New Year, New Building, New Teachers...

With all the new things this year has come a new Visual Design teacher, Mitch Small. He is a graduate of this course who went on to work for Codemasters as a Concept Artist. His lessons have already taught me some very helpful techniques and have reminded me of some of the key aspects of concept art.

Last year the third years, when critiquing my work, would often talk a lot about getting your values right and how a painting will look very wrong without the values being right. I took away from their crits that I should stay away from full black and full white, which I understood and tried to take into account. However Mitch has taken this and explained it properly and below you can see an explanation of what "getting your values right" means.

I made this explanation sheet during Mitch's class on values and colour. There are 4 balls which have exactly the same grey-scale values. I have simply made a colour layer to colour them the different colours; this is where it is easy to see what happens when you get the grey-scale values wrong in an image. As each colour has a range of values that it will look right in, if you do this and use the same range of values for different colours the colours which don't look right will quickly show themselves. Here you can see green and orange come out very muddy rather than clean like the red and somewhat blue.

Here I have somewhat corrected the values for the green and orange balls in the middle and for comparison the originals are beside them.

EDIT: When I asked Mitch if this explained what he was meaning he said yes but those are horrible colours and you'd never use them. The green square approximately shows where most colours should come from.