Munsell Neutral Cubes - A Tone Exercise

For some time now I've been preoccupied with tone. The more I work with it, the more I become convinced that a well observed balance of tones is the key to creating a feeling of

light, and by extension form. Frank Reilly reckoned that tones (well, being from the US he called them values) are 80% of a good picture. Who am I to disagree?

But I've been wrestling with a basic problem in painting for as long as I've been interested in tone: How to deal with the fact that the available value range from light to dark is much more

narrow in paint than it is in nature. Today's exercises have finally convinced me that I've got the answer to that problem - or at least, one answer. This post is going to get a bit technical,

and there'll be numbers involved. For that I apologise, but there's no avoiding it.

Regular visitors will be used to me harping on about tone by now. The series of still life drawings were started to try to gain some insight into this problem. After a few of those, I

came to the conclusion that compressing the tonal range whilst preserving the ratios between the tones was an approach that worked quite well. The blue and red cast paintings showed me that it was possible to compress the tonal range in a painting dramatically, yet still create

form and light. Today I worked on a few little exercises which finally proved to me, beyond all doubt, the validity of this approach.

First, some background on the theory behind these exercises:

This collection of painted wooden cubes, styrofoam spheres and MDF dog tags is what I call

my Munsell neutral value set.

They've been created for one reason - to help me get a better appreciation of tone. I'll be using them in a series of exercises over the coming months, all designed to investigate how

light behaves when it hits a form, and how best to translate that into a painting. I'll move onto colour later, I'm one of those boring methodical people that likes to follow a logically

ordered

first. If I can crack this, and Mr. Reilly is right about his 80%, then colour should be substantially easier to handle.

I won't go into any detail here about Munsell, since it's been done very well elsewhere, but if

it's new to you, the Wikipedia Munsell page looks pretty comprehensive. Frank Reilly developed the Munsell system into a practical tool for painting. I first came across Munsell

through Graydon Parrish, a superlative contemporary academic realist painter from the US. He's developed and expanded on Reilly's method and has evolved his own approach to colour

based on it. He was himself taught by one of Reilly's students, so he knows what he's about when it comes to this stuff.

Enough background. I recently got hold of the Munsell Student book. This is an overview of

the Munsell system and it's application to painting. It includes colour chips for some of the Munsell colours, among them a Munsell neutral value scale. The cubes, spheres and tags in

the photo above have been painted to match the values of this scale.

The Three Cubes Exercise

I'm calling this exercise the three cubes exercise because it involves three cubes. No point complicating matters. I've taken one white cube, one black one, and one a mid grey (a value 5 in Munsell). The first stage was to paint each one in isolation, starting with the value 5 one.

This should be the easiest, since I know I can hit all the values I see within the available range of my oil paint.

Like all these exercises today, this cube was painted sitting on a grey cloth (local about a Munsell 5.5 I think) in my shadow box. All the paintings have been done in natural light from

the window. The light did change a little through the day, but that didn't really matter since it's the relationships and not the actual values which count here.

One of the things I had to decide today was how I was going to use the value tags to help me

judge the tones. Since I want to get as close as I can to the values I see with this grey cube, I used them by holding them up in front of the cube and comparing the values.

For the purposes of this exercise, I was careful to hold the tags at

the same angle to the light as the panel I'm painting on. This is my value 8 chip, so the plane of the value 5 cube facing the light

appears as a value 8, pretty much. Actually, I think I adjusted it somewhat at the end, but this was the starting point.

Obviously, if I angle the tag towards the light, it will appear to be a lighter value, and vice versa. That will throw things off. I want

to get the values I see onto my panel accurately for his cube, so by keeping the light on my tag and my panel the same I should

be able to get close.

This approach is going to give me trouble later, especially with the white cube, but we'll get to that shortly.

This is the same process for the value of the top plane. This time I've got a value 6 or thereabouts, which is one step up from the

'local' tone of the cube.

I did this five times, Once for each plane of the cube, once for the background cloth, and once for the cast shadow. What I ended up with is four separate values, which should be all I need to paint

this cube as I see it.

Since the value of the cloth and the local value of the cube are very similar, the value of the cast shadow will be very close to the

value of the plane of the cube in shadow. I'm thinking about Loomis and the truths of the form principle whilst I'm doing this.

This one, whilst obvious, is certainly

relevant here:

"The lightest areas of the form will be within those planes lying

most nearly at right angles to the light. The half-tone planes will

be those obliquely situated to the direction of the light. The

shadow planes will be those planes lying in or beyond the

direction of the light so that the light of the original source cannot

reach them. The cast shadows are the results of the light having

been intercepted, and the shape of such intercepting forms will be projected onto other planes.

That's what I've got here, light plane, half tone (the top of the

cube), the shadow plane and the cast shadow. And here's my Munsell values, nice and simple. I'd like to add another truth, which doubtless Loomis thought was too obvious to include, but

here it is: The value of a cast shadow is determined by the value of the object it is cast onto, not the one which casts it. That'll

become more relevant later.

Next job is to mix up some of each value I'm going to need.

Thankfully, I only need four so it won't take long.

I should point out here that these are Munsell neutral greys, which means adding something to take away the bluish cast that black and white alone will give to the grey. The Munsell student

book recommends using burnt sienna for this, which is what I used. It does the job well. The black and white were ivory black

and titanium white.

I'm finding that the more often I mix up values to match my tags, the better I get at it. At first I found it very hard and it took

forever just to match a single value. But I'm pretty sure that one of the many advantages of doing these exercises will be a more sensitive and accurate eye when it comes to judging values in

nature. I'll be very bloody disappointed if that doesn't happen.

part two – the Black Cube

So here's the results of the first exercise. I've adjusted some of

the tones, reducing the steps in the light and half tone planes mostly. That part was just done by eye.

So far, so good. The painting of the cube turned out pretty close

to what I saw, and seemed to me to be pretty consistently following the form principle. The cast shadow being the same value as the shadow plane of the cube helps the eye to read the

cloth and cube as pretty much the same value (in local terms) and helps the half tone and light planes to work I think.

This cube has been painted black, a value 1 in Munsell. Well, it

would be if you could get black (that is, no light) in paint, which you can't. It's actually about a 1.5 I think. That presents me with

my first problem - I can't hit the black of the shadow plane on this cube with paint.

Unfortunately I haven't managed to get such a good picture of this one, but I've got 2, as before, for the cast shadow. The

shadow plane of the cube is ivory black, as close as I can get to value 1. The top plane is a 2 and the light plane is a 4. The cloth

has for some reason gone up to a 7.5 in this painting, I can't remember why I did that now, the light got stronger I think.

Part three - the White

Cube

Somehow this cube doesn't work as well for me as the first one.

There must be something off about the relationships I think. But overall, I think it works as a black cube on a grey cloth.

I was expecting this one to be hard, particularly using my method of holding up the value tags at the same angle to the light as my

panel. If I hold up my lightest tag, the white one, it's always going to appear darker than the light plane of the white cube

unless I hold it at the same angle to the light as that plane of the cube.

What to do? I can hold all my tags up at the angle of the light plane, but that will throw out my darks. I already know, from painting the black cube, that my black facing the light

appears as a value 4. But the cast shadow I know is a value 2. This simple little white cube is out of my available range. I could drop all the other values in the picture to compensate for

my white appearing as a light grey, but I've tried that before and it just makes for a darker picture. It doesn't make for a more convincing picture, at least, not in my experience.

This really comes to the heart of what I wanted to figure out with these exercises. I know that I need to compress the tones in order to get this painting to work as a white cube, and

so far I've been doing that by eye. But I've often been less than convinced by the results. In principle, I know that I want to preserve the ratios between the tones, so I need to work out

how much I compress the steps of the value range by to get a convincing picture of this cube.

