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One way to work with values, actually to start with a toned ground, rather than with a white
background. Normally we just have a white piece of paper and we go from there. But,
you also can work off of a colored background, or a gray background and that kind of helps
you move, you know, forward with the white highlights, and back with the dark shadows.
This has been used a lot in drawing, this is an example by Albrecht Durer, and he's
using a gray page, gray sheet of paper. He's got white ink for the highlights, and then
he can get really dark in his darks. And, then the page serves as that sort of medium
tone where it's neither really a highlight or a dark shadow. And, I did that with our
simple one here on a gray background and this is real simple. It's not finished, but it's
a start of how you would start to develop this. You have some white chalk for your highlights,
you have this medium for your medium values, and you use charcoal for your dark, and you
use an eraser because the eraser, like over here, I think I might want less highlight.
So, I'm going to erase some of this out, and this is easier to do with chalks, than it
is to do with pencil. There are white pencils but, they don't, they're waxy and they don't
hold onto the surface as well. So, you know, be adventurous and pull out a piece of paper
that isn't white and start working with that as one of your values.