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Originally Posted by Paul Foxton
Faced with this, I've thought about matching the relationships between tones, as you describe. But if I have a deep black in my subject, and I work down from the lights, darkening everything else so that the relationship between the lightest light and the mid tones is preserved, I exchange a glass ceiling on my lights for a glass floor on my darks - you can't go any darker than black.
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Quite right, but if you establish your lightest lights (which will be the unblemished white paper, or white chalk if you're working on toned paper) and your darkest darks first, and then leave them alone, you won't push either out of the drawing. Instead, you'll have to interpolate the remaining values between those established extremes in your value range.
And yes, we can't draw "light" (in the sense of that reflective surface), so we represent it or suggest it by making sure that we preserve at least some ratio of the relationship between that reflective surface and the surrounding areas. To oversimplify, if "real life" gives us a 100-value range, but for all practical purposes we simply don't have the materials to draw or paint the lightest or the darkest 10, then our drawing will necessarily lie within an 80-value range. But we preserve the ratios between the values, so that a difference of 10 value steps in nature will have to be represented in the drawing by an 8-step difference, an adjustment that will avoid the "glass ceiling" or "floor" problem. But the difference will still be convincing with respect to the representation of the reflected light.
Across the Mississippi River from my old office is a shipwright's dock for repair of towed river barges, which are metal and, so, there's a lot of welding going on all the time. One of the local master landscapists, Joe Paquet, did a painting of that scene, on a fairly bright day, and yet through his command of the value relationships, he convincingly created the appearance of a tiny welding arc -- about the brightest light you'll see, after the sun -- from a vantage point over a hundred yards away. Of course, he couldn't even begin to accurately depict the arc's intensity in an absolute sense, so he used the brightest hue he had available and then adjusted everything else to "fit" between that and the darkest dark he also needed to complete the scene.
I admire and hate people like that.