/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>1867520
Do thumbnails first to plan out the composition. Avoiding pure black/white might help keeping the values from getting muddy

>>1841752
>but afaik there are no tutorials or books to learn this stuff from

Yes there are. First of all, almost every single masterpainter in history has used 2-4 value structures, so you can learn by doing value studies of masterpaintings. Secondly, many artists do workshops on this or have written about it. Steve Huston, Michael Hampton, Nathan Fowkes, James Paick just to name a few that come to mind.

Also Creative Illustration by Loomis is a decent starting point. He explains how you can arrange your compositions using the 4 value structure, which was used by many golden age illustrators.