color and value 3.0

I had another conversation about the color replacing value thing. And since I like to save long windedness for stupid stories and such and since I know people don't read technical stuff. I will keep this brief. Above is a lovely painting of the Seine by Claude Money, ooops Monet. It's what we might call tonal. A very limited value scale. I've isolated 4 values in the range in the little squares. Below is the grayscale version just to make the point.

Value is the thing that tells you what is light and what is dark. But darks don't have to be black, they can be any color, and lights don't have to be white they can also be any color. I looked for a single value painting on line to make my point but couldn't find one, so I made one on my iPad based on the Money, oops Monet painting above.

Quite lovely, no? Now here's the same one in black and white. Look ma, no values. Okay there are two. I'll do a real single value painting with real paint one of these days to make the point even more. Which is that when you start letting color do the work of value, things start getting pretty exciting. Shadows can be filled with color and light can be filled with color and your canvas and your life can be filled with color and joy and kittens. And who doesn't love kittens.?