[Week II] Value, First Entry - What is Value?

Value, which is also known as lightness, is a property of colour which how we define how bright a colour is. When painting, we change the value of our colours by mixing them with white or black paints.

Munsell Colour Model

Here we can see the value increase from 0 to 9. Obviously in real life, there are more than 8 different brightnesses for colours, but this diagram shows us how colours with the same hue can look very different by changing value.

Colourized Apple Shading

Without appreciating the use of value, we would not be able to capture depth via the use of shading. The importance of value as a colour property is obvious, and it allows to take a colour such as red and give it different moods, all whilst keeping it definitely red.