How to work with the dynamic effect of tone and shade to bring your landscapes alive, by Tony Hogan

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

■ How to use tone and shade to create aerial perspective

■ Produce linear and tonal studies before painting

■ Add impact to your landscapes

We all draw and paint through a visual understanding of what we perceive. Whatever our subject, the construction of our artwork is created through shape, form, line, colour – and tone and shade. Colour surrounds us. We are saturated in all aspects of our lives with the visual impact of colour so much so that, as artists, we often rely too heavily on it and the juxtaposition of one colour against another – all to the detriment of the tonal value of the colour.

Tone and shade cover the graduating scale of a colour and allow the ability to produce counterchange and aerial perspective (Figure 1, right). Mastering this division of tone (tint) and shade, instead of just relying on the effect of one colour against another, will bring huge benefits to your finished work.

Examples of how powerful tone and shade are can be seen clearly in the ink paintings of the early Chinese style, when artists pre-mixed a range of values from carbon black before starting work.

Endorsing this further, I remember a time when I was lucky enough to observe the great David Hockney expanding this concept into his watercolour series of the Yorkshire Wolds. Once David had identified the working palette he wanted to use for the area (after hundreds of samples were painted and pinned to his studio walls) he then chose jars of the tonal range he desired mixed each morning before setting out to work. Each jar could only be opened and exposed to the air for a short time before evaporation altered its value.