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In the second lesson, we look at tone.

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Tone is light and dark with middle grades in between.

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Tone is used in drawing, usually to create volume.

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And what tone does is follow where light goes.

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So we move away from the line, which is done with the tip of the pencil.

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And move to the edge of the pencil to create varying degrees of darkness.

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If we push hard, it's very dark.

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If we move it lightly, we can create very, very soft, silvery tones.

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And it's the control of those tones that enables a drawing to be a success or

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a failure.

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Now, Ruskin was very good at this.

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He was a patient man, much more patient than most people are today.

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And he had time when he could sit and slowly draw the landscape.

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In the drawing that we're going to look at today, Ruskin is sitting out probably on

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a rather nice sunny day on a hillside with probably two or three hours to spare.

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And he very,

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very slowly builds an image of the mountains on the other side of the valley.

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He makes them look three dimensional by using tone.

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And he creates a sense of depth of

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one thing being nearer to you than another by varying the tone.

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Now, there is a basic rule in tone, which is that if you want to make

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something look close to the viewer of the drawing, you do it dark.

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If you want to make it look further away, you make it faint and light.

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And so to get to middle ground, you need a middle tone.

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Now if you look at this drawing,

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you will see that the mountains in the distance are very lightly drawn.

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The mountains in the middle ground are less light.

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And as we move towards the foreground, and the row of trees and the houses,

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we can see it getting darker and darker.

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And that is what not only creates a sense of volume of the mountains having real

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structure, but actually of depth of some things being nearer than another.

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So you can see that tone is a very, very important part of illusionistic drawing,

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of making drawings look a little bit like photographs.

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You have to remember that the time that this drawing was done,

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photography was being invented.

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And so people were aware of the importance of tone,

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probably more than they had ever been in the past.

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So in order to learn something from this drawing,

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the obvious thing to do is to not only sit and

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look at a drawing like this and look at the strategies that Ruskin has used.

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But also to go and sit in the landscape, or sit in front of a still life, and

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try and make one thing appear to be in front of another by the control of tone.

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Dark in the foreground, light in the background,

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it's a very simple exercise and you'll find it works.