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Thanks Allan. I'll bear your suggestion about the surrounding values in mind. Everything I do at the moment is geared towards eye training, to me that's first base. I've only recently started to concentrate on value, and am finding that there's a lot more to it than meets the eye, so to speak.
A good way of practicing with values, I've found, is to do small still life drawings. At the moment I do roughly one a day, small two hour drawings. They're teaching me a lot about relative value and how to deal with the necessarily narrow range of values we can get on paper compared to what we see in nature. At first I was obsessed with matching the values I saw as closely as I could. Increasingly I'm thinking that the picture needs to have it's own logic of value relationships, and that should be worked out at the start. I think it will still be some time before I successfully apply it to a portrait drawing.
Of course, I realise that there are many different approaches, but I think that doing this is helping me to get a more convincing feeling of light.
Here's a pic of one of the little drawings, so you can see what I'm talking about. On this one, I took the highlight on the bowl as the lightest light and worked down from there.
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