- Earlier in this course, we talked about using grays
to establish the all important value structure
of our digital color projects,
and how those grays can then be swapped out
with colors of the same value.
And you know what?
I want you to try this using paints.
Painting in this way gives us great chance
to practice judging values,
and it gives us hands on experience with paints
while teaching us lessons
about how colors can be mixed and altered
to make them lighter and darker.
Here's an idea for you:
we'll paint a value chart using the five colors
of paint that I talked about before.
Cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white.
You also need a brush or two, a piece of watercolor paper,
a pallet, and a pencil.
I'll start by penciling in a five-inch square,
thereabouts, on my piece of watercolor paper.
Nothing exact, just freehand this thing.
Now four evenly spaced horizontal lines.
Next, let's paint with acrylics.
I'll fill my five horizontal rows
with five values of gray, from light to dark.
For your lightest gray,
start with a small blob of white paint
and just add a tiny touch of black.
When you're mixing light colors, start with white.
Otherwise you can end up wasting tons of white paint
trying to lighten a dark color.
Take the time to really fine-tune your grays
until you have five values
that travel in even steps from light to dark.
Then let your paint dry,
with or without a hairdryer for help.
Next, pencil three evenly-spaced vertical lines.
Now, starting with cyan,
I'll make a little dab of it
right on top of some of my grays in the second column.
And I'm looking here for a value match.
I'm squinting my eyes hard and trying to see the square
where the cyan's value matches the gray underneath.
Interestingly, the cyan right out of the tube
is very nearly the same value as our darkest gray.
So I'll fill this square with the cyan.
Later I'm going to make this cyan a little darker
so it matches the value of gray even better,
but for now, I'll just leave it as is.
After that, I'll make lighter versions of this cyan
that match the lighter grays.
I'm taking my time here.
I'm being very picky as I aim for accurate value matches,
and that's something that takes both practice and patience.
Next I'll make a column of yellows.
The yellow is about the same value
as the lightest shade of gray,
so I'll fill this square.
And the rest of the yellows are gonna need to be darkened.
Now I could do this by simply adding
different amounts of black to the yellow,
but personally I'm not crazy about the look
of most colors when you just darken them with black.
Instead, I like to begin the darkening process
by adding a color's complement.
And the complement of yellow,
according to the painter's CMY color wheel,
is blue-violet.
So I'm mixing a dark blue-violet
for use when I'm darkening my yellow.
So here we go, I'm adding some
of the blue-violet to the yellow,
and when I get it to where I like it,
I'm filling the second and third squares
in the yellow column in this way.
When I get to the even darker yellow squares,
I'll also add touches of the black
along with the blue-violet
just to get things dark enough.
Same process for the magenta column.
Finding a location for the straight up magenta,
adding white to lighten it,
and darkening it with its compliment, green,
plus a little black.
There, done.
So two things creating this value chart:
it was fun, and every time I do something like this,
I actually learn a ton about what happens
when cyan, magenta, yellow, black,
and white pigments are mixed.
And in terms of the digital work that I do for a living,
this is going to be some really useful knowledge
the next time I'm choosing or adjusting colors
for my layouts or illustrations.