Value Sketching Practice From Black And White Portrait Photos

Here you are learning to train you eyes by value sketching practice from black and white portrait photos. You dont necessarily have to use the portraits but faces make great practices with its interesting complex elements going on. The term value in art basically means lightness and darkness. So why practice with the values? and why not with lines or shapes? Because values are what human eyes notices most quickly and obviously, and if you develope acute sense of values by training your eyes with value sketching, you will be able to do pretty accurate and realistic sketches fast and easy. Also, value is what makes things look realistic and you can achieve realistic representational piece just with daubs of values without any use of lines. Look around you. Do you see any lines in realty? No. You just see values and colors. You can learn about the colors later as I recommend learning to draw separately first.

At first, choose a simplified b&w photograph What I mean by "simplified" is those photos that does not have much details. For example,if you xerox copy a photo, it will come out pretty simplified with omitted details. Also a lot of old b&w photographs (photos of Charlie Chaplin for example) are simplified) Then, with a charcoal pencil or any soft pencil that can achieve a good darkness, start copying just the darkness and lightnesses you see on the photos, without caring about craftsmanship or making things nice and clean. Do not do any lay-ins, just pick a spot and go from there scribbling away the lights and darks. You can make it scribbly, dabby, whatever you want but your goal is to accurately copy the values. Try not to look at your photo as certain subject, such as face, nose, but just look at the patches or pixels of values put together and quickly copy it without worrying about any details. Concentrate on training your eyes to quickly see the value differences withing the photo you are copying from. Keep doing lots of this and fill up a sketchbook.

Once you feel comfortable and see that you are producing pretty nice looking sketches like this, Try doing the same thing but from life instead of photos. If you are experiencing difficulty, try playing with your mind and pretend what you see there in front of you is a photograph and quickly scribble away at the values. You may be surprised then how well you can sketch from life.

If your eyes become sensitive in seeing accurate value shapes going on in front of you, and start seeing the value differences very quickly and naturally, you will always be able to do quick great looking piecess with ease.

I still use a lot of these value scribbling techniques even though I also use the 3-d form methods (lesson 2 of my drawing lessons) along with it. You can see how I scribble with values in this charcoal black and white portrait video demo.
These are video demos of the above pencil drawing from a magazine photo. Notice how I did not do any lay-ins and started at a random point and scribbled away from there on.