How to See Values Like an Atelier Student

Ask an atelier teacher why a beginner’s drawing looks flat, and the answer is almost always the same: the values are off. Value is how light or dark something is, ignoring its colour. It is the single most important tool for making a drawing or painting look solid and three-dimensional. Get the values right and a picture reads even in black and white. Get them wrong and no amount of detail or nice colour will save it.

The good news is that seeing value is a skill you can train, and ateliers train it with three simple habits: squinting, the value scale, and notan studies. This guide walks through all three.

What “value” actually means

Value is just lightness or darkness. A lemon and a banana are different colours, but in bright light they can be almost the same value. A white shirt in shadow can be darker than a black shirt in sunlight. This trips up beginners constantly, because our brains care about colour and about what an object “is”, while a picture only cares about how light or dark each patch appears.

Learning value means learning to switch off that naming instinct and judge each area by lightness alone.

Squinting: the oldest trick in the studio

Squinting is the fastest way to see value clearly, and every atelier uses it. When you narrow your eyes until they are almost closed, two useful things happen:

• Detail disappears. Pores, hairs, and texture drop away, so you are left with big simple shapes.
• Values clump together. The many small tones merge into a few large ones, which makes the main light and shadow shapes obvious.

Try it now on anything nearby. Squint at a mug on a desk and watch it collapse into a bright shape, a mid-tone shape, and a dark shape. That simplified version is what you want to draw first. Beginners tend to draw every tone they can see with wide-open eyes, which is why their work looks busy and flat. Squinting forces you to commit to the big shapes.

The value scale

A value scale is a strip that runs from black to white in even steps. Most ateliers use a scale of about nine steps, or a simpler five for quick work. It gives you a shared language, so instead of saying “sort of dark” you can say “that is a value 3”.

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Two ideas make the scale useful:

1. Fewer steps than you think. A whole drawing can be built from four or five values. If you try to use all nine plus everything in between, you lose the clear structure.
2. Judge by comparison, not in isolation. No patch has a value on its own. You decide it is a 3 because it is darker than the 5 next to it and lighter than the 2 below it. Always compare one area against another rather than staring at a single spot.

A handy check: hold a real value scale up next to your subject, or make one small hole in a grey card and look at each part of your subject through it. Isolating a patch this way stops your brain from being fooled by the colours and edges around it.

Notan: studying value as flat shapes

Notan is a Japanese idea about the balance of light and dark. In practice, a notan study is a drawing where you use only a few flat values and no blending. It is the purest way to practise value, because it removes colour, detail, and soft edges, and leaves only the shapes.

Start with two values.

• Two-value notan. Pure black and pure white, nothing in between. Squint at your subject and decide, for every area, is this in the light family or the shadow family? Fill the shadow shapes solid black and leave the light shapes white. This one exercise teaches you more about reading light than hours of careful shading.
• Three-value notan. Now add a mid grey. Light, halftone, and shadow. This is enough to describe most subjects convincingly and is the workhorse of atelier value study.
• Four or five values. Once three feels easy, add a step or two for a bit more subtlety. Rarely do you need more.

The rule that ties it together: block in the big value shapes first, keep them flat, and only soften edges at the very end. Structure before finish, every time.

A simple practice routine

You can build a real eye for value in short daily sessions.

1. Pick a strong subject. Anything under a single clear light works best. A face, a mug, an apple.
2. Squint and find the shadow shape. Draw the outline of the shadow as one flat shape and fill it. That is your two-value notan.
3. Add a halftone. Put in the mid grey where planes turn gently away from the light. Now you have three values.
4. Check against a scale. Compare your darks and lights to a value scale. Are your shadows actually dark enough? Beginners almost always make shadows too light and timid.
5. Repeat with new light. Move the light or pick a new subject and do it again. Speed and confidence come from repetition.

Common beginner mistakes

• Weak shadows. The most common problem by far. Commit to genuinely dark darks. Half-hearted greys make everything look foggy.
• Too many values. If every area is a slightly different tone, nothing reads. Group them into a few families.
• Trusting colour over value. A bright colour is not always a light value. Squint and judge lightness on its own.
• Blending too soon. Soft edges hide a weak value structure instead of fixing it. Get the flat shapes right first.

Practise it in Art Atelier

The quickest way to train your eye is to compare your own value calls against a clean reference. In Art Atelier you light a 3D head however you like, then switch on value steps to collapse the shading into 2 to 5 flat tones, exactly like a notan. Try guessing the shadow shape yourself first, then turn on value steps to check. The app is free on iOS and Android.

Related: The planar head, explained, on how the planes of the face decide where those values fall.