Learning about and understanding TONE is one of the most important things a watercolourist has to learn. It’s something that I’ve always been conscious of and I’ve tried to incorporate it into my watercolour painting with varying degrees of success (and failure!). But I’ve never made a proper study of tonal values until now…
I have been inspired to do this by a channel I found on YouTube – NVfineARTstudio. Nina Volk, the author of this channel, has published a brilliant video about tone – you can watch it HERE. I’m not going to explain anything about the video – you will have to watch it for yourself!
But this is what it inspired me to do….
Firstly, I was prompted to find this out from among my art supplies:
You’ve probably seen one of these before, or something similar. I bought this several years ago and I’ve never used it… until now! To be honest, I’ve never really understood how it works or what I’m supposed to do with it. Nina’s video changed all that!
Next I created my own Grey Scale/Value Finder in photoshop:
Notice that I have re-numbered the values on my Grey Scale chart so that the lightest value (white) is 1, which in watercolour represents the untouched white of the paper; and the darkest value is 10 which is black. Why did I change the numbers? Well, I’ve noticed a few other artists have done this and I like it – it seems a more logical approach to me. In watercolour we usually work from light to dark, so having 1 as the lightest value makes sense. So, values 1 – 3 are the light values, values 4 – 7 are the mid tones and values 8 – 10 are the darkest values.
What I need to know now is how these Grey Scale values relate to the colours in my palette. So I painted a few colours from my palette in different tones and compared them:
Above are five colours that I frequently use and I painted them in a range of tonal values – 2 dark tones (10 & 9), 2 mid tones (6 & 5), 2 light tones (3 & 2) and white (1) at the bottom. To make sure I got the tonal values consistent for each colour, I used the camera in my smart phone which I switched to greyscale. I then placed them side by side and converted them to greyscale and compared them:
When you compare the different tones of each colour in the greyscale image above, notice how the tones are identical for each colour. I will keep these colour tone samples for future reference and I will probably create more for other colours in my palette. This has been a really useful exercise and I feel I already have a much better understanding of tonal value. In the colour comparison chart, when I compare the Undersea Green values 6 and 9 with the same Prussian Blue values, I would have said that the Undersea Green was darker; but when comparing them on the Greyscale chart, I can see that the tones are, in fact, identical!
I now realise I will have to learn the tonal values of ALL the colours in my studio palette; and learn how each one relates to the others….
The other tonal value exercise I did was this:
In the above colour chart, I painted all of the colours in my studio palette, 31 colours in total. I painted each one in the darkest possible value it would reach, almost neat pigment (but not quite!) and each colour was painted in only one layer. The colours are:
Top row, left to right: Buff Titanium, Naples Yellow, Hansa Yellow Medium, New Gamboge, Aussie Red Gold, Pyrrol Scarlet, Permanent Alizarin Crimson(W/N), Quinacridone Coral
2nd Row, left to right: Quinacridone Rose, Carbazole Violet, Indigo (W/N), Ultramarine Blue, Prussian Blue, Cobalt Blue, Phthalo Blue GS, Manganese Blue Hue
3rd Row, left to right: Phthalo Blue Turquoise, Cascade Green, Olive Green, Undersea Green, Quinacridone Gold, Monte Amiata Natural Sienna, Quinacridone Burnt Orange, Raw Sienna Light
4th Row, left to right: Transparent Red Oxide, Raw Umber (W/N), Burnt Umber, Sepia, Flint Grey, Jane’s Grey, Lunar Black
Next I converted these colour samples to greyscale:
This greyscale conversion above tells me quite a lot about the colours in my palette.
The darkest tones above, value 8 – 10, like Indigo, Sepia, Jane’s Grey, Lunar Black, Prussian Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Flint Grey, Burnt Umber, Transparent Red Oxide, Undersea Green etc., are going to achieve the widest range of values from the very dark to very pale. They are extremely useful to the watercolourist.
The lightest tonal values above are the three colours on the left of the first row, namely, Buff Titanium, Naples Yellow and Hansa Yellow Medium. In this chart they are only a tonal value of 4. If I painted a second layer of colour they might reach a value of 5. BUT they wont reach a higher or darker value than this. I could paint 20 layers of Buff Titanium and it wont go beyond a tonal value of 5 !! This means that in a painting, colours with a low tonal value range will need the support of other colours with a much higher tonal range. This also means that when I choose to paint with a limited palette, I need to make sure the colours I choose will, collectively, reach all the tonal values I need.
In conclusion, I would say that this has been a time consuming but very helpful set of watercolour exercises. I now have a much better understanding of tonal value. But I do need to learn more! However, I am spurred on by what I’ve learnt from this and will endeavour to keep moving forward in my watercolour journey.
That’s all for now, happy painting!
INDIGO BEACH ART 