Tone 3

Tone 3 - Tonal Collage
We are flying through the art elements! We are already on Tone 3, the seventh lesson of our course. We have already looked at how important light is for seeing tone and last time we mixed tones of grey and shades and tints of other colours. This ltime we are going to work on tonal collages.

A collage is basically a picture made from bits and pieces, for example other pictures, fabric scraps, buttons, coloured or textured papers, pasta etc. We will be experimenting more with collage later in the course, but for now we are focusing on tone, so we will be working with black, white and greys for today. Here are a few of examples (there are lots more on our Pinterest album).
As you can see, like everything else in art, there is no one way of doing a collage. You can put in as much or as little detail as you like. Firstly get out your line of light to dark tones from last week. If you don't have one you can use the one below, and even if you have your own it would be a good idea to print this one and stick it in with your notes.
Now find yourself some old newspapers, magazines or black white and grey paper/fabric scraps and tear or cut them up into little pieces matching each one to one of the tones above. You should end up with ten little piles of grey scraps. Try to keep them organised in the various shades of grey, it should make collage process easier.

As we noticed other weeks our eyes do not always pick up all the tones when we are looking at something. We see might just see a red apple when looking at the image below, but when the image is changed to black and white we start noticing the tones more easily which is what we are focusing on this week.


You can start a collage with a blank piece of paper and pick your own subject - still-life objects, self-portrait etc. but this time, as we are concentrating on learning to see tones we are going to collage straight onto a black and white image. Any image will do, you could pick something out of a newspaper (at least A5 size), one of the white object photos you took for Tone 1, a photo of yourself etc. You can see some of the ones we are using below and click here to find more and print them yourself if you want to.
Depending on what you are looking at and the lighting conditions you might not see a full range of tones. The orange above has almost no white or black areas, while the chess piece is almost all white and black with just a bit of grey and the other samples are made up of lots of tones of grey. Having your graduating tonal chart beside you can help identify how light or dark the tone you are trying to match is.

Start by picking out the darkest areas in the photo and match this with the one of the darker tones on your chart then stick some of your collected scraps of that tone onto that part of the image. You might find it easiest to then move on to the lightest areas next and repeat the process. Then continue to match the mid-tone and  then any tones you can find in between these three building up to a completed collage of greys. Feel free to experiment too, leave some areas of the photo visable, draw or paint over the image etc or just use the photo as a guide and create a bigger or smaller collage based on it starting with mid-grey or black paper as your background. Have fun!

No comments:

Post a Comment