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Welcome to the Drawing Board #7!

Welcome to the second newsletter of February! It's been cold and snowy here; perfect for thinking about the tones of the landscape while I work in my studio and have fun, engaging conversations in prep for the launch of our podcast! We're continuing our exploration of working within limitations this month by focusing on tonality- and hopefully shedding some light on what exactly is the difference between "value" and "tonality"? More below!

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A Podcast Update

Editing is underway - be on the lookout for future updates and a March release!

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Finding Value in Tonality

We've all heard of "value" scales and "tonal" structure at some point in our training. "Value" and "tonality" are often used interchangeably, with some authors moving between the two words frequently. In my instruction, I prioritize language as a re-framing concept- so I'm very interested in the difference between "value" and "tonality", and if that difference can help us to develop a more strategic process when we build our images.

I like to consider tonality as the full spectrum of light and dark that a medium is capable of achieving.

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So then, what is value? Value is how we subdivide and organize a tonal spectrum. As an example, look at how the tonal spectrum of acrylic paint (black and white pigments) can be broken down into nine value steps:

These nine value steps of acrylic paint are made by Golden, and I highly recommend them. If you only pick up one, I recommend the N5 Gray. I use it to ground my canvases - it's a middle value neutral gray. The bottom end of the spectrum is Golden's Bone Black, and the high end of their neutral scale is Titanium White. You can also find N3-8. I've picked up the whole scale out of convenience, but you don't need to. You can mix everything you need with the bone black and the titanium white- but it's nice to have the N5 as a reference point and to mix with.

So, Golden chose to break the tonal spectrum up into nine value steps. But this could've been 17 steps if they had chosen to include "half-steps" between these nine. Or, you could work with less steps and focus on your clarity and shape design:

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In this assignment, I limited the tonal scale my students and I could use to only five values: Black, Dark, Middle, Light, White. By limiting ourselves to these five values, we were forced to see how tones can work in context with each other to create the effects we were after, instead of copying the actual tones that we saw. The effect is still largely a graphic one, with shape driving the structure of the image, but there's enough tonal relationships in play from the limited number of values to create a feeling of space and form-clarity.

What if we reduce the number of values again? How about three-ish?

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I say "three-ish" because the paper wasn't sprayed with fixative, and things have blurred and received texture over the years of storage, which I actually think looks pretty cool. How can we subdivide our dominant shapes with light and dark to create a strong design for our image? This was the beginning of me working out how I like to consider "NOTAN".;

What's "NOTAN"? I define NOTAN as a considered arrangement of light and dark.

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NOTANs are typically taught as "binary shape" studies: on/off, yes/no, light/dark. This is a great thing to study, to be sure, but I like to study my NOTANs with three values.

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On the right you'll see a typical NOTAN study- two values in the graphite tonal spectrum (a dark-middle and the white of the paper.) Because there's a big gap between the two values tonally, the image contains a lot of light/dark contrast.

The study on the right is what I call a "3,5,7" NOTAN: it's using a more compressed tonal range. This study was done with values 3, 5, and 7 from the above acrylic neutral palette from Golden. By using the three values, we're able to study the "light" and "dark" notes more specifically. We're also able to study how the middle value can look light in the dark, and dark in the light (just like in the five value exercise above...)

If you find yourself limiting your values and working within a more narrow range of the tonal spectrum, show us what you come up with in our Discord!

Weekly Sketch Starter:
​Round vs Boxy

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Thanks for checking out the 7th "issue" of The Drawing Board newsletter! I hope you found today's discussion of "Value/Tonality" interesting- I know when I was a student I found it impossible to limit my values. I wanted to make everything look detailed, and "real", without really knowing what that might look like, or how I could go about it. It wasn't until I limited my values and organized them that I really started to make compelling imagery.

If you know of somebody who might find this sort of thing interesting and helpful- please recommend our newsletter to them!

Have a fantastic week, all!

Happy drawing,
Evan​​

​​https://learn.theopensketchbook.com/​

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Join our Discord:
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