Picture-Making

Before we proceed, let’s take a moment to reflect on the lessons that we’ve taken from the past four weeks during our conceptual analysis of Picture-Making.

A picture is an arrangement of dark and light shapes on a flat surface.

We’ve been using white paper. So that’s not a picture yet. It’s just one light shape covering an entire flat surface.

It becomes a picture when we divide it into dark and light. You can do that in a billion different ways, and we’ve been doing it in the most basic way possible: dark ground/light figure.*

We could stop there. It’s a picture. 

But we take it a step further: we divide that figure into light and dark, just as we did to the entire picture plane. We are sub-dividing. Like mitosis. Our picture is growing in complexity. We have been dealing with the human figure, so in this case we are dividing the figure into a light side and a shadow side.

But here’s the kicker: even though we divide that light figure into light and dark, we keep the whole figure still lighter than the dark (black) ground.

We hear Howard Pyle whispering in our ear again: "Your lightest dark should never be lighter than your darkest light."

The wording makes the idea sound complex, but it’s really pretty simple. It’s just about keeping our pictures organized:

All dark areas should be dark.

All light areas should be light.

But you can have a whole variety of light values in the light areas, and a whole variety of dark values in the dark areas. We just don’t want our pictures to get fragmented with a whole bunch of light and dark areas that break up the forms that are essential to the message that we want to communicate.

Here is a good example of what we’re talking about:

Look how Sterling Hundley composes this portrait.

This is what I was talking about when I suggested that Dave make his map of Somalia all the same value, but with a wide variety of hues. Why?

Look at the grey scale version:

Look at the light side of the head. The planes are all basically the same value. Look back up at the color version- at the light side of the head. It’s the warm and cool colors that give the subtle effect of advancing and receding planes.   

Hundley wanted to first grab the viewers attention with a bold value pattern, so he gave us a light shape(face), a middle value shape (background and shirt), and a shape of pure black (hair). (The image could have been more striking had there been some area(s) of pure white. Maybe he and the art director decided that it might have distracted the viewer from the accompanying article?) 

His second goal was to communicate a likeness of John Mayer, and he wanted it to be clear and simple, so he kept his light shape (the face) light, but was still able to add variety within using hue shifts. Too many value shifts may have fragmented the form, making for a weaker value statement, thus making the image less able to catch the eye, thus making the concept (in this case the likeness) more difficult to grasp.

A good rule of thumb is this: within a shape, let hue variation be your first option for giving the illusion of form. Use value variation only when absolutely necessary.

In other words: if you have the option of giving the illusion of form using hue or giving the illusion of form using value, choose hue first. Hue changes can, of course only take you so far, so then you can move into value shifts. But if you jump right into using a whole variety of values, you run the danger of fragmenting your picture, and obscuring your concept.

Sterling Hundley is, by the way, one of the most successful young  contemporary illustrators working today. Here's a few of his more popular images:

View more of his intricate, well composed paintings, with their unique style and often times complex concepts here: http://sterlinghundley.com/

Another great example of how to create a striking image by a careful organization of value shapes is this demonstration by American Illustration legend Mark English: http://illustrationacademy.com/Demo.htm