Value, Entry 1.

Value, Tint's and Shades.

Value, or tone is essentially the modification of pure hues by mixing either black or white with that hue. This will creates 'tints' in cases where increments of white are mixed with the pure hue, and 'Shades' when increments of black are mixed with the pure hue.

This is done to create tonal variance. Tonal variances are used to express many things in a composition, but practically speaking, they are most commonly used to denote where light and shadow occur within a scene.

A good example of value is this piece of work by Daniel Graffenberger, sourced from the website conceptships.blogspot.co.uk

We can see that the artist has used value to define the forms of his structures in this piece. Dark shades are used to occlude areas from light, for example the tight seam lines between metal panels on the ships in the foreground. We also see that light is not able to directly reach the underside of the ships hull for the most part, so darker shades of the base colours are used there, too. Still examining the ships, we see that tints are used rather sparingly, picking out little more than the odd highlight on the metal surfaces, notably the cockpit. Other than that, we can see small lights and painted symbols stand out due to light tints.

What's really interesting about the piece is also the fact that the background is well lit, bathed in light, whilst the foreground is shadowed somewhat. This changes up the standard formula for staging a scene like this and really brings interest to the layout. the piece encourages your eyes to explore the shadowed areas for all their little details, whilst the bright background neatly outlines the focal points, the ships, in a scene that would otherwise be a metal against metal mess of greeble details,