🌗 Value Squint

$ man values

Value is how light or dark something is, ignoring its color. Six items: sort three gray ladders light → dark (tap two chips to swap them), then three times make a gray that is exactly as light as a color — with the slider, or switch to the hatch pad and scribble until the paper holds the same tone.

Ladders score by how far the order beats a random shuffle (a perfect run is 100, the deal you start from is ~0); matches by how close your gray lands, out of 100 steps from black to white. Land within about 2 steps and you are matching by eye as well as a working painter does.

The hatch pad: the nib is fat and translucent, so five to ten passes take you across the whole range — there is no endurance test here. There is an eraser and an undo, and “clear” starts the pad over. Because the tone comes out of your hand rather than your eye alone, the hatch window is a little wider on a mouse or a finger than on a pen — a few L* of hand allowance, not a different drill; the slider scores the same on every device if you would rather not draw at all. A pad you have laid no ink on is not an answer and cannot be locked in: bare paper is the paper, not a value.

Studio tip: half-shut your eyes — detail drops away and only the light-and-dark pattern remains; that pattern is what makes a drawing read.