Artists rarely paint exactly what they see. They paint what they want YOU to see and they use many techniques to make that happen. Let's look at five ways artists describe and manipulate light and dark to make their paintings convey what they want you to see.

1. Value
Value refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a pigment. Values change from black to white with a continuous range of gray values or tones in between. The range of values from black to white is called a grayscale. The position of a gray tone on the grayscale indicates the gray tone's value.

What is true for gray tones is also true for colors. We will discuss more about color in the next lesson.