HOW TONE CAN SUGGEST FORM.

excersize

This exercise should help you to see how different tones and hues of colour can describe form.

Choose some simple objects. Pears are good, as is other fruit, lemons, green apples. Jugs, vases and bottles.

• Apply a thin turpsy wash of colour to your board. This will dry quickly. Use a colour that relates to the composition. An overall tone that you see.

•   Draw the still life on the board with charcoal. Begin with an outline and relate objects to each other, measuring distances between them, relating height and size of objects to

• Ask yourself is it bigger or smaller? Look at the negative space between objects. Once an outline has been established, you will see by observing the object, where the changes of tone occur  that describe the form. Draw these shapes as you see them. NB. Changes in tone usually occur where the plane of the form changes. dust off the charcoal excess.

•   When all the shapes on the surface of the objects have been marked in you should have a design of geometrical shapes. The object now is to block in all these different areas with colour, noting the tone and its relationship to the tones around it.

• Begin with the darkest tone. This could be under the object, where it is sitting on the gr As you fill in each area ask yourself is it lighter or darker? Warmer or cooler? And adjust the tone to suit your observation. Work in the background at the same time, carrying the colour around the board as you go. As you put on a colour, look around to see where else you see this same colour and put it down.

•    Colour can be lightened by adding white, yellow or yellow ochre. 

• Colour can be darkened by adding ivory black, ultramarine, alizarin, burnt sienna.

• It can warmed by adding red or ochre, or cooled by adding ivory black, blue or green.

•  You can mix up a number of tones on your palette first before you paint. This may help if you are not confident with mixing oil paint.

 A FEW HINTS.

 Painting bottles and glass.

These objects can be daunting, but I have found that if you approach them in a simple way, it is quite easy. Glasses can be painted over the top of the background, or indeed as part of it. If you look for shape and tone and forget you are painting a ‘glass ‘the object will come together because of the various tone of colour you have put down. Similarly a bottle can be treated in the same way. Just paint the shapes as you see them. If the tone is right it will work.

 Painting perishables. Eg, lettuce, spinach,

These things have to be painted quickly. Whatever method you are using you can always get these down in the first sitting, even if the under painting is not dry. The rest of the painting can be done later.

 Painting Tomatoes.

Windsor red is ideal for getting the ‘right red’ for tomatoes.

‘The guardians”