/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>2477708
Starting black and white does help. Dealing with color is a whole different beast and can distract you from the values which are honestly more important in the hierarchy of how your brain interprets what your eyes see. So keep doing black and white for a good long while.

Are you asking if you should do black and white studies of black and white pictures or b&w studies of colored pictures? if the latter, this is actually exactly what you need. It's harder to judge values in b&w scale when your reference is in color. The challenge is good, you'll learn faster.

Ignoring color, everything you see is comprised of values in the range of black, medium, or white. Your brain is actually designed to enhance this visual information so contrast should be your first and foremost concern.

a good rule of thumb is to omit the 'inbetween' shades, or at least downplay them. What I mean by this is that if you were to look at all of the values from 1 (white) to 11 (black) you should avoid using the values of 4 and 8. Thus you'll have a clear value jump from white to grey and grey to black thus creating distinctive contrast, but still have variations of 1 to 3 values within those three value ranges. - Essentially, your lightest darks should never be lighter than your darkest lights.

So when you're looking at a colored image look for contrast. If you see it, try to figure out which category the color fits into (white grey or black). For example, look at this picture I linked. To simplify it as much as possible, the girl and gun are black as well as the far right of the picture, the rest of the room is grey and that triangle of light is white. From there you can add variation so long as it doesn't extend outside of the set value ranges.

Now you can add bits of other values into your whites greys and blacks, like in the image, but keep them minimal, don't break up the overall shapes of the value blocks by muddying them up too much.