It's time for Episode 6 of 10 Minutes to Better Painting.

I am your cyberly gregarious host, Marco Bucci.

Let's dive right into the lesson.

Playwright August Wilson said, the simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

This episode is about light and shadow, which falls under the category of values.

Values, of course, refers to the grayscale between white and black.

Now, when we see the work of great painters like Frank Frazetta, Saul Tepper, John Singer Sargent, the quality of light and shadow gives their paintings a real dimension, like they're about to pop right off the canvas.

And when I take the color away, the effect of light remains equally strong.

You guys remember Episode 4, right?

Where we talked about how good shapes are an essential part of making good paintings.

In this lesson, we'll be connecting our shapes to some values.

And I say some values, because a good painting does not treat the value scale like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

If our goal is to paint light and shadow, we have to be very conscious about our shape-value connections.

And this lesson will focus on just three values, three values that I consider essential to understand.

Two of those values will describe the light, and one value will describe the shadow.

So let's arrange a quick still life.

How about a ball sitting on a floor?

Okay, now we need a light, and our unpaid intern will switch on the light.

Hey, go grab me a coffee, would you?

Make it quick, I'm dying here.

I love interns.

So anyway, our still life is just waiting for us to paint some light and shadow.

First, we'll have to find some light and shadow shapes, and then we'll need to connect values to those shapes.

But before I do that, there's a checklist of fundamental things that we need to know.

First, see all those polygons?

Those are called planes.

Planes have a very specific orientation in space.

You can put planes together to understand three-dimensional form, which is handy when, huh, what?

Oh, do you?

If you're so smart, why don't you just be a contestant on the brand new 10 Minutes to Better Painting Smartphone Game Show?

Get your tapping fingers ready.

Here's question one.

Shadow values are what than light values?

Okay, let's tally the answers.

Darker, of course, most of you nailed it.

When you're painting light and shadow, your number one job is to keep the two separate.

For example, the shadow values in this Frazetta painting are all way down here.

And by contrast, the light values are way up here.

We'll explore a little later how doing this really helps with clarity.

But now, question two.

Generally, light travels in blank lines.

I know you feel this.

Let's see what you got.

That's right.

Generally speaking, light travels through the air in straight lines, a phenomenon so reliable that most of us proved it in fifth grade science class.

Okay, this one's for all the marbles.

How many types of shadow are there?

Final answer is, if you answered all three correctly, today's grand prize is.

I'm still looking for sponsors.

So in shadow, we have cast shadows and form shadows.

And this Sargent painting has both.

These are two shapes of cast shadow.

Cast shadows happen where the light is blocked.

Let's look at the nose.

Light is coming in from this direction.

And because the nose kind of juts out of the face, it blocks the light.

And what we get is a projection of the shape of the nose onto the face.

So cast shadows adopt the shape of whatever's causing them.

Form shadows, on the other hand, occur when planes turn away from the light.

And the resulting shape is determined by the particular arrangement of planes in that area.

So moving back to our still life with our selection of values and our checklist of fundamentals, we can now add light and shadow.

And remember, I'm only going to use three values.

The first value will tell the viewer everything that's in light.

So I'll choose a value that's pretty light, like this one.

And because light's coming from above, I can just find every plane that points up and give them all that value.

This row of planes is tricky.

Are they pointing upwards or not?

I'm going to say yes and give them the same value.

So every plane that was facing the light received one average value.

In fact, I call that value average light.

Now I'll give the shadows the exact same treatment.

Even though there are two shadows here, the form shadow on the sphere and the cast shadow projected onto the floor, I'm going to merge them together as one shape.

Now I'll choose a value that is clearly separate from my average light value, like this one, and I'll fill it in.

This average shadow value is called, you guessed it, average shadow.

Now before I show you the third value, let's reflect on just these two.

They look kind of simple on a sphere, but simplicity is exactly the point.

This figure's light and shadow shapes are more complex than the spheres, but that doesn't mean your values have to get more complicated.

A tiny bit of editing reveals that Frazette is doing most of the work with just average light and average shadow.

A similar edit on these paintings also reveals the same high contrast, two value principle.

