Tone 4

Tome 4 - Tonal drawing with Charcoal and Chalk
This is the last lesson of our focus on tone. Lots of famous artists start with tonal sketches in charcoal and chalk when planning one of their paintings. Here are three samples from Leonardo da Vinci, Edgar Degas and Vincent Van Gogh. Do you know which picture belongs to which artist? (Scroll down to the end for the answer)

You will notice that they choose a mid-tone for their background and add white highlights and black shadows. Mixing the charcoal and the chalk can also allow you to draw in a range of grey tones.
Before we do our own charcoal and chalk drawings though, we are going to have a look at some history, geography and geology and find out where charcoal and chalk come from.

Charcoal
Charcoal is made by partially burning wood without oxygen. It is mainly carbon (like coal) and, as any Minecraft player will know, it burns longer and hotter than wood. It was necessary for smelting metal in ancient times and is now popular as barbeque fuel. As we saw in Line 2 charcoal has been used by artists since art began from the earliest cave paintings, through the Renaissance and all other art movements right up until today. Charcoal is great for quick tonal sketches as it can be smudged with fingers or a dry brush and can even be smashed down to a powder and mixed with water to create ink.

More about how charcoal is made:
www.historyforkids.org/learn/environment/charcoal.htm

Chalk
Add a white stick of chalk with the charcoal and you can create a whole range of grey tones from white to black in your drawing, but do you know where chalk comes from?
Chalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock made of calcium carbonate. The chalk deposits of the world were created during the Cretaceous Period 145 to 65 million years ago (Creta is the Latin for chalk). This was an era of extensive change in the world when the continents separated, the first flowering plants appeared and it ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs. It was during this era that layers of microscopic skeletons of plankton on the sea floor were subjected to heat and pressure and transformed into chalk rock. There are many famous chalk sites in Great Britain such as the White Cliffs of Dover, but we have very little chalk in Ireland. There is some along the Antrim coast and a surprising discovery of chalk was made in Ballydeenlea near Kilarney in Co. Kerry in 1959 which has made geologists rethink the formation of the Irish bedrock. If you are interested in knowing more about the Irish geology there is a very detailed map of the bedrock available here from the Geological Survey of Ireland website (www.gsi.ie).

More about how chalk was made:
www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/chalk_formation_fossils.htm

So, now that we know a bit more about them, what can we do with charcoal and chalk? As with everything in art you can do anything that your imagination lets you. Below are some images to inspire you. More on our Pinterest page here as usual. We tried to pick a wide ranging selection from portraits of people and animals to still-life objects. As you can see each of the artists uses the charcoal and chalk in their own unique way. All  of them chose a neutral background which allows the bright white highlights and darkest black shadows to stand out equally. The second image down on the right includes a tonal scale like the ones we used for the last few weeks and you can see that the paper colour sits neatly in the middle of the scale.

So start by getting yourself a grey sheet of paper A3 or bigger if possible and a stick of white chalk and black charcoal (any type will do). Before you draw anything on it cut of a strip and play around and see how many tones of grey you can make. Get out your notes and compare the tones you make with your tonal scale. If you want you can cut out squares of different tones and stick them into your notes in a scale from white to black too. Try different techniques like cross hatching and blending with your fingers. Use a dry brush and see how you can change your marks with it, you can even scrap off some powdery chalk and charcoal and draw with it and the dry brush if you like.

When you are ready decide yourself what you are going to draw. You can pick one of the images above to copy, some of the images from last week or any other black and white image. You could get out your tonal collage from last week and copy it with the charcoal and chalk or you could draw something you can physically see - get someone to sit and pose for you or set up one of your white objects from Tone 1. It doesn't matter what you draw, but it is important to look carefully at what ever it is, notice the lighting conditions and analyse the areas of tone that you can see. Try sketching it out with white first then start mapping in the lightest areas working up to the darkest (or the other way around if you find it easier).

Don't worry too much about how the drawing turns out. It is more important at this stage to train your eyes to see the tones. Everyone's drawing improves with practice but no one is ever completely happy with their own work. Rather than thinking about the finished piece, relax and enjoy the process, experimenting with different techniques as you go. You might be surprised with the results and don't forget you can send us images to creativeardagh@gmail.com.

Answer: Left = Degas; Middle = Van Gogh; Right = Leonardo