In the second lesson, we look at tone.
Tone is light and dark with middle grades in between.
Tone is used in drawing, usually to create volume.
And what tone does is follow where light goes.
So we move away from the line, which is done with the tip of the pencil.
And move to the edge of the pencil to create varying degrees of darkness.
If we push hard, it's very dark.
If we move it lightly, we can create very, very soft, silvery tones.
And it's the control of those tones that enables a drawing to be a success or
a failure.
Now, Ruskin was very good at this.
He was a patient man, much more patient than most people are today.
And he had time when he could sit and slowly draw the landscape.
In the drawing that we're going to look at today, Ruskin is sitting out probably on
a rather nice sunny day on a hillside with probably two or three hours to spare.
And he very,
very slowly builds an image of the mountains on the other side of the valley.
He makes them look three dimensional by using tone.
And he creates a sense of depth of
one thing being nearer to you than another by varying the tone.
Now, there is a basic rule in tone, which is that if you want to make
something look close to the viewer of the drawing, you do it dark.
If you want to make it look further away, you make it faint and light.
And so to get to middle ground, you need a middle tone.
Now if you look at this drawing,
you will see that the mountains in the distance are very lightly drawn.
The mountains in the middle ground are less light.
And as we move towards the foreground, and the row of trees and the houses,
we can see it getting darker and darker.
And that is what not only creates a sense of volume of the mountains having real
structure, but actually of depth of some things being nearer than another.
So you can see that tone is a very, very important part of illusionistic drawing,
of making drawings look a little bit like photographs.
You have to remember that the time that this drawing was done,
photography was being invented.
And so people were aware of the importance of tone,
probably more than they had ever been in the past.
So in order to learn something from this drawing,
the obvious thing to do is to not only sit and
look at a drawing like this and look at the strategies that Ruskin has used.
But also to go and sit in the landscape, or sit in front of a still life, and
try and make one thing appear to be in front of another by the control of tone.
Dark in the foreground, light in the background,
it's a very simple exercise and you'll find it works.