“2 to 1” Value Thumbnails

A recent library find was Painting Light & Shadow in Watercolor by William “Skip” Lawrence, as recommended by watercolor Youtuber Liron Yanconsky. In the book, I was intrigued by a section on creating what he calls “2 to 1” value thumbnails (pp. 26-28 in my copy). I usually find value thumbnails to be useless busywork that I don’t consult, once made. But when I saw Lawrence’s take on them, I immediately felt inspired to try his new approach. What could he have said to turn a grouchy value-study antagonist into a proponent? Read on!

What are “2 to 1” value studies?

Most watercolor teachers instruct you to make three-step value thumbnails: a small version of your painting with the dark, middle, and light values blocked in (usually dark = black, middle = gray or hatched, white = leave the white of the paper). This is supposed to help you to remember which areas of your painting you want to be dark, medium, or light when you add the complexities of color and detail.

Lawrence doesn’t object to this practice, but he thinks it should be taken further. He explains that the problem is that this practice fails to create a visual hierarchy: it says nothing about where the dark, light, and middle values should be.

He suggests a twist on the value thumbnail.

1. Before you begin making it, you should first choose which area of your landscape you wish to highlight or make the focal point: the sky? the tree(s)? the rocks? the land? the foliage? the flowers? Whatever section of the landscape most makes you excited to paint the painting.
2. Assign two of your values to the focal point, and use the remaining value everywhere else. For example, if you wish to make the sky the focal point, you might assign the sky the light and middle values, and the rest of the landscape gets dark values. (This is common in a sunset silhouette, for example.)

This practice allows you to create a hierarchy (the focal point of your painting gets more value range than the rest), and it also gives you a way of setting off your focal point and creating contrast with the rest of the painting.

I try it

I chose this reference photo from my trip to Nova Scotia in 2022.

The reason I chose this photo was that it is not clear to me whether the sky or the trees are/should be the focal point, so it gives me options to choose multiple plausible approaches.

Here’s my page of value thumbnails, using black and gray felt tip markers.

At the top, I did a “traditional” approach where I assigned the dark, light, or middle values according to where I saw them in the reference, without respect to any kind of value hierarchy. You can see that the sky has light and middle values, and the foliage has light, middle, and dark values. This mirrors the reference.

The six thumbnails below show different approaches to “2 to 1” value thumbnails. On the whole, I definitely feel that they are successful at drawing attention to the right area of the painting (the sky in the top row, or the foliage in the bottom row). Some are more plausible than others (I’m not sure, for example, how the “dark + medium sky/light foliage” would translate to colors anything like those in the reference).

Translation to color

I decided to paint a couple of these out – small and quick, glorified color studies – to see how the value studies might translate to color and a bit more detail. I attempted one of the sky versions (light + medium sky, dark foliage), and one of the foliage versions (light + dark foliage, medium sky).

I got lost in the sauce on the bottom one; I had lost so many of my lights in the dark + light foliage that I tried to put a bunch of them back in with white gouache and made a mess. (It’s HARD to do dark + light without middle values!) Still, I think the general idea is there if you squint.

My thoughts

I’m not sure I have full control over my values well enough to really lock in on translating the value studies to color, but I still feel that I got a lot out of this practice.

The key point is the decision of which part of the landscape to make focal. This process helped me to even realize this was a decision, as well as explore options for which decision to make.

Once I had made that decision, so many other decisions flowed from it. You can see that it’s not just the range of values in each section of the painting that differed between my two color studies; it’s also:

• Proportion of frame. Naturally, in my “sky focus” painting, I left more room for the sky, and in the “foliage focus” painting, I moved more foliage into frame.
• Amount of detail. In the “sky focus” painting, I painted individual clouds and cloud shadows, but the trees are just a quick line of undifferentiated strokes. In the “foliage focus” painting, the clouds are vague, but there are multiple individual trees and shrubs.
• Range of hues. In the “sky focus” painting, there are multiple shades of blue and gray in the sky, but the foliage is all dark green. In the “foliage focus” painting, the sky is all Phthalo Blue Red Shade, and the foliage gets multiple mixes of green, yellow, and red.

Taking a moment to clarify my area of focus pre-made a lot of decisions for me!

It’s definitely better to have a specific point that you set aside early on in the planning to make that decision once, and let everything else from it, rather than making each micro-decision piecemeal along the way. It helps you to make consistent decisions and also reduces decision fatigue by turning it into one decision instead of many. The answers to downstream questions become more obvious.

Other benefits

Aside from forcing me to make a key decision about focal point early on, I feel this practice gave me a few other side benefits:

• The framework gives a reason for changing the values of the original. It’s one thing to say “feel free to change the values/composition/etc and not be a beholden to your reference photo,” but it’s another to explain why and how you might want to do that. Without a compelling reason to do otherwise, I definitely would have gravitated toward painting the reference photo exactly as-is. That would have been okay, but I think the split focus is a weakness of the reference. It makes a stronger statement to have a painting of the sky or a painting of the foliage.
• The framework suggests a limited number of options to choose between. Once you choose the focal point, there are three possibilities for where to put the value combinations. This is enough to make meaningful choices, but not so many options that it’s an overwhelming, wide open, blank canvas.
• Thumbnails are easy enough to create that you can use them to try stuff out with a low cost of effort.

Limitations

Like all value studies, this method does not address chroma, which is another way to draw focus with color. I found myself instinctively adding higher-chroma colors to the areas of focal point, but strictly speaking, the framework doesn’t comment on whether to do that (high chroma can occur in any of the value ranges). In the future, I want to address ways of incorporating chroma goggles into my painting planning.

More generally, all art-realted frameworks and algorithms can be unnecessarily constraining, and as a rebellious person by nature I tend to buck against any kind of teacher’s rule or limitation. Just as I renamed the “rule of the thirds” to the “tool of thirds“, it’s helpful to think of this a tool in your toolbox to be pulled out when it’s helpful, and ignored when it’s not.

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Painting Light and Shadow in Watercolor by William “Skip” Lawrence