Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/Arts and Crafts/Drawing & Painting

This honor has been deprecated in favor of Drawing and Painting.

Drawing & Painting
General Conference Arts and Crafts	Skill Level 2 Year of Introduction: 1929

Contents

1. Make a freehand sketch of an animal, showing in values the distribution of color.

In order to complete this requirement, you must have a good understanding of the term "value" as used in drawing and painting. Value is what you see when you convert a colour photo (or scene) to a black and white image, or as some would say, remove the colours. It is the dark shades and light shades that indicate that there were many colours in the scene that the artist is creating. Usually this is used in reference to art mediums that do not include colour such as pencil drawings, charcoal sketches, or pen and ink work.

Here is shown a chart where pencils have been used to match the shades of grey from black to white. A computer was used to generate the grey shades on the left, and various drawing pencils created the "values", numbered 0 to 9 on the right. It is a good exercise to make a number of these charts to get a feel for which pencils to use, and how much graphite to apply to achieve the value you want to apply to the paper.

In this drawing of the cube puzzles, you can see how the top cube is of uniform colour (white). Since the light is coming mostly from the front of the cube, the front is left with a very high value, but the darkest shadows are drawn with a low value (dark pencil).

When the cube is drawn with various coloured sides, you can see that even though the top side (blue) has more light than the red side, it is drawn with a lower value than the shaded red side, because converting the blue colour requires a low value.

The mixed up version really shows how the colours are converted to “values” in the drawing.

To further illustrate, a computer was used to convert this colour photo of a turkey to a grey scale photo. You can see the value numbers as illustrated in the various areas of the photo. When the turkey is drawn with pencils, the values are matched to the values in the grey scale photo.

This is what is meant by “Showing in values, the distribution of colour”.