Please watch the video on value contrast.
This video will help you to identify what your personal value contrast level is.
The exercises below are designed to help you apply this knowledge to yourself and your outfits. This will be more obvious for some than others so please ask for help if you are not sure.
Contrast level assignment
Look at yourself in a picture or the mirror.
Would you describe your hair as light, medium or dark/deep?
Using the greyscale below, levels 1-3 are generally light; 4-7 medium and 8-10 are deep.
Is your skin light, medium or dark?
Are your eyes light, medium or dark?
If you are using a photograph, you may find it helps to adjust your picture to black and white so you are looking at a grey scale picture. Once you have identified your personal coloring levels, see if you can add a picture of a celebrity example or someone else, who is the same value contrast as yourself.
Using a picture of me as an example, using a ten point scale, my skin is about 3; my eyes 9-10 and my hair is mixed but is mainly around 7. This gives me light to medium skin, dark eyes and medium hair so overall my value contrast is medium. I have included some examples and pictures to help you.
** If you have particularly bright white teeth or the whites of your eyes are bright white then you may be high contrast, or your value contrast may move from low contrast to medium.
High contrast
A high contrast outfit consists of a very dark color and a very light color. They can be separate pieces or in a pattern. If a third color is added, it should a small part of the outfit to keep the high contrast.
Medium contrast
There is the most variety in this group, and you can chose which one you prefer. The colours can be in a pattern or individual items. You can chose from three versions of this.
- One (or more) deep colors and one (or more) medium colors
- One (or more) light colors and one (or more) medium colors
- A light color, a medium and a dark color
Low contrast
Again you have choices on how you do this:
- All deep colors
- All medium colors
- All light colors
Your assignment
Create three outfits for yourself. One high contrast, one medium contrast and one low contrast. Put the outfit with the contrast level that you think suits you best in the header picture, then put the other two in the comments. Identify why you think this contrast level suits your personal colouring the best and who your celebrity example was.
Post your images in the forum as a separate post and add the tag #valuecontrast
Please Note: As many of these examples are actresses, they will change their appearance regularly to meet a role.
I appreciate they do not look like this all the time, these are just examples to show the range of variations in hair, skin and eye color and the impact is has on their value contrast levels.
How they appear in these particular photographs may vary from other pictures of the same person because of how the photograph has been lit, if they have a sun tan or the color they have their hair at this particular time. Where I could not think of a famous person I have used an unknown person as the example.