Here is an example of altered key. The photo on the left is unaltered and I darkened the lower end key of the one on the right. The altered photo has more depth and the bird stands out more too.

Altering the key lets you play with mood, focus, and composition as well as allowing you to draw more sculpturally and differentiate color in gray scale.

Mood

Key expresses lighting which gives us cues about the scene in many subtle ways. Light tells us what time of day it is or what time of year, and time and season are evocative.

Alter the key slightly to express a different time sense and the mood changes slightly too.

Change the over all key to inject emotion into a piece by indicating “lightness” or “darkness” of mood.

Focus

Shift the focus by making one area lighter or darker than the rest of the drawing.

Composition

Modify the “weight” of light and dark values to help balance the composition.

Pushing and Pulling

Extend both extremes of the value scale and you’ll see a more three dimensional effect in the drawing. At the drawing club, we call this “pushing the shadows” and “pulling the highlights.”

Defining Color in Grey Scale

Alter one part of the drawing to differentiate between two colors that are nearly the same value. Red and green are particularly notorious for looking different in color but the same in gray scale. (See this post.)

Cameras See Differently Than We Do

Cameras can’t record all the values our eyes can see, especially at both ends of the scale. They often can’t pick up the detail in the shadow areas and make them too dark, and they usually obliterate details in highlights by making them too bright.

Lighten the key of shadows and darken the key of highlights to correct for your camera’s poor eyesight.

Don’t think about it too much.

Listen to your inner voice as you work. Be sensitive of the need to lighten or darken, shift the focus, or add more detail. That inner sense always knows how to take the next step needed.

In Part Two, I’ll talk about a few ways to alter key.

Horse In Field

I wrote in my Valentine post that I’d exaggerated the values in that drawing. Drawing in gray scale requires a bit of reality manipulation sometimes because many colors are the same value. For example red and green are often the same value. (Value means lightness or darkness.)

One summer morning a few years ago, I looked out our kitchen window and my eyes scanned the green scene with pleasure, then I did a double take. Standing there in the middle of our lawn was our neighbor’s horse! He’d escaped from his field and was happily munching away at the clover in our yard. I didn’t see him at first because his red coat was the same value as the green lawn and foliage that surrounded him. I’m sure that particular shade of red evolved to help horses blend in to the scenery, and it works!

Anyway, when drawing in gray scale we can’t draw a red horse standing in a green field exactly as it looks or the horse would disappear into the value of the field. The solution to this knotty problem is to lie. Well, just a little bit. Depending on the mood I wanted to create, I’d draw the horse lighter or darker than the field. To do that I’d need to adjust the “key” of the value scheme.

And since this post is leading me into pastures I didn’t intend to graze, I’ll talk about what “key” is and how to manipulate it in a future post. :)