To me, value (or the level of light and dark) draws me in and has a greater descriptive impact in an image than what colour seems to alone. I’m not sure where this originated from – perhaps from an early love of comics where the stark areas of solid black and white embodied so much more emotive power than an equivalent illustration crafted from tight outlines and richly colored fills.
I took a liking to Chiaroscuro long before I’d ever heard of the term or knew what the hell it meant (which incidentally is Italian for light-dark).
I started doing small value studies because I wanted to increase my understanding of value and to improve my ability to identify the small shifts in value within an image.
That’s not to dismiss colour as an area I need to put more development time into, but my initial aim was to get a better grasp on value without having the secondary concern of colour to deal with.
As it turned out, I really like the way these small value studies turned out over this period. I know it’s probably time I put an equivalent effort into developing my colour knowledge and skills, but I think I’ll always have a soft spot for these little value compositions that’ll keep me coming back.
