JJ Worden

Mixed Media Artist

June 04, 2026

Squinting Into the Shadows: What a High-Contrast Value Exercise Taught Me About Seeing

When Best Intentions Go Awry

Every now and then, it’s incredibly healthy to throw yourself entirely out of your comfort zone. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you know how much I love diving straight into expressive color, rich paintings, and bold, intuitive brushwork. But the other day, I took a lesson that completely stripped away my favorite safety nets—namely color and fine detail—and forced me to focus entirely on one thing: structural value.

The assignment sounded simple on paper, but it turned out to be an incredibly challenging, eye-opening exercise in learning how to truly see.

The Exercise: Stripping It Down to Black and White

The lesson started with a scavenger hunt for multiple reference images. Once I had them, the real challenge began. We were told to scale things way down, tracing the core elements of our references into small, constrained 4"x4" squares. Shrinking the workspace immediately stops you from getting caught up in tiny details; you physically don't have the room for them.

Next came the hard part: finding just the shadow and the light. No mid-tone transitions, no soft blending, no color cues. To do this, I dug out a mismatch of grey markers. I ended up using four distinct tones: a light grey, a medium grey, what I thought was black (but turned out to be more of a deep charcoal dark grey), and an intensely deep, true black.

The Set Up

Using only these markers, I had to block out the shapes of light and shadow. It forces you to look at a face or a scene not as a collection of features, but as a puzzle of interlocking geometric values. You have to squint until the details blur away and only the abstract structure remains.

From Marker to Oil: Expectation vs. Reality 

Once the 4"x4" value drawings were complete, the final stage was to use those exact high-contrast sketches as an exclusive roadmap for a small oil study. In theory, the value drawings had already made all the hard analytical decisions - where the form turns, where the deep shadows anchor the piece, and where the light punches through. The painting process should have been a liberating exercise in translating that simple map of tone directly into paint. But theory and practice don't always hang out together in the studio. Instead of sticking to the brave, abstract blocks of my marker sketches, my muscle memory took over. I hesitated. I started adjusting. Before I knew it, I was sneaking those familiar fine details back in, ultimately overworking those poor little oil studies and muddying the very simplicity I was trying to capture. It turns out that stepping away from your default setting is a lot harder than it looks! 

Overworked. And Underpaid.

The Next Challenge 

Even though my first attempt didn't stay as minimalist as I planned, the exercise itself was a massive wake-up call. I can see the incredible power a painting has when its underlying architecture of light is rock solid. So, I’m not throwing in the towel just yet. My next goal is to go back to the easel and actually force myself to do what the lesson intended: execute a study strictly guided by the marker map, leaving the tiny details entirely behind. Sometimes the hardest part of painting isn't what you put on the canvas —it's what you have the discipline to leave off.
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