This is lesson 3, drawing on toned paper.
Now, this actually is much simpler than lesson 2 because you're just
dealing with two tones that are in your hand and the third tone is on the paper.
That is your starting point, a paper that isn't white but
is able to receive a dark and a light line and to be visible.
So here you can see in this drawing that's mounted into
a white album that the paper is not gray, but
it's a blueish color, but it is importantly a mid-tone.
Ruskin has drawn onto that paper with white chalk and graphite.
The graphite producing a dark line and the white chalk the highlights.
Now, what Ruskin is doing here is
trying to copy the way light falls onto an object.
The object in this case is a piece of carving,
a detail from an architectural piece of ornament.
And what he's looking at is where light falls onto this leaf-like form,
producing shadows on one side and light on the other.
So it's a very very simple process.
It's a way of making images that has been around
since the very early Roman decoration.
You see it in Renaissance drawing, and the idea of drawing onto tonal paper
is very strong throughout the history of representational drawing.
So what we're gonna do is make a very simple drawing onto toned
paper using a light and a dark pencil.
The light pencil to record the light side of the object,
the dark to record the darker, more shadowed side of the object, and
leaving the gray paper to look after the middle tones between.
So it's very simple, very straightforward, and shouldn't take you very long.
Now, having chosen to use the gray and
the white sheet of paper for the demonstration.
Just remind you how these lines work on here is that here,
all three are visible and here, two are very visible,
look very similar, and one is rather invisible.
Now, if we just make a very simple drawing of a leaf.
Assuming the light is coming from this direction,
I'm going to give one edge like that, and then the other edge in darkness.
Now, if we do the same exercise on a white paper,
I think what you can see is that the black lines [INAUDIBLE] perfectly well on both.
The white line sort of suffers on this side, in fact it reads as a dark against
that white paper, and this one we're reading as a light.
Now, to make that white line more visible we could shade all that in,
Shade all that in and try and
very carefully leave a white edge here.
As you can see, this would take an enormous amount of work,
And become a substantially different kind of drawing from the elegant and
quite simple way of realizing images onto a midtone.
Now, if one wanted to make this look even more three dimensional,
we could put a light shadow behind it here.
And so it stands up even further.
And this is the basis of tonal drawing on a grey ground.