But high contrast isn't always required.

Sargent achieves remarkable subtlety here by bringing his shadows closer to the lights, but still we can deconstruct it to see simple shapes of average light and average shadow providing the foundation.

Okay, so here's our final value of the day.

Remember this row of planes that's just barely facing the light?

It's often helpful to reserve a value to describe that.

So I'll pick a value that's just slightly darker than our average light, this'll work, and I'll fill it in.

This value is called, halftone.

It can show where light transitions to shadow.

Let's bring up this Sargent painting again.

We've already looked at the light source and the shadows, so let's identify the other two values.

We can pull an average light value from this broad area.

Those values hover around here on our grayscale.

Now we've got a whole ton of values from which to choose a halftone, so how can we stay controlled here and not treat the value scale like an all-you-can-eat buffet?

Well, remember that shadows are darker than lights, and we want that to be very clear.

Sargent's advice is to ignore the values that are close to the shadow, and instead choose a value closer to the average light.

So watch the painting.

Here are some halftone planes.

Remember, halftone planes are still facing the light, but starting to really turn away from the light.

I'll fade that away now so you can judge how the halftones are just a step darker than average light before the values plunge into shadow.

Now the human head is far more complex than a sphere, so I'd like you to meet my art friend, the Isauro head, a 360-degree cast of the planes of the head.

Using something like this as reference, you can move beyond a simple sphere and try to recreate different lighting situations on the head from your imagination.

With enough practice, you'll find you can say a whole lot with these three simple values.

And the simpler you say it, August Wilson, you got it.

Well, that's the end of part one, except something feels incomplete.

What could it...

Oh yeah, where's the unpaid intern with my coffee?

So here's a photograph of me, actually, looking seven years younger, and I want to show you how you can take this lesson and apply it to studying from a photograph.

I'll be looking at the probably hundreds of values that exist in that picture and reducing them to just three.

That means I'll be losing a lot of information here.

Real life has more than three values, but a big part of a painter's discipline is the idea of simplification, getting down to the bare bones of what makes form and light work.

So using a fully detailed photo and simplifying it is a great way to build that discipline.

One of the benefits of having only three values to work with is you can actually begin to draw with paint.

You probably noticed I didn't start with a line drawing.

I went straight in there with my three values, and I'm currently moving them around, painting over them, adjusting my shapes as I search for that clear form and light.

Now my goal here is not a portrait likeness.

I'm not trying to copy the photo.

It'll end up looking something like the photo, but more than anything else, what I'm going for is an overall statement of how this series of planes is interacting with the light source.

So when you do studies like this, you're practicing both your lighting and your drawing.

Even though I did not do a line drawing, I'm still drawing shapes.

They're just shapes of value.

Making good shapes is critical, so I'm constantly refining them.

You know, I'm not trying to get them right the first time.

I'll be the first to admit that I never get my shapes right the first time.

But a big part of studying is putting something down, seeing where it's off, and then adjusting it.

And having only three values to choose from is kind of like a life preserver that keeps your head always above water instead of drowning in the sea of hundreds of possible values.

I want to mention one more important thing, and that is I'm using edges in this demonstration.

We talked about edges in episode three of this series, and I'm using them here to soften the transition between values and shapes.

In part one of this lesson, I did not consider edges.

Everything was kept razor sharp.

But in practice, it's nice to combine these fundamentals, because after all, that's what they're made for.

And the nice thing is, whether you're working from photos, from life, or even from your imagination, you can use this same approach.

You know, I wouldn't blame you if right now you're wondering to yourself, Are three values really enough to make an impact?

That's a fair question.

And in response, I'd like you to consider this familiar piece of music.

A statement made with minimal means can still make a powerful impact.

As far as light and shadows concerned, you can use these three values to make a complete statement, or you can use them as the basis for something more complex.

Remember that good painting, like any form of communication, is based on solid structure, and that's what we're pursuing here.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and...

Uh, what took you so long?

Show's over.

Hire an intern to help with the show, and whoa, I get the one guy who can't even deliver coffee.

And now you probably expect me to write you a letter of recommendation for a job at an animation studio.

Well, I don't think so.