The solution, at least the one I used today, was to work out the difference in steps of the Munsell scale between each tone block. Once I knew the total range of the steps I could see,

I could translate that to the narrower range I can hit with paint. The tags were invaluable here.

First, I needed to find how many steps the top plane (my half

tone) was down from the light plane, for which I'll be using pure white.

To do this, I angled my tags towards the light. Now my white

tag matches the value of the light plane of the cube, and I use another chip, at the same angle to the light, to see how many steps of the scale I need to go down to get to the tone of the

top plane.

The grey tag there is a value 7, so I'm seeing three steps down from the light to the half tone.

Here, I'm comparing the light plane with the cast shadow. I'm

holding up my darkest tag, the black one, but angled towards the light it's still showing lighter than the cast shadow. That's what I mean by going out of my range. I got round that by

finding the number of steps from the top plane down to the shadow plane of the cube (it was 5). Then I went back to my

tags, but this time held them at the same angle to the light as my panel, and found the number of steps between the shadow

plane of the cube and the cast shadow. I got 5 steps.

Hopefully this gives some idea of what I've done. The top plane is 3

steps down from the light plane. The shadow plane is 5 steps down from the top plane. The cast shadow is 5 steps down from the shadow plane.

All together, that gives me fourteen steps, 13 to 0. I can't get a value

13 in paint, or a 0, but now I can choose the range I'm going to work with, and work out where each value will fall in that range. I'm

starting with the cast shadow at 2, up to 10 for the light plane of the cube.

I normally glaze over when I see value charts like this, but I can't see another way to show this. I've translated my value 13 white to a

Munsell 10 (actually more like a 9 in reality, white paint). The top plane falls at around 8,

the shadow plane at 5, and I've ended the range at the cast shadow, which I've kept accurate at 2.

To wrap up, here's the three cubes together.

If you've managed to get this far through this post, now you know how I worked out a way to keep the ratios between the tones the same,

whilst compressing the value range. I hope it was worth it.

Did it work? Well, the painting of the white

cube does look like a white cube on a grey cloth, so I'd say yes, it did.

Most likely there are simpler ways to arrive at

the same conclusion, and I'm quite sure that many generations of painters have been doing this by eye and getting along fine. But I really

wanted to tie this down today, to see once and for all if my idea of compressing the value

range but keeping the ratios the same would work with a subject outside of my available range.

The next stage of this exercise is a painting of all three of these cubes together, in the same painting. That brings up the range problem at both ends of the scale. I've already done it, but I'm too tired to include it in this post, which is already over long. Hopefully I'll get it up on the

site tomorrow. For now, I'm happy that I've proved to myself that compressing the value range is a valid approach.

To my eyes, the white cube looks like a white cube despite the fact that the steps between

the values in my painting are smaller than they were on the actual cube. I think it works because the relationships between the values have been preserved. But still, the grey cube,

the only one here for which I can exactly match the values I see in paint, works the best of the three. It will take a few repeats of this exercise to discover whether that's simply because

I didn't need to compress the value relationships, or because I didn't compress them quite right on the black and the white cube.

I do think I've got a lot more practice to do with this, but at least I've proved to myself that

the basic principle is sound, and should translate directly into better and more convincing paintings eventually.

Munsell Cubes - A Tone Exercise

Having come up with a way of working out the relationships between the tones of the white

cube, the most obvious next step was to put all three cubes together in one painting. That

will extend the range further, and dramatically increase the number of tones to control. I

planned to use the same system as I did for the white cube, but to be honest I was too

excited and steamed straight in with what you might call guesses for the tonal relationships.

I've never been good with numbers.

At least they were educated guesses though, I already knew at this point the steps needed

between the values of each plane of the three cubes.

Apart from dropping the tones on the light and half tone planes of the grey cube, it should be a simple matter of adding black to the values from the painting of the white cube.

The values of the white and grey cubes hold pretty true to Loomis' form principle I think, the relationships between the planes of those two cubes are the same: one step down from the

light plane to the half tone (the top plane), and three steps from the half tone to the shadow plane. The relationship between the shadow plane and the top plane of the black cube is compressed though, exacerbated by the fact that ivory black paint is higher than a value 1 in

reality. On the other cubes, there's three steps between the top plane and the shadow plane. On the black one, it's only 1.5. That can't be right. Loomis would rap my knuckles for

departing from the form principle there, I've compressed the dark end of the scale.

I need to post a correction here. Black isn't 1.5, it's 0.5. Amanda emailed me wanting to

know why I had ten of everything in my Munsell set, when she only had nine. Graydon

emailed me saying that black is 0.5. So I went back to the Munsell student book and read the

chapter on the neutral scale again, I've been working under a misconception with my black.

The Munsell value 1, which I'd painted black, is actually one step above black. True black (no

light) is a Munsell 0. So in the Munsell scale from black (0) to white (10 - not achievable in

paint) there are ten steps, but 11 separate tones. Of course that throws all my maths here

out. The student Munsell book has no value chip for 1 since they say it's not achievable in

matt finish chips. So in fact, I've got something like 2.5 Munsell steps between the top plane

of the black cube and the shadow plane.

Despite that, I think these cubes came out ok, although I'm less convinced by the white cube. Perhaps because I'd used my lightest light on the light plane, so couldn't add the little white

highlight on the top edge of that plane, which the other two cubes have. That might seem a bit obsessive, but these exercises have to be related back to the real world of painting

pictures at some point. That's another small thing I'd like to work out in paint before going too much further.

What's interesting though is that on the final painting, I lightened the light and half tone

planes on the black cube, it seemed to need it. Perhaps I was feeling what I'd missed in the numbers. The relationships are still compressed on that cube when compared to the other two though. I can't help wondering what this painting would look like with the tones worked

out again, allowing for that, so there'll probably be another couple of versions of this set up.

The point about the missing highlight on the white cube is pretty well shown by this painting I think. It all seems to work pretty well until you get to the highlights on the saucer. Someone

emailed me once to say they liked the picture, mentioning that when they originally saw the painting in a small thumbnail view, they thought it was a photo on which the highlights had been painted. That's pretty funny. I take it to mean that most of the values in the painting

are pretty convincing, but the highlights aren't light enough in relation to the other elements to work. A lot of my sketches from last year are like that, with big problems in the tonal

balance. That's the kind of thing I want to resolve, if I can.

Despite the departure from strict adherence to the form principle, on the black cube, I think the values on the cube painting have come out pretty well. Each cube seems to me to be

reading right against it's neighbours in terms of values. To me, the yardstick for whether or not this way of compressing the tonal range helps is whether it will make for a better painting, whether it helps to create a more convincing impression of the light. I'm pretty

encouraged by the first go at this, and am immediately itching to try some colour cubes.

I'm not alone...

My painter friend Marsha is painting Munsell cubes

too, this is one of hers. Marsha's done the three cubes exercise though, and the 5YR cubes - cubes

of different value and chroma in the hue of 5YR in Munsell (orange, to us mortals). She started on a blue cube because she just couldn't wait.

blue cube because she just couldn't wait.

I know just how she feels. This exercise has fired me up, and I'm immediately thinking about other exercises I can do with the cubes and spheres.

After doing a few colour ones and getting at least some grasp of chroma (the second of Munsell's three elements of colour, hue being the third) I can perhaps stick some bits of fruit in and see what happens.

This here is one nicely painted cube. The tones look completely convincing to me, and are pretty close to the value relationships I got for my cubes, I think. To my eye, this little blue cube has a palpable reality and solidity to it, and that's what these exercises are all about.

Amanda, another painter friend, is also doing these tone

exercises, but she's gone clear. She's got cones too, this is her Munsell set.

Adding cones strikes me as a pretty good idea. It also harks back to Cezanne's idea that all nature could be reduced

down to the basic forms of the cube, sphere and cone. I'm not a big fan of Cezanne personally, but drawing of

geometric shapes has been featured in some well respected courses. The Boston Museum School (I think) had an exercise in drawing these three shapes.

Amanda also gets extra appreciation from me for being civilised and using the word 'tone' instead of 'value'. Just to confuse matters, I use both words interchangeably these

days. See how the Internet can confuse you.

I've also been corresponding with my painter friend Robert about this tone problem. We think alike, in a lot of ways, and have been mulling over exactly the same problems of tone. In particular, Robert has listed a lot of possible approaches to this 'range problem', like

compressing the tonal range as I've done here, or accepting the upper limit and averaging lights, or doing the same at the bottom end of the range with the darks.

These approaches are mentioned by Harold Speed. Me and Robert are down with Mr. Speed,

as all clear thinking people are. Robert pointed me to a couple of pages of Speed's "The Practice and Science of Drawing" which are so relevant here I'm going to quote them. He's

talking about tonal relationships in his chapter on 'Unity of Mass'. In particular, he's talking here about the fact that paint can't match the tonal range of nature, and looking at various approaches to the problem. To be fair though, these passages deal with catching the more

brilliant effects of light in nature with paint. Harold does say that the range of paint is sufficient for catching normal interior light. My white cube tells me otherwise, but perhaps I'm

being pedantic.

"In all quieter aspects of lighting this range from black to white paint is sufficient. But where strong, brilliantly lit effects are wanted, something has to be sacrificed

In order to increase the relationship between some of the tones others must be sacrificed. There

are two ways of doing this. The first, which was the earliest method adopted, is to begin near

the light end of the scale, and taking something very near pure white as your highest light, to

get the relationships between this and the next nearest tone, and to proceed thus, tone by tone, from the lightest to the darkest."

Harold points out that if you do this you'll hit your darkest dark, black, pretty early. What you're effectively doing is shifting the tones you see down the scale and running out of space

at the bottom. He cites Rembrandt and his dark paintings as an example of this. He then talks about the approach of starting with the lightest light and darkest dark, and progressing

from there. I've used that approach, on Harold's advice, and I think it's pretty sound. Then he describes the opposite approach to the first one:

"The third way, and this is the more modern, is to begin from the dark end of the scale, getting

the true relationship felt between the greatest dark and the next darkest tone to it, and so on,

proceeding towards the light. By this method, you will arrive at your highest light in paint before

the highest light in nature has been reached. All variety of tone at the light end of the scale will have to be modified in this case, instead of at the dark end in the other case"

Harold says that this will result in a more brilliant picture, and is effective for representing

sunlight. It strikes me that it would be very interesting to try the first and third approaches,

using the Munsell tags, on the white cube. The second approach he mentions, placing the lightest light and darkest dark first, is a practical way of compressing the tones, since you'll

be working from both ends to the middle. More like what I've done here with the aid of the Munsell value tags. I can feel two more white cube paintings coming on.

I'm pretty sure that the approach of finding the full range of Munsell steps in the subject,

locating values and then compressing the range is effective. I've also got a strong feeling it's possible to do this by eye, maybe through experience, sheer talent, or both, but without the

safety net of the Munsell tags. For me though, for now, this is a way to practice and to develop this faculty of judging tones. I'm also hoping that a close study of tone will help me to understand better how light works in nature, and how better to translate it to a picture.

Having a good command of that, and putting it in the service of the creation of something with a bit more feeling than a painting of grey cubes, is the eventual goal.

Which ever way you look at it, there's no doubt that you can't hit the entire range of tones in

nature within the range of paint. I didn't even have a wide enough range to hit all the values of a white cube on a grey cloth. So some kind of transformation has to be done to paint a representational picture of nature. That thought struck me some time ago, but it's nice to

have my little Munsell tags bear it out.

More Munsell Tone Studies

The cubes keep coming. I've now answered one or two questions I've had for a while about

tone, and raised many more. There have been moments over the last few days at the easel when I've felt that this subject - translating light into paint - is too difficult to grasp. But like

Magnus Magnusson, I've started so I'll finish.

The first and most important point I need to make today is that I've realised that I'd got my Munsell scale wrong in the last couple of posts. I thought true black was value 1 in Munsell. It isn't, it's 0. Ivory black oil paint, which I thought was 1.5, is actually 0.5. Of course that

throws out all the sums I've been doing so far to work out how to compress the tonal range but keep the ratios between the tones the same.

Here's my Munsell neutral palette as it stands now.

The Munsell scale goes from 0 (black) to 10 (white). That makes eleven tones, with ten steps in between.

In paint, we can't get black, it's more like 0.5. We

can't get a true white either, so it's nine-point-something. What the point-something is I'm not

entirely sure. Graydon Parrish, perhaps the most notable exponent of the use of Munsell in painting, believes that titanium white can get up to a 9.75. My

white tag looks lower than that, but I'm not going to disagree. He's quite possibly spent more time with

Munsell than any other living painter, has evolved an approach to colour based on it, and is a modern day Apelles as far as I'm concerned. Look him up on

Google if you want to see what he can do with brushes and paint. I have Graydon to thank for

starting me on these exercises.

Back to the palette, and reading from left to right on the palette above, we have 9.?, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Adding pure ivory black at the end would give me another tag at 0.5. Now

we've got the palette straight, lets get onto the pictures.

In the last post was a painting of three cubes, one white, one a value 5 (mid grey) and one black. The point of that exercise was to figure out how many Munsell steps I had in my

subject, and then compress the ratios down to the range I have available in my paint. I could try to do that by eye, but I'm doing it mathematically in order to make sure I get it right. I

should get the answers I need visually from the resulting paintings.

The first post in this series describes how I arrive at the number of Munsell steps I can see in my subject, by holding up two tags over adjacent areas of tone and counting the steps

between them. Since I'd done my sums wrong in the first stab at the three cubes exercise, I thought it would be wise to do another with the numbers for the values more accurately worked out. This picture shows the first version and second, corrected version below it:

The most noticeable difference is that the cast shadows and the shadow plane of the white cube are

significantly lighter in the second version.

Another change here is that I used a

Munsell 9 for the light plane of the white cube, leaving myself a bit of headroom on my lights. I did this so

that I could add the highlight down the top edge of the light plane of the

white cube. It's there. I can see it, so I want to paint it. The light and half tone planes of the value 5 and black

cube have also got a little lighter. Which do you think is the most

convincing?

The second version was done when I was still working under the misconception that black was 1.5, so, of course, I'm going to have to do this particular exercise again. However, I do think that the second version is more convincing than the first. Overall, I'd say that the light

appears more diffuse, less strong than it does in the first one. But I also think that each cube works more convincingly as a part of the whole, the white cube in particular.

Perhaps I'll get it better still when I come to do a version in which I finally get the sums right.

For this version, my Munsell tags told me that I had thirteen steps in the subject from my lightest light to my darkest dark, so I compressed each relationship by 0.76. I rounded the figures up or down for the painting though, my eye isn't nearly sensitive enough to perceive

and correctly mix a difference of a tenth of a step. The final stage of the exercise is always some adjustment by eye, so the ratios are never exact in any case.

One final point about the second version. In "Creative Illustration", Loomis points out that in

order to create a consistent feeling of light in a painting, the relationships between the tones of the light and shadow planes should be consistent across all the objects. At least, that's the

way I read it. So the difference between a light plane and a shadow plane would be, say, five steps, whether the given object was a light or a dark colour. I was careful to stick to that rule in the second version here, as far as I could. That may have helped the light to feel more

consistent across the three cubes.

But now I come to one of the questions that this practice has raised. My Munsell chips tell me that the ratios of light to dark are not the same across my three cubes. I've checked time

and again over the last few days, on my white, my value 5 and my black cube. Every time I get the same result. On the white cube, there are 7 steps between the light plane and the

shadow plane. On the value 5 cube, there are 6 steps. On the black cube, there are 5.

Does this mean that we perceive more tonal contrast in lighter objects? Does it mean that Loomis is wrong? I find that hard to believe, but I must believe the evidence of my eyes. The

only way for me to be sure about this is to do some exercises designed to investigate it further.

And that, I think, is the greatest benefit of this method of practice. The cubes and the Munsell tags can be used to pin these things down, to get answers to questions of tone through

purely empirical means. What this really comes down to is a method that can be used to investigate how light behaves when it hits a form. Although the tags, cubes, value steps and

maths may seem unduly technical to some people, what painter wouldn't benefit from a greater understanding of light? Light is what we paint. Without it, there's nothing to paint at all.

Back to the excercises. After the second three cubes exercise came two small paintings of the

white cube. You might recall me quoting Harold Speed in the last post, where he described two approaches to handling tone. In the first, you work down from the lights, matching the

steps in tone as accurately as you can, until you run out of available range. The second approach is the opposite, working up from the darks, whilst keeping the steps in tone

perceptually accurate. This method means running out of room at the top end of the scale. In both cases, the range is compressed at one end, the darks or the lights.

Here are the results. The first painting at the top is working

down from the lights, keeping the steps in tone perceptually accurate. My Munsell tags should be letting me get these steps much more accurate than I could get them simply by

looking. I've hit black (0.5) for my cast shadow, so it appears darker in the painting than it appeared to my eye.

But the light plane of the cube fairly shines out. The effect is one of sharply focused, directional light. According to Harold, this is how Rembrandt would paint a white cube. Except

perhaps that he would do a better job of it.

The second cube is painted up from the darks, so I started at a value 2 for the cast shadow. The compression is more obvious here, with the half tone and shadow planes of the cube, together with the background, coming out much lighter. Although the form seems less

defined to me in this version, there appears to be a stronger overall feeling of light, as if the cube is bathed in diffused light. This is Turner's cube, and is consistent with what Harold says

about it being a way to fill the painting with light. I think he's right.

This was a very interesting exercise, it showed me that tone relationships can be manipulated for effect. As long as the form isn't completely lost, it's entirely up to the painter what feeling of light he or she wants to convey, and a good command of tonal balance should mean the

ability to do that as and when the painting requires it. I plan to get myself down to the National Gallery and see what I can learn there. The three cubes exercise will also be done

again, using these two approaches. That will make the compression of the two ends of the scale much more obvious and the effect that much more dramatic.

The next stage was to introduce a sphere. To be

quite honest, I was getting a bit tired of painting cubes. Another aspect of this practice is to learn how to model form more convincingly. Cubes are

easy. Spheres are hard.

It was during the planning of this painting that I first noticed the wider range of tones on the white

cube. At one point, I measured it and got eight steps, so the process is far from infallible in my hands. But thereafter I consistently got 7 steps. 6

steps for the grey cube, 5 for the black one.

The values for this painting were worked out more carefully again, and I think are getting

closer to an accurate, even compression. The amusing thing about this sketch is that it took me over six hours to plan out the values of the tones and about an hour to paint it.

Another question was raised that day when the sun came out a few times, shining directly into the window. From reading Loomis, I have the impression that tonal contrast is stronger

in direct sunlight than it is in diffuse, overcast light. Again, my cubes and my Munsell tags disagreed. I'll have to test this a lot more too, particularly since my eyes tell me that Loomis

is right. But my eyes have told me plenty of things that my tags have disproved, I know now how easily my eyes can be fooled when it comes to judging tonal relationships.

After all that working out of tones, I felt the need

to just paint something. With my value 5 cube, I can hit all the tones perfectly well, no need to compress or sacrifice anything. I can paint the

tonal balance exactly as I see it. This little sketch was done with the idea that I wanted to get as

close to what I saw as I could, to get some kind of visual truth.

Some time ago, Harold Speed taught me that quality of line is as important as tone in

showing form. I've tried to work the line here, trying to be lead as much as possible by what

my eyes told me. I've included the Munsell values on the right. Six steps between the light

and the dark, no matter how many times I measured it. Six in direct sunlight, too.

Cubes are easy. Spheres are hard. But the

practice with the value 5 cube helped me paint this value 5 sphere.

Rather than thinking about the surface of the

sphere as a whole (and panicking) I tried to split it into the shadow, half-tone and light planes. The highlight is extra to those. Having just painted the

cube, I knew exactly what values to use for the sphere, so there shouldn't be much more to do

than lay them down in the right places, then blend a little between them. The reality was a protracted period of sweating and swearing whilst I tried to

get it look right.

I think the cube sketch is more effective than the sphere, so I'll have to paint some more

spheres. But tonally speaking, both paintings looked very close to what I saw. Encouraged by

what I'd learned so far and by these last two sketches, I wanted to have a go at something

real.

This pear fit the bill since the colour is low chroma, and the value is close to my v5 cube and sphere,

maybe half a step above. So I was already in the ball park with the values and had modelled a sphere, how hard could a pear be?

Well, harder than the sphere. That's all I'm saying.

One part of the form principle which I very much agree with is that texture applies only to areas in the light, the light plane and the half tone. Shadows are without detail. Reflected light does have an influence on the modelling of shadow planes and cast shadows though.

Since I'm working in a shadow box lined with dark grey cloth to cut out reflected light, the sphere and pear are the first time I've really had to deal with reflected light in these

exercises. It reflects up from the v5.5 cloth onto the curved edges in shadow. One of the many epiphanies I've had over the last few days is that I've been consistently painting reflected light too light, weakening the form and the feeling of light. I think it's about right on

this pear. I would have loved to do this pear using the 'lights down' and 'darks up' approaches too, but unfortunately I ran out of daylight and had to stop. Those sketches will

have to wait for another day.

Having been blessed with a series of overcast days last week (which means no direct sunlight

coming through the window in the afternoon) I've had the opportunity to move on somewhat

with the tone studies.

For this batch I've been adding the odd real object to supplement the cubes and spheres. It's been illuminating.

One of the problems I'll have when I come to relate this practice with cubes to real world

paintings will be correctly judging the tones, specifically the local value, of real world objects. So I've started adding them now.

Having judged this lemon to be a local value of 7

(ish), I painted it along with my cube and sphere. I think this was a good exercise.

The cube becomes a cipher for the tonal balance of the lemon, showing the values in clearly

defined planes. The sphere gives an opportunity to play with modelling of soft edges and

some reflected light. When it comes to painting the object, the lemon in this case, it's largely

a case of refining the cube and sphere.

It strikes me that this is conceptually very like a Bargue approach, but with tone. The cube is

the first tone schematic and the sphere a further refinement before moving on to the final

piece. Each stage is a preparation for the next. When I get to the lemon, I don't have to think

about what values I need, since I've already worked them out on the cube. The numbered

Munsell neutral palette lets me pick up what I need and get right into painting, my colours (or

tones) are mixed and ready. All I have to think about is the modelling and handling of the

paint.

Here's another in the same vein. This time I

judged the value of the green pepper to be a 4.

This is interesting to me. Although I've only been working on these studies for a short time, I'm

beginning to home in quickly on tonal mistakes in my older paintings. A little over a year ago I painted a red pepper.

I thought that was one of the better sketches at

the time, but looking at it now I'm struck by the many tonal mistakes. I see how light I've done the

shadow plane on the skin of the pepper. It's way too light, especially in comparison with the

shadows around the stalk.

The shadow plane of the stalk itself is also much too dark, completely out of relationship with the light and shadow planes of the wooden shelf the pepper is sitting on. Which are also

wrong.

In this tone study, I can't differentiate between the shadow plane of the pepper and the shadows around the stalk. This new pepper, although it's grey, has more life and more physicality to me than the red one of April last year. I'm considerably encouraged by that. I'll

be doing some more of these.

Next up is a simple study of spheres. These are values 8, 5 and 3. Although I know that there's

three Munsell steps between each, it looks more like two here. But I could add a white or a black

sphere to this study without upsetting the balance of the tones, I have enough of my range left I

think.

It was beginning to sink in at this point how important the relationship between the shadow plane of an object and it's cast shadow is. The more of these studies I do, the more I begin to see how important the values of the shadow planes as a whole are. I've been spending most

of my energy on the lights up until now. But there seems to be a pattern developing in these studies, which is echoed by the way I build up each study:

The first thing to go in is the overall value of the cloth. Then the cast shadows of the objects.

At this point, the balance of tones, the light environment of the painting, is established. Everything that comes after this point will need to be judged in relation to these two main

values.

The next stage is to add the shadow planes of the objects. The value of the shadow plane in relation to the cast shadow defines whether the object is lighter or darker than the cloth. If

the shadow plane of the object is lighter than the cast shadow, I know that the local value of the object is lighter than that of the cloth. If darker, I know the local value of the object is

darker.

Now it remains only to add the light and half tone planes. As long as they fit with the existing relationships, a convincing impression of light should come into the picture. The painting can

still be very crude at this point, just rough, hard edged blocks of tone, but if the relationships hold water then the light will work. I must do some studies to play with this, someone remind

me when I'm next at the easel.

I'm fond of painting silver. This study was a test to see if what I'd learned

so far about tonal relationships in a painting would translate to something tonally more difficult like this.

The complication with very reflective

objects is two-fold I think. Firstly, the highlights reflect more light than the

light plane of a white cube, so they're even further out of the available range of paint on a flat plane.

Secondly, the shadow planes tend to reflect whatever is around them,

throwing off the value.

But everything still has to relate to that basic relationship of the main background value and

the cast shadow. This study convinced me even more that it's the shadow planes and the

background that really matter, more than the lights perhaps. I ignored the limitations of the

paint for once, and just tried to get the relationships of the shadow planes right, leaving the

lights to take care of themselves. And oddly enough they did. Somehow my eye is tricked into

seeing the highlight on the silver as lighter than it really is. Valuable lesson learned. Coming

soon: silver cup and white sphere.

This last study is of my white, value 5 and black

spheres. I had the relationships of the shadow planes to the cast shadows uppermost in my mind with this one.

For the white sphere, I've essentially ignored the

fact that I can't match the lightest light, and made sure that the shadow plane is sufficiently lighter

than the cast shadow.

For the middle one, the value 5 sphere, the value of the shadow plane and the cast shadow are almost the same. The shadow plane of the black sphere is darker than the cast shadow.

That doesn't come out so well in this photo though.

Although I know that there's much more to learn here, and many more studies to be done, I have the distinct impression that I've learned something very useful through this batch. The

shadows are as important as the lights in defining the local value of an object.

Now the starters are out of the way, it's time for the main course.

The original plan with these cubes and spheres was to paint each one in four different lighting conditions. Form light, the first, is three quarters in light, rim light is the opposite, three

quarters in shadow. The other two are back light, with all the object in shadow, and front light, with no shadows. Time will tell whether or not I get the whole lot done. I'm half way

through the first batch now, here they are. Apologies for the slightly fuzzy pictures.

The first one, the white sphere. This is actually a nine-point-something in Munsell terms. This

sphere seems to have darkened a little as the paint dried, it's only a little above a 9 now. All the

same, I used white for the light planes, meaning there's no room left for highlights. It's the opposite of the way I'd usually paint something

white.

I'm finding that moving down in single Munsell steps with these studies is not all that easy. I'm

keeping the background fairly constant at around 7, and the cast shadows fairly constant at around 3. I should be able to hold those all the way down

to the black cube and sphere.

Although I know that in reality, there's a whole step in Munsell terms between each of these cubes

and shperes, I can't hit that full range with paint. So I need to compress as I go down, trying to

move down by less than a whole step each time. Some of these were done on different days though, and the light was a bit different. I'm not

convinced that makes a difference to the relationships though.

About this point I started changing the way I paint

these studies.

I'm not using any medium for a change, just neat paint as it comes out of the tube. The current

order is background first, scrubbed in thin with a bright.

Next comes the cast shadow, painted opaquely, but as thin and even as possible, with no work on

the edges yet

. Next comes the shadow planes of the cube and sphere, also thin and even. At that point, the main relationships are established, so most of the softening of the edges of the shadows

can be done then. I'm still trying to keep the shadows as even and featureless as I can.

Working in a shadow box lined with dark cloth, I have little or no reflected light on the cubes. It appears to me that some reflected light from the cloth bounces up to the underside of the

spheres, but that comes in at the end. I'm thinking about the form principle as I do this, trying to deal only with the big shapes. Of course, there's not a lot of detail on a cube and

sphere in the first place.

The light planes I've started putting in with thick impasto, using the brush lke a trowel. As well as making it possible to build up the edges and get sharp edges where they're

warranted, it gives the light planes a physicality that doesn't come across in a photo. It makes the shadows look softer and and more convincing I think. This goes back to something

I read about Howard Pyle's teaching in "Creative Illustration". Texture belongs to the light, not to the shadow. So I'm doing the minimum of modelling and blending on the light planes, letting the texture of the paint do most of the work for me.

I should admit that I'm not worrying about the accuracy of the drawing or the modelling very much. The tones should be enough to carry it, if

the relationships are right. It's interesting, too, to see how little you can get away with.

These studies are taking me back to the Harold

Speed elementary tone exercise, and are built up in much the same way

. In may ways, I'm relearning what I learned about the compression of tones in that exercise

and the red and blue still life exercises. In reality, the cast shadows are darker than I'm

painting them here. I need to leave some room in the darks for when I get to the value 3, 2

and 1 cubes. That also means pushing up the tones of the shadow planes of the cubes and

spheres a touch. In short, I'm not painting what I see, I'm painting what I know I can hit with

paint

So for these studies, I'm not using my tags at all. Although I could work them all out with the

tags, as I was at the beginning of these studies, I'd struggle then if I tried to paint a dark and

light object together in a painting. I think that this is a probably a better real world solution.

With the value five cube I've hit the same value in

the shadow plane and the cast shadow. This cube and sphere are (about) the same local value as

the cloth. That should be about right. For the last four of this batch, the objects will be a darker tone than the cloth.

That means I've got to fit four steps in between 3

(the cast shadow) and 0.5 (the black that I'll be using for the shadow plane of the black cube).

With the first batch of ten studies of the objects in form light, I'm a quarter of the way

through. Although I have a nagging feeling that I should have spent more time trying to get the relationships between the tones exactly right, and that I should have spent more time

observing the spheres more carefully, I do think I've gained a lot from this exercise. Perhaps the strongest lesson I've taken from it is the importance of the relationship between the shadow plane of an object and it's cast shadow. These two can define the difference in local

value between the object and the surface it's sitting on, and must work correctly with the relationships between the light planes.

I've started to apply paint differently as this series has progressed. I'm not using any medium

now, just paint straight from the tube, and working on canvas panels. The backgrounds and shadow areas are laid in as thinly and evenly as possible. Anything goes in the lights. In some of these studies the paint has been piled onto the light planes pretty thickly. It's

probably not a good thing, but it's fun and it makes them stand out. It almost feels like sculpting the plane out of paint.

Coffee Pot and Lemon - Tone Studies Part Six

Having had quite enough of cubes and spheres after the last ten studies I dragged out my old

coffee pot and a lemon for a few more. This coffee pot has already featured a few times in

the series of tonal still life drawings. It's a good subject for these studies because it presents

me with the full range from white across most of it's surface to black on the handle and lid. I

have to do some drastic compression to paint it.

This was the first study of a series of

six. Originally, there was only going to be this one, but it took me six goes to get what I wanted. It's often

that way in painting land I find.

This one is a bit on the large side for me at 12 X 16 inches. It's on a fine

linen canvas panel made from 12m MDF. After sealing the panel with PVA, the linen is attached with rabbit

skin glue. As with most of the panels I'm using at the moment, this one

has been given an oil ground, I think

Michael Harding's foundation white oil primer for this one. It takes forever to dry, but the surface is beautiful to work on. I think part of the reason I've stopped using mediums is that the surfaces of these panels give such nice handling, they've become unnecessary. But never

say never.

I was less than happy with this one. It started ok, but lost something in the finishing stages, which went on forever. Which is probably why I'm less than happy with it. I have a feeling

that there's something wrong with the tonal relationships somewhere.

Here's the set up in the (ahem) studio.

It couldn't be simpler. There's a

window which goes down to within two feet of the floor and desperately

needs a clean directly to the left. It looks like I stood up to paint this one,

but I'm often sitting too. It doesn't seem to make a blind bit of difference which, although people will argue

over it. It's more important to stay as far back from the easel as you can

and still be able to touch it with a brush as far as I'm concerned.

The light looks quite blue in this shot, which probably means it was taken early in the

morning on a fine day. Come two in the afternoon I have to stop on sunny days, since I get

direct sunlight through the window. Although lately I've been wondering about trying paint

the effect of direct sunlight.

This I think was the fifth. The cubes represent

the white and black areas of the pot, and are a key to the values.

I think it was around this point that it started to occur to me that I could push the tonal balance

up into the light end of the scale or down into the darks, expand (as far as paint will allow) or

compress it. All that really mattered was that the ratios between the tones were preserved.

I know that might sound a bit, well, dull. And I

know I've said it before, but through this series of coffee pot studies I've begun to understand it on more than just an intellectual level. There's

something physical about putting down the right tone. If the relationship to what's already there

is right, it can feel almost like dragging light across form. I've had a couple of mildly odd experiences whilst doing these studies. Mostly

it's just been sweat though, but of the most enjoyable kind.

For the sixth and last study I added a lemon. It

could almost be a proper painting if it had some colour in it.

I've taken some liberties with the values in this

one, but always I've tried to keep the relationships true. The cast shadows must be darker than the shadow planes of the pot and

the lemon. I seemed to have complete freedom with the value of the background. It could have

gone much darker than this and still worked I think. But the feeling would have been different.

I've also tried to keep up most in my mind, at any given time, the angle of the plane I'm

painting to the light. I've tried, as far as I can, to stick to four main values for each object: The

light plane, the half tone, the shadow plane and the cast shadow.

This is the last one because I got what I was after on this one, a stronger feeling of light. At least, I think I did. The main difference between this one and the first one is that the shadow

plane of the coffee pot is darker in this one, so keeping the relationships constant means the other shadow planes getting darker too. More contrast creates a stronger, more focused and

more directional effect to the light. Less contrast gives a feeling of more diffuse, all over light.

I'm starting to get a glimpse of the possibilities of tone, of how varying the balance can change the feel of the light. I'm moving further away from what I see all the time, but at the

same time closer. Although I'm more free with the tones in the picture, to the extent that I don't try to match what I see, I'm trying to observe more accurately how the light behaves,

and to replicate it as far as I'm able. I want to hit the relationships of any given tone to all the others in the picture as close as I can.

The return of colour (but just a bit...)

Some days you just don't know what's going to happen. Today was the day I broke my colour fast

with a tube of cadmium yellow. And some alizarin, and a bit of burnt sienna.

This study was really a test. I've struggled with painting a lemon on a white cloth before, near the

beginning when I'd just started painting again, about a year and a half ago now. The first one

didn't even get finished. The second one was little better. I haven't forgotten the trials that lemon put me through, so this study was a sanity check.

I wanted to know, in fact I needed to know, whether or not I could do a better job of it now.

Here's the lemon a couple of hours into the

morning, blocked in as I would a neutral study. The colour was painted into the grey, which made

it tough to bring it up as much as I wanted to in places.

This is just a simple little study, and there are mistakes in it that I can see now, but for me it

bears out what I've learned about tone through the last few weeks of neutral studies.

There are many little things, but in broad general sweeps I'd say that I've learned three main lessons: Firstly, it's the relationships that matter, not the degree of contrast, and all tones in a painting relate to all the others. Secondly, the value of a plane shows it's angle to the light.

Getting the right value makes the plane read correctly and creates form. Thirdly, objects can be simplified down to four main tones, just like a cube. If the light plane, half tone, shadow plane and cast shadow are in the right relationship to each other, then form will appear.

I'm wrapping up this post today with a quote from 'Creative Illustration' by Andrew Loomis:

A certain amount of manipulation of values is possible when we know what we are doing. Our purpose is not always to catch the effect as it is, but rather the most dramatic effect possible.

It is permissible to do anything you wish in paint. Nobody stops you. One can only like or dislike

what you do. If you base your pictures on big basic truths and understanding you will do good

ones. If you sit and putter with effects, allowing yourself to guess rather than going out to find

the truths you want, you will do bad ones.

By painting grey pictures for three weeks, I've tried to go out and find some truths about tone. I do think I've found one or two. Now, although the tone studies will continue, it's time to get the colours out again and paint some stuff. As my painter friend Marsha said to me in

an email recently, "It's all in the doing". Never a truer word said.

Harold Speed - Elementary Tone Exercise

This painting is part of a two part tonal exercise in painting the same subject twice, once in blue, with a wide tonal range, and

once in red with a much narrower range. The post linked there deals with that part of the

exercise in more depth.

What I want to cover here is the method I used to build up the paintings, which I got

from a book by Harold Speed called "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials". I won't go too much into the book itself here, (I plan

to review it when I have the time), except to say that it's the best book I've found so far

about oil painting, it does exactly what it says on the tin, and can be had from Amazon for a paltry Ł6. Don't believe the reviewer who

trashed the book, he/she plainly hasn't the first idea. For the serious student of the

philosophy and practice of oil painting, this book is a real gem.

Back to the painting. The good Mr. Speed presents a detailed account of what he calls an elementary tone exercise in his chapter on the practical aspects of learning to paint with oils.

I've followed his instructions to the letter here, except of course that I've used cadmium red and white, were he recommends using raw umber and white, something I intend to do for

future monochromes.

First, a word about the support. I've used a 6mm thick MDF panel which has had two coats of Robersons Acrylic Gesso primer, sanding after each coat, and a mix of ultramarine and burnt sienna alkyd paint and turps rubbed on with a rag to give a light grey ground, something like

a Rubens panel, but with quick, cheap modern materials. The brush strokes from the gesso get accentuated by the rubbed in grey tone, giving a nice lively ground to paint on. Of course,

canvas or whatever else you want to use would do just as well for this exercise. Using a toned ground makes it much easier to judge the tones as they go onto the painting.

First stage is to lay out the drawing roughly, with charcoal. Unnecessary if you have a superb

eye, but I don't. I used a rough and ready sight-size approach to drawing out, like with the Bargue drawing technique, only quicker and less accurate. This exercise is about tonal relationships, not accurate drawing.

Before starting to paint, both the white (I've used flake white) and the raw umber (or

cadmium red in this case) are thinned down with a 50/50 mix of turps and linseed oil. This is a time honoured medium, which I know a lot of painters use. Strange that, even though I've

gone as far as cooking my own maroger and making my own sun bleached linseed oil, I've never tried painting with this basic medium. The paint is thinned down to a consistency which allows it to flow well, but still covers solidly and opaquely. Mine was about the consistency of

butter left out on a warm day. I used Robersons pure gum turpentine and cold pressed linseed oil.

Step one - mark the darkest and lightest points

First thing to do is pick the darkest point on your subject, and put a corresponding dark note on your painting. Then find the lightest light, and match that. In the case of this cast, it was

pure the white on the highlights. That gives you your tonal range, and every other tone will be judged in relation to these. Well, this makes perfect sense to me, since it's exactly the

approach I've been using on my series of 100 still life drawings.

Harold (we're on first name terms now), makes a point of recommending that you relate tones to your darkest, not your lightest tone. This is because relating tones to the highlights

will make them appear too dark in comparison to the white, and will result in errors. I think he's got a good point there.

Step two - fill in the background

Step three - fill in the base and main shadows

Once the two extremes of tone are stated, it's time to fill in the background. This should be done as

evenly as possible. Harold says that you should learn to put down flat,

even paint before you start messing around with flashy textural effects.

Make sure the paint doesn't go on so thick that you get ridges up against the edges of your subject, since this

will work against the three dimensional effect when you paint

the main forms. A loose edge which cuts slightly into the form is best.

Well I guess this will only be relevant

if you're painting a cast, like I am here, and like Harold uses for his exercise. I can see no good reason

why you can't use something else though, as long as it's monochrome.

He advises paying particular attention to the edges here. Although the tone blocks are put in with flat tone, the edges should be stated as carefully

and accurately as possible, with particular attention to where they are

sharp and where they soften and disappear. To be honest, I've rushed

mine a bit here, but you get the idea. The edges of shadows soften considerably the further away they

get from the form that casts them.

Step four - lay in the main shadow

blocks

Step five - put in the main light block

These are also done with a flat, even

tone. Simplifying the main shadow blocks and deciding where to end them is no easy task, and comes with

practice. My practice with the Bargue drawings and with the tonal still life

drawings has helped me here. To be fair, it's also much easier to do this with a plain white cast. I find trying

to do this on a portrait drawing much more difficult. Again, attention should be given to the edges, particularly where they meet the background. Since the

edges of my main tonal block here against the background are on the

shadow side, I've softened them somewhat. When I get to putting the light tone shape in, I'll be wanting a

hard edge up against the background on the left of the cast.

At this stage, you have your surface covered, and can begin to judge

more carefully the relationships of your tones, one to another. In this picture, I've already darkened the

surface the cast is sitting on, and lightened the background. The

difference between them was too great, and the light block wasn't standing out enough. This stage took

probably the longest of any part of the painting, making small

adjustments to the tone blocks and trying to get the relationships between them as close as I can to

what I see.

It's important to note that I'm talking about the relationships between them, or the ratios here. I'm not matching what I see, because my black is red, (I thought everyone knew that red is the new black), and has a mid tone. So I'm trying to make sure that the light block reads as light, which means bringing down the surrounding tones. But I also have to make

sure that the base still reads as black, as far as I can, so that means bringing them back up. Lots of push and pull. This stage should be slightly less complex on a raw umber

monochrome, since the darkest tone will be almost black anyway.

But this is simply a more extreme form of what we have to deal with in painting anyway, that our tonal range is limited, particularly, I think, at the light end of the scale. Because of that, I

was careful not to throw away pure white on my light block here, I had to leave some 'headroom' for highlights, which will be pure white.

Step six - work the edges

As in the previous stages, the task

now is to concentrate on the edges where the tonal blocks meet, making them softer where there are smooth

transitions, (indicating rounded transitions between planes), and

harder where there is a sharp edge.

Most of the edges here are smooth, at least almost all the internal ones are. The only really sharp edge is

down the left of the cast against the background. But the bottom of the

leg, on the left, has a sharp edge, and so does the broken plane of the

left arm. Likewise the right edge of the neck where a 90 degree change in plane direction creates a sharp

edge.

Although I've been looking at edges more in my still life drawings, I've never concentrated on them to this extent. Because of that, I've never quite realised before how important they are

in describing form. Now I think that they are at least as important as tone in creating a convincing three dimensional illusion.

Harold makes the point that the edges should be dealt with first, before any internal

modelling is attempted. The reason for this is that when you only have the large tonal blocks established, there's nothing in the way of the free movement of your brush. You can make confident, definite marks, and if you're really good, bring real sparkle to the painting at this

point. Unfortunately I'm not, and just spent lots of time fiddling obsessively. But when I get better at handling a brush, this should be very valuable. Harold also goes to some length to

advise on how the brush should be held. Not near the tip, like a pen, that will reduce you to small, fiddly movements. Holding the brush as far down the handle as you can allows for grand, confident sweeps. Unless you have wobbly old arms like me, in which case you just

get paint everywhere, and have to wipe it off again.

But he's right. Every now and again on this painting, I managed to put in a sweep which worked, or at least came close. The effect is very different than fiddling and diddling with

little tiny movements, and has two great advantages: Firstly, the more you diddle about with your paint, the more it breaks down and loses the strength of it's colour. Try it, get a bright

colour, and diddle about with it ceaselessly for half an hour on a bit of canvas, work the living daylights out of it. Then get some fresh from the tube, and put it down with one stroke, right next to it. Very illuminating. Secondly, once you learn to control your brush like this, you will

be able to make more expressive sweeps. That has to be a good thing. Painting, as we all know now, is not just about copying what you see, right?

Step seven - final modelling and finishing

The last stage, of course, is putting in the finer modelling and highlights, which I got too involved with to remember to take any progress shots of. But that stage went a lot quicker for having laid down a solid foundation with this organised approach to building up the

painting. I must be honest, I'm a bit surprised that this painting came of the end of my brush.

One of the strengths of this approach, I think, is that it forces you to work from the general to the specific, just like a Bargue drawing. This seems to me to be such a universally useful

approach that I'm beginning to think that it's a basic tenet of producing good representational work. You sometimes see people who work gradually down a picture, completely finishing

each part before they move onto the next. Now I don't want to criticise other people's working methods, but it seems to me that it's very easy to lose the 'big picture' working like

this, and, if I'm honest, I think the overall strength of the work I've seen done like this suffers. There's nothing wrong with detail, but it must work within the entire picture, or it's just fiddling for fiddling's sake.

Having got so much from this painting and this approach, I'm now planning a series of monochrome still life paintings, the point of which will be to practice and internalise what I've learned here. Realising how something works is just the first initial stage. Then, it has to be

practiced and practiced until it becomes second nature, until it happens without thinking. It needs to be internalised to the point of unconscious competence.

What I've taken from this exercise is, firstly, a way of building up a painting which allows me

to concentrate on the main tone masses without getting lost in detail too soon, and secondly, the full importance of edges. These are the two points I'll be looking to internalise over the next series of paintings. I have to say, I'm quite excited.

The Four Phases of Learning

Ordinarily, I'm skeptical of self development books and the like. I'm skeptical of any approach

which promises to be a "magic bullet" for learning any skill. There are no short cuts, especially when it comes to representational drawing and painting. My experience of returning to drawing and painting after a ten year gap has taught me that. These days, any

time anyone tries to tell me different, my bullshit detector goes off the scale.

Since I returned to painting, I've sampled one or two books which promise to have found a new approach to either the learning or the practice of drawing and painting. I won't deny it,

I've been seduced for a time myself, at least in the early stages. These books are popular because everyone would like to be able to short cut their way to competence, like Neo

learning Kung Fu in The Matrix by having it digitally implanted into his brain. Wouldn't it be nice of you could go to sleep with a tape playing in the background, and wake up the next day able to paint like Rembrandt? It isn't going to happen.

But some time ago, my advanced motorcycle riding instructor introduced me a concept of

learning which splits the learning process into four phases, which I do believe has some relevance. Partly because it stresses the importance of practice, and I'm all about practice.

It's the only way to learn anything, no exceptions.

These are the four phases of learning which this model postulates:

Unconscious incompetence You're unaware that there is a skill to be learned, and that you don't have mastery of it.

Conscious incompetence You're aware that there is a skill to be learned, and that you currently don't have mastery of it. You know just how bad you are and have some idea of how far you've got to go.

Conscious competence Through practice, you've become competent at the skill, but you have to think about it to make it happen.

Unconscious competence You've practiced so much that your competence has become unconscious, you can do

it automatically without having to think about it. You've completely internalised said skill.

I do think that there's some mileage in applying this to representational drawing and

painting. Other approaches, abstract or conceptual art say, I'm not so sure, but I do think that the lack of a benchmark for quality in these areas promotes the mistaken belief that you

can move straight to stage four without having to bother actually learning anything, thus the (in my view) impoverished nature of much of this kind of work. A lot of people who do this

work and believe themselves to be at stage four are actually languishing at stage one. Hmm. I've just convinced myself that it does apply, apparently.

Regardless, I want to paint stuff that looks like the stuff it is meant to look like. I would put myself somewhere between stage two and stage three, currently. Closer to stage two. I know

I'm not very good, but I'm practicing in order to achieve stage three.

There's certainly a belief among many people that art 'just happens,' you either have it or you don't. I've never subscribed to this view. Yes, there's such a thing as aptitude, no

thinking person would deny that, but it's perfectly possible, (again, in my view,) for someone with perhaps less aptitude to be better than someone who is more 'gifted,' through hard work and practice. If my old school teachers are to be believed, I've always had some level of

aptitude for drawing and painting, but I've also been very lazy in the past, and haven't developed it.

Finding your level

Drawing and painting is a complex business which demands the mastery of many skills. As far as I'm concerned, the first and most important skill is seeing. I believe that it takes practice in order to see something properly, to become consciously aware of all the nuances of tone

and colour, of the actual shape of the object. We need to take time to override our usual way of seeing the world symbolically. We need to get from thinking, "Lemon: Yellow, oval" to thinking, "This width, this height, this angle formed by the line from the point at the right up

to the top. Small bright bit this shape, this intensity. Dark shape there." In short, what does it really look like. We have to do this before we even get to thinking about how we're going to

represent that on paper or canvas.

I try to devote more time to this skill than to any other. Of course there are many other skills demanded by representational work: the motor skills required to make a line go where you

want it to go, skill at handling various materials, balancing compositions, etc.

Becoming competent at drawing and painting requires a certain level of mastery of all these skills. When I returned to painting about ten months ago now, it became immediately obvious to me that, through prolonged disuse, many of my skills had atrophied. Looking back over the

last ten months, I see it now as a period of finding my level with all these skills, of gradually realising exactly how far I've got to go. Of reaching the stage of conscious incompetence.

Although I realised pretty quickly that my work left a lot to be desired, I still didn't

immediately find a good spot to start from, it's taken me some time to find my level. Always I've been trying to reach too far. I've repeatedly tried to do work which I really wasn't

capable of yet, and have repeatedly proved to myself how much I had to learn by repeatedly falling flat on my face. Although I've told myself many times over the last few months that I shouldn't be trying to produce finished work, that I should be just practicing, practicing, and

not worrying about the standard of what I produce, I've largely ignored my own advice despite myself. I've quite patently been trying to do work which I hadn't the necessary skills

to do well, and this has meant a lot of heartache.

Take my paintings. Right from the off, I started painting. It's now obvious to me that I shouldn't have touched a brush before I'd worked on my drawing skills for a while, and before

I'd learned to see a bit better. I've spent a lot of time on painting techniques when I couldn't even get an object the right shape, never mind the right colour or tone.

What's really brought this home to me is my current series of 100 still life drawings. I've

found my level with these drawings. This series has shown me that what I should have done is started with drawing. And I should have started only with line. When I was reasonably

competent at getting things the right shape, I should have moved on to tone. At some point, which I've yet to reach, I will hopefully attain a reasonable mastery of tone. Then, and only then, I should think about applying what I've learned in a new medium which will require the

assimilation of more new skills: paint.

Learning the Lessons

So I've reached a decision. I'm going to give up painting for a while. I don't want to do it, but I think that if I do, I'll progress more quickly and in a more natural way than if I keep

steaming ahead as I've been doing. It'll also be a much less frustrating experience.

My new series of still life drawings have helped me to see my paintings with new eyes. In all of them, I can now see errors in the tonal balance which are working against the feeling of

light. Despite my initial obsession with matching colours as a route to catching light, I'm now realising that unless the balance of the tones in the picture is right, the light will not be as convincing as it could be, and it's all about the light, as far as I'm concerned. I've come round

to thinking, through my tonal still life drawings, that matching the tones I see in nature is not possible, since my materials necessarily limit the tonal range available to me. I'm

concentrating more now on matching the ratios between the tones, which is what I mean by the tonal balance. I believe that the more recent still life drawings do a more convincing job of expressing light than any of my paintings so far, and they're doing it entirely without the

use of colour. I can't ignore that.

But there's something else. I think it's fair to say that all the painting I've done so far has been accompanied by frustration. Some of them I've enjoyed, yes, and some I've been quite

pleased with, but they've been very hit and miss. I'll get something right one day, and think I've cracked it, only to get it completely wrong the next. I think that's partly why I've been

yo-yoing between thinking I was doing ok, and thinking that I was failing utterly.

The still life drawings aren't like that. I'm pretty pleased with almost every one of them, particularly the more recent ones. They're a lot more simple to produce than the paintings, and take less than half the time per picture. That gives me the freedom to experiment more,

to try out different lighting, different compositions, and different subjects.

More than that, they feel completely different when I'm working on them. The frustration has melted away, and I've really started

enjoying my work. I was thinking today whilst I was doing a small drawing of a couple of garlic bulbs that I'm rediscovering the sheer

joy of what it is to create a picture. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and how when I drew back then, I went into another world for a time. Drawing was an escape for me back then, an escape into a

world where everything made sense, where I could relax and just live in the moment, engrossed in what I was doing. I didn't draw

because I felt I had to, or because I had some particular goal that I was working towards, I drew because I loved to draw. With these simple, unassuming little still life drawings, I've been rediscovering

that feeling.

That's what I mean by finding my level. I can do these drawings without any emotional roller coasters, without any histrionics, and without beating myself up about how bad they are. I

just enjoy doing them. It requires no effort on my part to make a start on one, because I love doing them. So, through a gradual process of stepping backwards, I think I've finally found a

level at which I can work comfortably. I've said before that I think that human beings, as a rule, do best at things they enjoy. For the first time since I started working again, I'm doing these drawings for the simple enjoyment of doing them. I think that the drawings are better

for that, and also, crucially, that I'm learning more because I'm enjoying myself, and not clouding up my mind with negative thoughts about how good the work is.

So I think that these drawings will help me to get from conscious incompetence to conscious

competence without having to do myself all kinds of mental damage along the way. The journey has just got a lot more fun.

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