Exploring tone

 I  this task I went through a number of exercises to learn the different aspects of tone. through these exercises I hope to understand how tone can be used to help draw the eye into an image and to find the techniques used to make good tonal drawings.

Exercise 1

These two drawings both show how you can create different shades and tones ranging from total white to total black. Using digital software and pencils it is possible to create a wide verity of tone and both work well, however I found that both are different. The digital drawing allows for much more accurate tones but don't allow the same flow as pencils do as they have the ability to be pressed down lighter or heavier for different gradients. You can do this digitally to but I found that it takes a little more concentration as you don't get the same feed back with a stylus that you do with the pencil.

This first image was created using pencils. as you can see each tone was made using a different type of pencil, the "H" pencils are harder and the "B" pencils are softer. These give a great variety of tone but I feel that the harder pencils are much more difficult to use as they can damage the paper due to you needing to press quite hard to get any mark to show at all. The other issue is that you have to keep sharpening them if you what to keep better control of your lines.

 This next images have been created in the same way but by using a piece of software called Photoshop. This again shows a great variety of tone but can offer a greater level of control as with this you can be certain that the tone will never get lighter or darker by mistake as there is an option to stop any sort of pressure sensitivity. However if you do want this option you can turn it on or lower the opacity so that it acts a like a pencil.

 

Exercise 2

In this exercise I was tasked with accurately showing tonal shading on 5 different shapes. It is important to know how light falls on shapes as you can use the knowledge to add tone to most objects, this is because they will mostly all fall into the same category of one of these 5 basic shapes. For example a head could be shaded like a sphere or a tree could be shaded like a cylinder.

With the sphere in order to keep it looking round you need to make any tonal shading you do curve around the object. with this image I make the dark tonal shading radiate from a highlight that is pointing directly at the source of light. Also spheres have a small amount of light on the under side where the light is reflecting off the floor.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       For the cube the face that it not in the direction of the light source will be in the shade. In most cases ther are 3 base tones in a cube, the dark "away" side the mid-tone side and the bright side that is facing the light source. In this image two of the sides have equal exposure to the light so they both have roughtly eaqual shading. also on cubes any edge that is facing the light should usualy have a highlight.

The pyrimid is simmilar to the cube, however with the pirimid you will usualy only see two sides. The only time you see the other sides is if you are looking at it from the top or if it has more than 4-5 sides. This means that there is one bright side and one dark. Like the cube any edges facing the light will have a highlight.


With the cone you need to remeber that highlights and shading will usuly be triangular in shape. this means that it will be wider at the bottom and taper to a point at the top. also dont get it confuzed with the sphere where the highlight is a pin point, here it will be a strieght line down the side.



The cylinder is very simmilar to the cone with shading, however insted of it tapering to a point any tone will be in a straight line from top to bottom. also there will be a flat surface on the top/bottom that will be shaded in the same way as the flat faces of the previous shapes however any tone will be curved.





Exercise 3

For this exercise I had to find an image of a simple landscape, blur it and then make it into a grey scale (black and white) image. from here I added different coloured lines to show the different areas of tone, this would then help me to see how tone effects the image and shows distance

From this image you can easily see that the foreground in the landscape is much darker in tone from the background. This helps the eye travel from the front to the back of the picture and give a sense of depth to an otherwise 2D image.


Through these exercises I have learnt much about tone and the techniques I can use to effectively use it. For shapes I have found that in general the shading will conform to the shape of the face it is on, for example a conical shape will have tone in a triangular shape whereas a sphere has circular shading. also for landscapes you can use tone to draw the viewer into the image by making objects further away lighter in tone.