An important part of sight-reading for the musician is recognizing the rise and fall of notes:  the higher the notes appear on the score, the higher pitched their tones are.  To sight-read color, we first identify the hue, something we did last week. Next we pinpoint the value of that hue by naming its range, a kind of visual pitch. 

There is a parallel between music and visual art in what both call tones.  In visual art, we call these values as well as tones.  We can distinguish these more easily by arranging them on a scale.   There are several value scales used in visual art, but the one I prefer has ten values arranged so that the lightest value is value 1 and the lowest is value 10.

We speak of a color as being high key or in the light range, middle key or in the mid-value range, and low key or in the darker value range.  When sight-reading color, then, we need to identify into which value range the hue we see falls.

We can augment last week's exercise to include the value range once we have identified the hue, so here's how that would go: 

1. Look around you and locate a large area painted a single color.
2. Curl your index finger so that it touches your thumb, forming a little peephole about 3/4 inch in diameter, our isolator.  
3. Close one eye, extend your hand about half arm's length from your face and with your open eye look through the isolator at any area of the solid color.  Stare for at least five seconds. 
4. Now, move your isolator a few feet in any direction and stare at that area for at least five seconds.  
5. Compare the two areas.  Remembering the twelve hues from last week, first name the hue of each area.  THEN identify the value range of each.

If you happened to be looking at a wall painted this color, in an area where the light is strong you might see high value, blue-green, but in a shadowed area, you might see low-value, blue-green.   As the color appears here, it is a mid-value, blue green.