Frank Reilly and Value Scales Part 1

I've been trying to grasp the idea of compressing values, value relationships, and how that relates to painting for a while now. I had read and heard artist explain that you just cannot get the range of values in paints that are in nature. I had a suspicion that I mostly had been copying values in my work to this point and I wanted to see if I could improve my understanding. I used as my reference a blog I
had been following for a while. Paul Foxton over at Learning to See started studying values by using
Munsell's neutral value system and painting cubes, cyclinders, and tags with the values of the 9 step
neutral gray scale.  I have done the same (see above) and made a set of my own.  I have to admit I skipped all the hard work of mixing the values in oils. I used the Golden acrylic Munsell neutral values.  I really wanted to just delve right into this and will save all the hard mixing and matching work for another day. The Golden set really surprisingly turned out very, very close to the Munsell neutral values in the Munsell student book. I could not tell any difference by sight.

Here are my tags (below) lined up to represent the value scale from lightest light to darkest dark. Most refer to this scale during reference as 10 being lightest and 0 being no light. Actually I learned that true white is not achievable in paint. Titanium white is 9.75. The same is true for black but ivory black is 0.5 on the scale where a true black (unattainable) is 0 on the scale.  So that means paint can only depict values from 0.5 to 9.75 because titanium white is the lightest paint we have and ivory black is the darkest we have.

  

I set up my experiment just like Paul using the black, middle gray, and the white cubes in north light

under a shadow box. I used my value tags to check the local value of each of the planes of the blocks.  I ran out of room at the black cube which is at the bottom of the scale (See diagram A).  This was an eye opener for me. This is I suspect what happens when an artist try's to 'match' values!  You would have to manipulate the vales somehow to be able to have enough room on the black cube to make it look more real.

           

    Diagram A

So I turned to Frank Reilly and some of his teachings about how to understand and
solve these types of problems. Reilly used a system in which values were manipulated systematically and evenly on a 10 point value scale like the one above. I had read about this system but never fully delved into it enough to determine how to apply or use it.  See what I learned from Reilly in Part 2 of
this post.