Tones

cloth hat

I’m reading Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Drawing Techniques and trying his suggestions for using tone. This cloth hat lying on my desk was drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro in areas of tone only – no initial line drawing – using the Lasso Fill tool in Clip Studio Paint.

potatoes

Previously, as in this drawing of chitted potatoes, I’ve gone for a linocut or silkscreen printing effect using areas of solid tone, set to 100% opacity.

tone swatches

But following Mateu-Mestre’s method in his chapter on The Gray Scale, these tone swatches are actually all based on pure black.

Tone number one really is black but it was applied with a Clip Studio brush set to 70% opacity. The resulting grey was then sampled with the eyedropper tool and painted as swatch 2 but again at 70% opacity, making it that bit lighter and so on, grading the tones almost to pure white.