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| Value of Tone in Your Portrait Drawing Part 1, ● Kurs rysowania, Kursy, Ludzie |
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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Drawing Newsletter December 2004 The Value of Tone in Your Portrait Drawing – Part 1 one is generally thought of as shadow. Beginners always irst draw an outline then ill in the shadows bit-by-bit, usually starting with an eye and then grow- ing out the shadows. Inevitably the result is a lat mish-mash of incohesive darks and lights. In this issue of The Drawing Newsletter I will build upon the November issue’s feature which was Understanding Planes. Tone and planes go hand-in-hand. 1-800-427-2468 © All rights reserved. T T here are two culturally distinct ways of viewing tone: in Western European and North American cul- ture we see tone as shadow; in Eastern, or Asian, cultures tone is seen as color. A Western viewer seeing a Chinese drawing will be struck by its latness. Conversely, Chinese connoisseurs in the 18th Century seeing European portrait painting for the irst time were perplexed by what they saw as dirty snuff-marks under the nose and a ilthy cheek. What we saw as tone and shadow, they saw as dirt. Applying, or more accurately, contructing tone should be approached with a sculptural sensibility. That is, think of your drawing as a block of clay that is to be carved. Once roughly carved, you then model the surface forms with varying intensities of tone while manipulating their edges thus deining the volumes of the head. Having said that, let’s back up a moment and approach this step-by-step. The arabesque has been reasonably accurately struck and the basic proportions established in this 7/8’s view. Two things must be accu- rately achieved in this irst step: 1. the shape of the entire head; and 2. the proportions (i.e., width/length relationships). This critical skill is thoroughly taught in the Mastering Portrait Drawing DVD Workshop. In portrait drawing the irst critical goal is to strike and establish a reasonably accurate arabesque. This is a learned skill that no one is born with. Sure there are those who have ‘talent’ where cer- tain things come easily and naturally, but making art involves skill, intellect and heart. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Pretty much everyone struggles with ‘striking the arabesque’. You have to be taught and trained to acquire this skill. And frankly, without this skill you cannot travel far as an artist. To compound this problem, most art schools and classes do not adequately stress the need to acquire this skill. The proof of this can be seen in the end of the year graduate art shows. Most of the work presented in these shows are decidedly weak. There is usually one or two stu- dents whose work stand head & shoulders above the rest. You can bet your bottom dollar that those students have acquired the skill of striking the ara- besque. And they acquired that skill outside of the classroom! Once the arabesque has been struck, the entire head is then broken down into two parts: a big light and a big dark. No more. Don’t worry about whether one area is darker than the other. Not at this juncture. You should only be concerned with the major light/dark pattern. When working either from life or a photograph squint down your eyes as if looking into the sun so that you can see the primary light/dark pattern more clearly without being distracted by details. The rule of thumb is to always divide by two. Do the math and you’ll see that it does not take long before a complex, yet cohesive, array of tones is constructed. From the blocking-in of my primary darks I can then fairly quickly sketch in the features. Over the years I have fully ingrained the anatomy and sense of structure of the head so that as I draw I can ‘feel’ the form 3-dimensionally. This, too, is an acquired skill. You must know your anatomy to succeed in drawing portraits at even the most basic level. I have included the entire color-coded Anatomy of the Human Head as a free bonus feature in my Mastering Portrait Drawing DVD Workshop so that you can learn the anatomy in succinct, bite-size portions as you draw along with me. It really is the best way to learn and you can go back over any section and review it again and again as you need to. My preferred method of drawing is ‘toggling’, or switching back and forth, between the linear and tonal aspects. With a soft 2B Charcoal pencil I hatched and cross-hatched, further developing the big dark pattern. While hatching in this big dark I am also conscious of both the planes of the head and the light direction. This consideration is most noticeable at the trapezius (shoulder muscle). Another skill to be acquired is the ability to cross-hatch lat, even shaped areas of tone. There is nothing more distracting than cross-hatching that looks like chicken scratches in a barn-yard. Practice your cross-hatching on a small pad of note-paper. Don’t worry about draw- ing an object, just focus on developing lat, even tone. Keep you cross-hatching smooth & even! Otherwise you’ll never be able to stump it down effectively. A curious phenomenom is happening though. My carefully placed and sized nose is looking gargantuan! And the hat has shrunk! A time to panic or abandon the project? Absolutely not. What is happening is an optical phenomenom called simultaneous contrast . As a color, white is expansive while black is constrictive. (Not always though; the reasoning takes quite a while to explain and is outside the scope of a Newsletter – just take my word for it.) The result is that the effect of simultaneous contrast is creating an optical illusion. My advice, stick to your guns and just keep going forward. The Value of Tones in Your Portrait Drawing, Part 2 will be sent to you on January 1st, 2005. In Part 2 you will see how I further construct and develop the tonal values into a inished portrait ’ [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |