Okay, so you’ve been drawing. I hope it is two or three times a week, enlarging the image by reducing the image but concentrating on the line. Schematics are a convention, a bit like perspective, it doesn’t really exist in real life. We don’t walk around with lines drawn on the edges of everything. Where we see at the junction of two planes there is no black line at that junction, what we do is use a black line as a kind of visual shorthand to describe that junction. We don’t really live in a linear world.

But we live in a tonal world. What tone can you say? Well, hue is the degree of lightness or darkness that the surface reflects. A bit like seeing the world as a black and white photograph, there is no color in the tone. Just different degrees of darkness or light.

I want you to draw now looking at the tone the lightness or darkness of the relative surfaces. You may well start the drawing by placing the surfaces you are looking at using a line just as you did before. Don’t think of tone as completing a line drawing, that would be the wrong way to do it.

What you are doing now is “shading” a surface will have a darkness or lightness value that will be of value in relation to its neighbor, so the top may be lighter than the side closest to you than the side closest to you. to you. It will be darker than the side farthest from you. everything is relative. Use your eyes to critically judge these values.

The shade is up to you, you can use a 4B or 3B pencil, both relatively soft and will give nice dark tones. You can blur surfaces with your fingers, you can bring out highlights with an eraser, you can even draw lines with an eraser. Use a craft knife to cut the eraser to give it a sharper edge. Notice how you use your wrist to move the pencil and shade an area. Practice this action on scrap paper.

Once you get a feel for this, you can try other means. Try charcoal, which is a messy, smooth, crumbly medium, great for large drawings, it’s great for getting involved and getting your fingers dirty you don’t care about. Charcoal is wonderful for making a beautiful dark dark black drawing. Use Conte crayons, these are harder than charcoal for a more precise line and great deep tones.

Make BIG pictures and have fun. Make tiny pictures made of four small shaded areas well observed but done very quickly. This shouldn’t be tedious and boring. What you draw, the objects you are drawing, the still life, it really shouldn’t matter. what matters is that you are drawing by making marks with your eyes and approaching this step by step. If you get bored with just this, skip a couple of steps and move on. the key to working in a tonal medium is to ignore and eliminate the COLOR. try to see the world in black and white.