Portrait Drawing Lessons:
Developing Tone

Portrait Drawing Lessons - Developing Tone 1

The urge to leap directly into painting is universal. The problem, however, is that jumping into painting before you learn to draw, i.e. before you learn how to relate and carve out form, is that things will quickly get bogged down. If one cannot handle form in drawing then the myriad challenges of working with pigment, color, temperature, relative values, etc. will completely overwhelm you.

Drawing Lessons - The Drawing EZine

Get even better portrait drawing lessons every month!

Drawing EZine subscribers receive high quality, high resolution drawing lessons in PDF format. And it's FREE!

There's no obligation and your privacy is ensured. We never, ever sell, rent, lend nor in any way give your email address to anyone.

The Artacademy Drawing
EZine

Name

Email


Portrait Drawing Lessons - Developing Tone 2

In this lesson I will show you a working method that bridges the gap between drawing and painting – a tonal approach to portrait drawing.

Using an ivory colored sheet of Fabriano Ingres drawing paper, sanguine conté, a couple of paper stumps (or tortillons) and a clean kneaded eraser I will approach this drawing as if I were painting.

Sanguine conté is my favorite drawing medium. It has an expressive quality that appeals to my sensibilities. But it is challenging and somewhat unforgiving – errors are not readily dismissed. For intermediate and advanced artists I would suggest giving sanguine conté a try. For the beginning portrait artist charcoal is a much more forgiving medium.

Holding a small piece of conté with my finger tips I block-in the major dark pattern of the portrait drawing using the broad side of the conté crayon.

An easy way to determine the primary light/dark pattern is to squint down your eyes so you no longer see the facial features.

It is important that your major dark pattern is only one value. You do not want to start differentiating the range of dark values at this point. The key is to always work from general to specific.

A common error that most artists make as they learn to draw is to focus on the details or a specific area, such as the eyes, too soon. A rule to remember as you learn to draw is: you can never be to simple. There is beauty in simplicity.

Now the real fun begins. Using my fingers (make sure that they are oil free) I stump down the blocked-in conté so that it is smoothed out and ground into the paper. This stumping-in is not a willy-nilly madness but a careful modeling of form. The result will not be particularly pretty and that’s OK.
Portrait Drawing Lessons - Developing Tone 3

Using a clean kneaded eraser (in fact, one that has never been used with another medium such as charcoal, graphite, etc.) the lights are first painted out and the forms of the features are further suggested. Ideally you want to be painting out the lights with a sculptural sensibility.

As you learn to draw and model form this idea of drawing with a sculptural sensibility will take on a greater clarity as you achieve ever more subtle, yet strong, plastic form in your portrait drawing.

Artacademy.com
Artacademy.com | Drawing Lessons

Copyright © 1998-2012 Artacademy.com. All rights reserved.