Follow These Oil Painting Instructions to

Improve Tonal Values in Your Art

This series of oil painting instructions takes you through one of the most important
exercises for beginning or intermediate level artists: creating a series of tonal value studies
in black and white.
Mastering tonal values is an essential skill. Without it, your oil painting will always be a hit
or miss proposition.
On the other hand, once you have learned the technique of painting with a single color plus
white, it will be much easier to learn more advanced color mixing.
So do yourself a favor: if none of the artists you study with have given you any oil painting
instructions on monochromatic tonal value studies, then use these and do it yourself.
Remember, if you can paint whatever you want in black and white, you can learn to paint it
in color as well!
Learn this skill and you will find it easier to harness all the other painting techniques out
there.
In this exercise, you will paint a white symmetrical object (e.g. a white ball).

The following are my oil painting instructions, but you can modify them to work with soft
pastel, acrylic, or almost any other artistic medium.

Find a pure white ball with a matte surface (not shiny). One economical way to do this is
to spray paint a light bulb white.

Sit the ball on a matte white surface (e.g. a piece of gessoed cardboard) with a medium
toned background. Having the white object on the white surface makes it more
challenging; later on, you can try a neutral colored surface.

Position a lamp with a less than 45 watt bulb shining on the ball at a 45 degree angle
above and to the right (or left) of the ball.

Mix 5 to 6 values of paint using white and black (you can mix raw umber with the black to
make it less blue). Start by mixing the very middle tone and then work toward the
darkest and the lightest tones afterwards.

Take your brush (use a sable brush for smooth transitions in values) and start to look for
the line that divides the shadow and the light on the ball (the terminator). Squint often
to locate the overall tonal relationship.

Look at the graph on this page that breaks down all the layers of values on the ball and
on the surface on which it sits. Values show how the light travels.

As an artist, you are painting the light, and the light shows the form. Where the surface
receives more light, it is lighter. Where the surface turns away from the light, it gets
dimmer. It is that simple. One of the essential oil painting instructions you can't do
without!

Start with the terminator which you identified above and work through the shadowy
side all the way to the reflected light. Once you are done with that, work from the
terminator toward the bright side until you hit the highlight. Carefully model the gradual
variations of the values and make sure there is no sudden jump between the adjacent
values.
So, how do you spot jumps? By squinting! It's the secret tool you can't do without!