Value a hard one to describe and understand, why is that? because you don’t think it as an actual element of art of design or you don’t understand it very well. when drawing something on paper, coloring something, painting what you are doing is giving a value of color and putting it on paper or canvas. Even you don’t get it normally but you do it every single time, don’t you?
when studying about elements of art/design it is little confusing to understand all the element because they all are interconnected to each other. When we were taking about space as element of art we also discussed color in it, value in it, brightness, shadow and other things. Now value, it is visible quality of any color. To make it simple to understand Let say you have any black and white photograph.See it closely, are all colors are same? See if you can find different blacks and different whites. There must be some grey in it,may be some light grey or very very light or dark grey. Even in black and white color photography you can find so many variety of these two colors. this is because of value. Value is visible lightness or darkness of any color and this thing will make you interested in reading more about value in element of art. To understand the value of ‘Value’ element we took emphasis the principle of art for a moment. According to it out of your whole design or artwork there must be something that catches the attention of viewer.
value here can be used to create emphasis in an artwork by using them correctly, using patterns of lighter and darker values of colors together in patterns to grab attention of viewer. Adding more black to a color is called shade, while doing the same with white is called tint, you can set a tone by using both shading and tinting or by adding gray to the color. Another way to create emphasis in Design is by using power of color, color can be used as drawing attention to one focus point. For example there are three shapes of same size, same height and width… They are different in no ways, but when you give different color to a single shape among all. What happens??
So value, the darkness or brightness of any color is value and it is very powerful.