From the course: Drawing Foundations: Light and Shadow
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The three tone masses
From the course: Drawing Foundations: Light and Shadow
The three tone masses
In it's most basic of terms, directional light can be split into three tone masses. The lights, the darks and the mid-tones. In our shadow mapping drawing we looked at how you can simplify a subject by just splitting it into lights and the darks. But now we can add an extra layer of subtlety. By introducing a mid tone. On the foundations of drawing, we establish our mid tone by drawing with graphite, and rubbing it in to the cartridge paper. But now what we can do, is begin to experiment, by using tonal paper as our mid tone. Then we can use charcoal for our darks and a white chalk for the lights and start to build a drawing still looking at three tone masses but using the mid tone of the tonal charcoal paper. So this can often be split. If you think initially of having pure white and pure black, so if we could only use black and white for this drawing. What would those areas be? So you can see here, this is what it would be like if you just had the lights and the darks. You start to…
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