I have done three paintings so far this unit and I have had some positive outcomes. I experimented with different colors and tried to portray styles of artists through my work. I used a range of colors to represent tones and shading. My best painting was when I used the palette knife. I used the palette knife so that I wouldn’t mix my paints and so I would get a very interesting combination of colors. Also, since my paint was more thick it produced a texture on my painting.

Tones and Shading Reflection

These are my charcoal figure drawings incorporating tones and shading. I have gradually improved and learned where it is appropriate to add tones and how to get a good variety of shades.

Click here to see my comparing and contrast of Nielly Francoise and Van Gogh.

Tones and shading have always been a very difficult aspect in art for me. I could never use tones to make my figure look life-like. They would always be either too dark or too light and not have enough variety. Although I have improved during the tones and shading unit, I would still like to see more improvement and more variety in tones. I need to use tones to my advantage to make the image look more realistic. Another problem I had during this unit was not outlining the figure in before i added tones. I found this was very difficult to do since I was used to outlining everything I drew. It was a very difficult transition but I managed to produce some images that were not outlined. I had to focus on just shading to fill in the volume of the figure. I have made some improvements during this unit and I plan to continue to improve.

Click here to see my chiaroscuro analysis.

I have improved in using tones with pastels and charcoal. I learned not to shade the whole drawing, only the most significant dark and light tones and that I could use the color of the page as another tone.

These are my homework drawings of week two. The colored ones are inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec’s style. I tried to incorporate many different colors to coney tones, just like Toulouse-Lautrec did.

I have improved with using charcoal. At the beginning I just outlined the figure with a thick charcoal line, but then i began to include tones.