in my other two primary, it's a very yellow ochre and it's pretty dark. You know, it really doesn't fall into the high key range at all. My blue which is my thalo green, deep is pretty dark. Okay, so it's at the high end of the darks and the low end of the mid range. The next thing I did was to mix the two together. What I'm mixing is not diluted pigment. It is the strongest pigment possible while still being transparent as a transparent water color should be. I am trying to see what the very darkest saturated pigments are, and I am plotting them on this diamond. I can always make them lighter, but I can't really make them darker. I mixed yellow, my yellow ochre, I'll call it, with my permanent magenta. And this is what I got in between my red again, I went with mid range for the value is really quite a brown. But this is the best red I could get by mixing my yellow and my magenta. All right, and then I got these pretty nice red violets going down. This way. Okay, This is the red I chose for my primary pigment. Okay? But this is not the red that belongs up there. All right, now over here, I mixed my yellow ocher with the thalo, blue, green, deep were the values and the colors that I got. Just mixing those full strength. Notice here, the yellow I placed right here in the orange, red. I decided that the value I had chosen here was wrong and that I should move the yellow up to here. Then I would extend this a little bit further, that's what happened. And then I made this one darker. Then what I did, I decided to fill in that top part with some diluted mix on this side of just the yellow ochre. All right, because I've already bypassed my orange. I'm already into my yellow here. So the only thing I can do is dilute this to go up here. And the reason that this shows like this is I did the yellow on both sides because I'm mixing yellow with my blue on that side. I just put a very pale wash so that I know what's the palest yellow I can get by diluting my full strength yellow ochre. Then I put another wash on top of that. And then I put a third wash down here, so that I have a graduation. The whole thing was one layer. Then I added the second layer in these two sections. And the third layer right there in the third section here, it begins to be diluted. This is my pure yellow ochre. And then on the other side, what I did was I had my yellow. And I still had some of this mix in my palette. So I diluted it with some water and I came up with a mix that's a yellow, yellow, green. And it's part way between here and here. It's not perfect, but it's close here. I did the bottom of the value scale and remember this is my pigment, the pigment I'm using for my primary red. This is the pigment I'm using for my primary blue. Then these are a mix of the permanent magenta and the thalo green deep. All right, This is pretty much the bluest blue I can get mixing the thalo green deep and the permanent magenta. Then I go into a little bit more on the permanent magenta side, I get a violet blue. This is my violet which is a pretty good right on violet. Then here I come around, it's still really dark. Of course it's going to be darker than this because it's lower on the valley range. This is my violet, violet red. This is the whole set up of information I have about using these three pigments. Now, I almost used up the mystery yellow. I can fill that with yellow ochre and it's going to behave pretty much the same, right? So I have a lot of information. I know what value my pure color is going to be, and I can dilute all of these and I really get an idea of what it's going to be. Over here, I have my Quickie color wheel that I've shown you in other classes here. I have the color chart that I make for my extended travel kit so that I can pull it out and really get a better idea. I can't depend on my memory when I deal with so many different limited palettes. I have these little charts. The chart is made in a sketchbook. I photograph it, then I print it out, and I fold it up and it all fits nicely into a little tiny zip block. Next, I'll show you how I adjusted this to come out with a more valid color value diamond. I started off with something like that. All right, Now I'm using a pencil to go in and adjust the value. I'm just gradually building this up. I'll speed this up so that you don't have to be bored to death watching me do this. It helps to squint so that you don't get distracted by the hue, by the color, so that you're really seeing the value. The gray scale value I'm using, a carbon pencil now gives me a better dark and it's not as shiny as graphite. Notice I'm going lighter now. I think that's a much better representation of the gradient gray scale. This is my red, my blue. And ah, in saying this, I didn't remember that I had made another adjustment. This is my saturated yellow Are all diluted, are fully saturated. I'm going to cross out that. And this is much more my orange. There's a red, orange, red. Okay. These are all Okay. I have a blue boot cream. Okay. We start with the red. We had the yellow. I changed the place of this yellow a few steps later. This was awfully dark. I didn't really want to move it up, but it worked best there. It's moved up. There's the whole I hope that made sense to you, and I hope it was helpful for you to be able to use the templates to get the most information from your pigments. I will continue to make these custom color diamonds because I learn so much as I'm doing, it benefits my painting in the long run and also in the short run. Thanks for listening. Good luck. Get in touch if you have any questions. I'm Chris Carter. Have a great day. 6. Review: Let's