Manipulating values.

This week I thought I should probably move on from the value task I had been doing before since my feedback was getting more and more positive. I was told not to dwell on the same task especially since i was getting ok at the task. And with that I took another one of "essentials of realism" classes. This weeks class was about how to manipulate values to help the narrative and feeling of the piece. He said the contrast of the piece can make things show out a lot more. "What do you want out of a piece? do you want it to be happy? Sad?"
Values can help draw focus to certain parts of the piece and how having a range of values means colour can really be played with! It can help structure a piece and make it have a lot of life. 

The task for this week is to get an image and to change the values, either make them lighter, darker, or both. However my latest uni projects have kicked off and I want to not spend as much time focusing on the fundamentals, just so I can pass my course! 

With the lesson completed I decided to jump right in! I was eager to make a start. I first pulled up my reference image and started to evaluate the values.There was quiet a range! I decided since I took the reference photo I wanted to convey the feelings I had when I took the photo, which was happy! I decided to try and lighten the values to really try and capture a softness. The darkest value I chose was about 50% to black and the lightest is 95% I then broke the in-betweens to 6 values. I was going to do 5 but I found myself struggling to visualise the piece. My first piece I did for this was so awful I couldn't even bare to put it in this blog! But it didn't demotivate me.
For this piece I first did a 3 stage block in and then continued to work on the values.  This piece was quiet hard and I caved in and rendered, but as you can see by doing this i messed with a lot of the shadow shapes. However, I'm not terribly upset with the results. I know I have A LOT of room for improvement, but I'll get there in the end. 

 I wanted to add a little bit of colour just to see how it would look, I added an overlay layer over the top of my values and threw down some warm colours. Im very excited to see how much more I can play with values in the future. I think I want to explore making values darker, and then looking at a value scale and making a full piece with manipulated values.