One of my biggest takeaways from the weekend watercolor workshop is the benefit of tonal studies. Since tone is something that I’ve struggled with, I’m delighted to add this tool to my toolbox! It seems like such an obvious practice to me now, but all of the disparate pieces from my classes hadn’t settled together yet for me to figure it out on my own.
In my Drawing class last month we used thumbnails to help us determine our compositional arrangement on the page. Then, we would do our tonal studies with charcoal on our large notepads. But it hadn’t occurred to me that I could integrate the two. In both of the classes I took last month we worked with tone. In Drawing we used charcoal and in Ink & Watercolor we used ink washes. Charcoal is rather fragile and messy and ink takes time to dry between layers, so neither mediums were something I’d thought of doing quick sketch studies with.
Yesterday in class I just used a pencil to lay down mid and dark values on my thumbnails. But our instructor also mentioned getting loose, quick sketches with an ink pen and a gray marker. I like the idea of practicing in that way because it maintains the same level of committing to the page and not over-fussing that we discussed in Ink & Watercolor. The temptation with pencil is to spend too much time shading in areas, or erasing when something goes awry. It’s easy to fall into making a fully rendered drawing instead of a sketch-study for a future work.
Each class I take contributes a new piece to the puzzle of my Build-Your-Own-Adventure approach to my art education. So, using the thumbnails I first learned about in Drawing class, the commitment to putting ink to paper promoted in my Ink & Watercolor class, and thumbnails as tonal studies from my recent Watercolor class, I have a new practice that I am pumped about using both out and about and at my desk at home!
Any finished artwork will most likely require an understanding of some combination of the following: color theory, tone, form, paint properties, perspective, and more. Any way that I can find to break things down into separate pieces is helpful for my learning. I can make more progress when I practice each of them separately and then integrate them together once I understand each of the pieces better. Otherwise things get messy very quickly! Any time I can limit some variables I’m grateful (For example: drawing only in black and white without color or painting my pre-stamped snails). These tonal sketches are yet another way to break down the process into bite-sized pieces. Instead of having to figure out tone and scale and form and perspective and paint all at once, I can figure them out one at a time!
For these, I started with a rough outline first (the 60-second pencil plan we used in Ink & Watercolor). Then I started examining my reference photo strictly on the basis of tone (as I did in my Drawing class with charcoal). This resulted in some lovely sketch renderings! But what’s neat is that I didn’t set out to ‘draw.’ I just sketched in some rough outlines and then filled in tone values as I practiced observing them.
I know this may sound really simple and to some it may seem that I’m belaboring it a little. But 2 months ago I thought I couldn’t draw. Last month’s classes taught me that maybe I could. Two weeks ago I couldn’t decode my supplies list for watercolor class, and now I understand the varying tools and supplies. All weekend long I felt like I couldn’t paint, and yet I did manage to get paint onto paper in a way that conveys subjects that are recognizable. I’m continually surprising myself and I’m so enjoying these simple revelations that help me glimpse behind the curtain and see how to break these processes down so that I can keep practicing and growing in my art.