This is a review of the efforts of one of our painter friends to master the color portion of color-values. His idea is to see where focusing primarily on the hue rather than the values leaves him. Important and potentially beneficial considerations come from it and hopefully our discussion of it.

QUESTION: I wanted to add an argument for why i think it's good (at least for me) to focus on hue instead of value. And i will ask a question at the end! For a long time i painted mainly by focusing on values because i heard that "if you get the value right then the hue doesn't really matter, it will look good anyway", which was sort of true. I could always get a painting that "works". I just looked at any part of a scene and asked "is that lighter or darker than the surroundings" and then painted that colour. Then i found out that there are artists who mainly describe forms, like how a face turns from light to shadow, with more or less only chroma. I looked at some of William Bouguereau's portraits in photoshop and saw that if i picked the colours he used in the faces, many of them never drop to a lower value. When he paints the shadows he only uses more chroma in the colour. This blew my mind. Then i thought, what if you can describe form by focusing mainly on hue shifts? And this has to do with what you said about "no one is going to use a blue when you are looking at a yellow". Because this is now basically what i'm trying to do. Now i look at the scene i want to paint, i try to lift up any darker values i see to get as small of a value range as possible, so basically a very high key painting. Then wherever i see a form turning, and where i would before just shift the value and/or chroma, now i try to shift the hues instead. This has changed everything for me. My paintings have so much more life and colour and i don't get the same dead feeling as before. You could argue that i'm actually changing what i'm seeing to something else in the painting, because values are different then in real life, but i actually think i'm getting a lot closer to the real feeling of the scene in front of me. You say in the video that you can't actually separate colour and value (and i understand that you are right), but right now i really feel like i'm trying to separate colour and value. If i don't actively ask myself in every moment "How would i describe this if i couldn't use value shifts?" I tend to get distracted by the values and then i put less colour in the painting. For me, focusing on value first is a sure way to get a lifeless painting. And if i could add a question at the end: I've been looking at some of Monet's paintings and he definitely seems to be doing what i'm trying to describe, at least sometimes. Some of his paintngs are very high key and the shadows glow and he's at the same time not loosing much chroma in the light. Could you mention other artists who do this? I also emailed you two of my paintings to show you the differens in my approaches and how that effects my paintings! Sorry for the wall of text, and thank you so much for the videos!
Adam S