review what I did. I chose for different palettes so that you can see the variation available depending on which pigments you chose. Each palette included one yellow, one red, and one blue, not necessarily a primary yellow, e.g. the yellow ocher is a neutralized yellow. With each of those four primaries, I created three different references. I created a color value diamond, I created a custom color bill, and I created a gray scale grid that showed the difference between all four of the palettes. In this slide, you see the primaries of three of the palettes and the completed color wheel of one of the palettes. Look carefully at the differences between each of the yellows, the reds, and the blues. The pigments from two of the pilots were created by a gala. This is the palette that used quinacridone. Gold is my yellow. Ph rob rows for my rent. An emblem from blue for my blue. This is the second of the air Gallo palettes. And in this one, the azo yellow, Where's my yellow? Alizarin crimson hue was my red and a zero was my blue. This was a combination of pigments. I don't recall what they were. They were squeezed into the pants long time ago. The yellow was yellow ocher, the red was English red light. And the blue is Payne's gray. These are the lovely beam pain stones. Yellow was popular. Yellow, red, strawberry red, and blue. Great ocean. I loved the names that they give them. Here, all four pallets again. This shows the four custom color wheels and the difference in the color value diamond with e to the palettes. Remember that the color value diamond shows each of the pigments at its full string. Here I'm showing the same thing with the gray scale chart included in the middle. Here's grayscale chart again, notice how with the beam paints, I get a much lighter value using the beam poplar yellow than I would with the yellow ocher. So if you've now made all three of the charts, you'll have an incredible amount of reference to learn both about the pigment and about the color value of those pigments. 7. What's Next?: Now that we've finished the tedious part of making all of these charts, we can jump into the much more fun aspect of playing with color value. What's coming up in part two? In part two, we'll be using line drawings to create strong designs in gray scale first, and then adding color using one of the palettes that you've created a diamond for, either one that you made in this class, or perhaps you want to try a new palette to use for the next class. That's up to you. Uh, we'll be using those palettes to choose our color by value and temperature. You will be free to play with color that is not the same as the real objects you're looking at. In the next part, you will be allowed the freedom and encouraged to take advantage of that freedom to experiment with color that may not be part of your reality. You're going to choose the color simply by the value of it. We'll be using full strength colors. As you can see by these samples. There are so many ways that you can play with color to keep your design strong. The first examples that I'm sharing with you are all what I call dollar art. And it's really playful and fun because you can take segments of reality, strengthen your drawing skills, and experiment with design and color at the same time. In the last few samples, I'm showing a video of some paintings I did focused on sailing. And I'm showing you the black and white version and the color version, these paintings so that you can see how once you're practicing this and developing your ability to determine color value, you can easily, even when you're sailing in motion, it will become intuitive for you to adjust your paints according to the value of the block to be. Thank you for taking the class. Please remember to post the review and post your profit Hicks. Thanks again, hope to see you in part two. This is Chris Gardner. 8. Bonus Lesson 1 - Something to Think About: Let's start with a simple design. A bowl sitting on a table with a wall behind it. We have to make a value choice for each of the shapes, the bowl, the table, and the wall. We can make it light, medium, or dark. So how many combinations will we have with just the three shapes? The bowl, the table, and the wall? Let's first look at the choices we have if the table is dark, remember that the bottom third of our gray scale is considered dark. The middle third is considered medium, and the top third is considered light. That means that we can have variations of tones within each of the designated areas of light, medium and dark. In the first example, the bowl and the wall look very light compared to the pure black of the table. But when you squint at it, you'll see that all three values are really quite dark. There are nine combinations of the three values. When the table is dark. Let's take a look at them. They're all so nine when the table is light. And they're all so nine when the table is medium. You can see that it can get very complicated. If you have 27 possibilities with only three shapes. Imagine how many possibilities you have with more than three shapes. And we're just looking at the possibilities. On a gray scale. When we add color, we have an infinite number of possibilities. That's why it's so important to be able to see your color as value, not just as hue. 9. Bonus Lesson 2 - Laminating Reference Aides: What I use is a clear covering. It's meant for covering cupboard, shelf. So that's what I use. Peel it carefully to get it started. I put it down and all kind of roll it down. Because you don't have to be careful that you're in alignment with it. You try to keep it. The edges in alignment. All sit down.