Back in college I took art history, in which I learned the astonishing (to me) fact that the old masters had as many as 99 layers to their oil paintings. I always thought that meant they had 99 layers of, say, blue on Mary’s veil, something that would give the color “depth.” Not so. As it turns out, the layers have different functions. First comes the primer to keep the […]
As I drove up to my art teacher’s studio this morning, I noticed a young black border collie trotting up the driveway. She looked friendly enough, so I wasn’t overly concerned about getting attacked — more like getting licked to death. I parked my car, and she came over to my door as I opened it. “Eh!” I yelled at her, making what Diana Gabaldon would undoubtedly refer to as […]
Today in art class I worked more on tone. I’ll show you the progression of a drawing in charcoal on rag paper. The first step is to determine the average tone of the setup, which in this case was a middle tone, about a 4 on a 1-to-10 scale, where 10 is the darkest. The setup was a dark wine bottle, a green pear, and a white onion set on […]
I’ve been learning to think about tone in a painterly way. Tone is the structure of a painting and is what makes objects appear to be three-dimensional. If you think in terms of movies, you’ll notice that a black-and-white movie tells you most of the information you need to know about the environment. You can tell what is grass and what is water and what is skin, and so forth. […]
Flabby Brain 