Getting better at seeing tonal variation

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To continue on the same topic of my last post this time I am going to talk about how as an artist you can train yourself to see subtle changes in value. This is very important if you want to draw and paint realism, since it is the most important factor that allows you to create a three dimensional illusion on a flat surface.

In a sequential way of teaching usually students wanting to learn to paint realism will need to master their drawing skills using graphite and later on charcoal. In my opinion charcoal is a better and easier to manipulate than graphite for this purpose. However with both media one is only dealing with black and white (usually of the surface) and so one only needs to control how light or dark the application is...known as value. When one moves to colour this becomes more complicated as it is not easy to see value in colour and besides that another factor becomes part of the equation..known as chroma (saturation or intensity).

So before moving to color one can use black and white paint to render tonal studies from casts. Using a white cast is the first step since one can clearly see all the elements of the effect of light on form, that are highlights, mid-tones, form shadow and cast shadows. And you can accomplish this by simply mixing various shades of gray starting from at least 5 main tones and then intermixing these together to create the intermediates as you progress and you realise that actually there are much more variations in tones than you first observed.

Doing it from life rather than from a photo is better because our eyes are sensitive to an unlimited range of values to which the photographic camera is not sensitive enough and hence not able to capture. Beside that painting from life gives you more skill to measure proportions accurately.

The image above shows the setup, where I hanged the cast on a black board standing on an easel and I positioned my working easel to the right to the front. The illumination was from the light at the top on my painting easel. I used an averaged light colour temperature from 2 LED tubes (4000K and 6000K). At the front of the cast I hanged a plumb line which helps me to align myself to the same view point to the cast at all time. As paints I used Mars Black (Langridge) and Flake white replacement (Gamblin). Please note that in the photo the angle and position of the camera were different from my eye level. It took approximately 6 hours to finish this small study (15 x 20 cm).