Your painting style depends on many things: your temperament, speed, intention, inspiration, skill, even how much paint you squeeze on your palette! One rarely considered factor is the way you hold your brush. It effects the character of your painting. You can change or acquire a new style by adopting a new grip. (more…)

Drawing is multi-tasking. There are many issues that the artist should deliberately address in drawing. With practice, this awareness turns into the ability to see. I have been asked a lot to publish a list of these issues. I recommend to all my students (and other artists) to print it out and use it as a guide.

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This week I will be covering how the
Old Masters taught tonal value to their apprentices. The concept of tone seems ephemeral at first intuitive. It is one of the things you don’t know you know.I will be posting a detailed, step-by-step instructionshow to stage this exercise at home.If you’d like to try this exercise for yourself at home, to enhance your understanding of tone, gather 10 to 15 various size and shape boxes and arrange them on a dark solid background. If you use match boxes, you can use the desk lamp to illuminate it.It applies to both viewer and artist. If you can’t understand tonal value you can’t appreciate art. In this blog we are only covering how this concept applies to the artists. It is very easy to identify those who don’t understand tonal values; to be able to express tonal value effectively is to master it applies not only to two-dim painting or to three-dim sculpture. This is the case of when “what you don’t know you don’t know” becomes the chasm between your vision and your ability to effectively communicate that vision to your viewer (without them understanding how t v contributed to that.

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Understanding Tonal Value – Simplified Version. [Drawing from an Arrangement of Boxes Shaped as a Reclining Figure].

Fig. 1.  Old Master’s drawing.
Study by Luca Cambiaso, 1527-1585

How a seemingly disastrous situation: my model calling in sick(!) 30 minutes before the start of the class last Saturday, turned into one of the most successful classes on tonal value ever.

Imagine the surprise of my art students coming to the figure drawing class, expecting to see a live model and to discover a mattress covered with cardboard boxes, arranged to resemble a “cubistic” reclining female figure on a deep-black cloth.

As my students will tell you, I stress or mention tonal value in almost every class, I’ve taught tonal values for years, but results were always hit-or-miss. Every art student learns tonal value at their own pace – that’s what I thought based on the results I consistently saw. Some picked it up faster than others, but all took some time to finally understand it and apply it in their paintings. What surprised me about this class was how the ‘light went off’ in every student as to how important tonal value is to defining shape.

The concept of tonal value is very elusive to someone who does not see it. But once you understand it and recognize it, you can’t help but see it in all things. It is the most important of the painter’s skills: stronger than the line, stronger than the shape and stronger than the color. Master this, and regardless of how bizarre the shape, how poorly you draw or what colors you use in your palette – the painting will be impressive. Failure to express tonal value results in flat, lifeless, boring art.

Reclining figure made of boxes.

Works by students from the class.

Next week I will be covering how the Old Masters taught tonal value to their apprentices.

 Please feel free to post comments or ask any questions.