Attracting Focus with Value Contrast

Value describes how light or dark a color is.

• The closer to white a color is, the lighter its value.
• The closer to black, the darker its value is.

If you’ve ever taken a drawing class, you have probably made an achromatic value scale like the one below.

Artists use gradual changes in value to create an illusion of depth and volume, like in the drawing of a sphere below.

The lightest areas come forward, while darker areas recede into shadow.

Artists use sudden value changes, on the other hand, to make an area vibrate.

When a light value is placed right next to a dark value without traveling through the mid-range values, that area lurches forward. In the painting below, Walford, Ancestral Winds, Aboriginal artist, Rex Winston juxtaposes extreme light and dark values.

Compare how you look at these two images. Soften your gaze and let your eyes travel across each piece. How do your eyes move across in each case? Quickly? Slowly? Linearly? Frenetically? How are the experiences different?

Takeaways

Ask yourself what area of your visual explanation you want viewers to encounter first, and consider using value contrast to make that element the focal point of your drawing.

When you need to emphasize one key part of your drawing or have that element “pop,” consider using high value contrast to distinguish that area of the drawing from the rest.

Example

The value contrast principle is at play in Norman Rockwell’s 1963 painting (right) of Ruby Bridges’s historic desegregation of American schools.

In a photo (left) taken of the actual event, we can see that Bridges was not wearing a white dress on her first day of school, and the U.S. Marshals were wearing black suits. Yet, Rockwell made the artistic decision to paint Bridges in a white dress and to lighten the U.S. Marshals’ suits.

Our eyes are drawn to the high value contrast between Bridges’ dark skin tone and her white dress, while the midtones in the suits of the U.S. Marshals escorting her match the value of the background. As a result, Bridges is visually designated as the protagonist and focal point of the painting.

Practice Exercise

Use only lines, shapes, and what you know about color contrast to create an achromatic, abstract composition that draws the viewer’s eye in the order indicated above. When you have finished, find a partner and compare your compositions.

Teaching guide for practice exercise

There are an infinite set of possible solutions to this exercise. Student can use this exercise to discuss how value, shape, and repetition interact in a composition.

Ask students to discuss with a partner what principles they’ve learned that they might employ in their work.

Examples Solutions: