Life Drawing (4) - Tones

In this session we did something completely different to the other sessions and focused on tonal drawings, which meant disregarding outlines and instead building up a figure through shading. My first sketchbook drawing though still has some of an outline because the light, which was moved around the room during the session, was shining almost directly onto the model. 

First quick sketchbook drawing

I found this a problem with the tonal drawings - that in areas where there wasn't a lot of shadow, it meant that there consequently wasn't a lot of definition as well. Despite this once we moved onto the larger sheets of paper I really enjoyed it looked as if you created a figure out of nothing. Also the figure seemed to be easier to get into proportion because you could use the shadows as markers for sections of the body so I didn't have to think as consciously about getting everything into proportion.

 Below was the last drawing that we did that we spent 2 hours on and required us to first prep a charcoal background to work on top of by removing sections with a (putty) rubber and adding shadows/ definition with more charcoal. I really liked the effect of this with the reversed contrast of colours, although it was quite difficult to do as you had to be quite precise because you couldn't rub out any mistakes. This meant that although we had a lot of time, the process was quite slow and so the figure doesn't contain a lot of detail.

I would have liked to go darker with my shading though in a few drawings to experiment with the different tones that you can achieve with charcoal, so if I get a chance to do tonal work again I think I'd try to do this to see how it affects the definition.