So we're going to have to create a value scale before progressing into the latest stages of still life drawing. And you're going to go off to the edge of your paper to create a 1 by 10 inch strip. You're going to divide that into 1 inch squares. So you're going to have 10 different values that you'll be able to compare. And you use the edge of a paper because you can actually move this up to your drawing or to the still life itself and kind of do some comparisons directly. So you want to be very careful about how you measure this out. You want to be very precise because you can keep this as a tool for the rest of your life if you want. And you can always keep it around. I like to make a different one of these for every single medium that I do. And sometimes I'll mount them to some board so that they're very sturdy. The first value you're going to put in is 10, which is the absolute darkest dark. So all you have to do is sit there very patiently and work over several layers to get the absolute blackest black. With pencil this might take a little longer than with charcoal or something like that. But it's the easiest value to do because you don't have to compare it to anything it takes no thought. It just takes a little bit of elbow grease. So when you do this you want to be very precise about it. Get the edges pretty sharp. Because what you're trying to do is decide on distances between values. And what makes a perfect value scale is that every time you jump from one value to the next, the distance of that jump is exactly the same. So the easiest value you're going to do besides that is number two. Number one is really easy because you don't touch it. It's the way with the paper. Number two you just sort of lightly as if you're touching it with the feather. Dust the square with graphite. Then I would skip to the middle either five or six. Here we're doing five. And you try to judge how dark somewhere right in between one and ten. And because five and six are both equally in the middle, you kind of have to make a little bit of a judgment about what halfway is and go either side of it. Once you've done either five or six, do the other one. They're right next to each other. And together they make up the middle of your value range. It doesn't matter if they're correct the first time because you can adjust the scale at the end. It's much easier to make to get something down, fill up all the squares, and then make adjustments until you're satisfied with what you have. Now what you're looking for is a distinct jump between each value. So once you actually get that, then you move on to the next square. So here I've moved on to value number four, which is a little bit lighter than five. So I'm going to create a three values next to each other that kind of get the light to middle value range. And I did that because I already had decided on one and two. So I'm filling in the lighter end of the value range first. Just because it's a little bit easier, there's not as much work to do on that side. Then I'm going to skip over to number nine, put number nine in. Nine is pretty easy because it's right next to ten. You might see a little bit of the white of the paper in there, but not much. You're not bearing down completely with the pencil, but you're coming close to it. Again, all you have to do is make sure that it's distinct from the 10th value. You don't have to worry about how far it is from that. You just have to make the distinction at this point. You'll be able to correct and make adjustments at the very end. So once you finish that, then you have to progress to the last two squares. Then it doesn't matter which one you do first. Right now you can kind of see that with seven and eight left, there's a pretty big jump you have to make between them. So you have to make two even jumps to get down to number six. And that's the trick. So here I'm going to do number seven and see how that comes out. The first shot at it, I wasn't very satisfied. It didn't look very good next to six. Temperature is a little bit cooler. It's graphite, different softnesses of graphite have a different temperature. And it wasn't quite as evenly filled in. So I'll have to go back and fix that. I just want to get number eight in just so I can compare. Without having anything to compare to, it's really hard to judge exactly how dark number seven should be. Because then you'd be comparing it to a blank spot next to it. Once you get the eighth value and everything would be a lot easier. So here you can see that the value scale is kind of developed. The jump between six and seven is definitely not correct. And the jump between five and six is a little bit big. And the jump between four and five isn't that large. The jump between three, four is too small. As is between two and three and one and two. So the whole lower end of the value scale is going to need just a little bit of adjustment. So at this point, excluding seven, you can see it's pretty good. But as soon as you touch that last value and get it locked into place, you have a workable value scale that you can use when you go into the local value and you're still alive.