Behind the Scenes: Stark Value Studies

I recently watched a video with a fantastic exercise I wanted to try: you look at reference photos and then try to capture the values with ONLY stark black and white. This helps your brain get better at communicating shapes and light, and, well, I'm always game to learn more tricks for that!

This youtuber, who also did the exercises, even released their own blank files & references to use — so I did!

Step 1: Baby Steps (or, Basic Geometry)

So, to start, this was WAY harder than I expected. I have fairly extensive life drawing experience from art classes throughout high school and college, plus I just enjoy doing it for brushing up on fundamentals. But this? Wow, this kicked my ass a bit. Without having a midground value to work with, trying to determine how to define the shapes was brutal.

Getting the Hang of It (Advanced Geometry)

As I kept going though, it started to make more sense, a little at a time.

Obviously, you want to get as close to the shapes you see, but I was putting full accuracy to the side here because it would add more complications to an already difficult process. My goal was instead to really practice figuring out how to show form and shape without utilizing line (unless there was definitively a line there in the original), and how to lean into negative space to give form.

You can already see me improving as we go down the list!

Hard Mode (Color)

Compare these to the first geometry sketches: you can tell I got MUCH more comfortable with them!! I'm really really proud of the last two.

I did these all this morning over about 3 hours. There are still some more exercises to be done, but I figured it was a good time to take a break and post my progress so far. I expect this is going to be pretty helpful in the future and I look forward to trying it more!