Tone Still Life:
Completion and Summary

Table of contents

Completion and Summary

… came to an end, but did not complete. Look at the completed drawing of the still life as a whole and analyze it. Does the drawing match your original design presented in the foreskis? Probably "consistent, but somehow everything is fractional"? Just by painting a still life, you have lost the feeling of its compositional integrity.

No matter how many objects there are in a still life, it is still a single organism immersed in the environment. Let us recall how the composition of the sheet began: by finding in it a single mass of still life objects. Being carried away by the study of objects and their details, you forgot that they are parts of the whole, as you looked at a still life with wide eyes and saw everything in a row.

Now squint your eyes (literally!) And see what you had to draw. Falling, own shadows of objects tend to unite into a bizarre dark spot; illuminated parts of objects tend to organize their spot; the distant plan is getting dark; the foreground becomes contrasted. Strengthen the tone in the corners of the composition a little, so that while reading the picture, let’s say, in a circle, your gaze does not linger on them.

You have passed the path from the general to the particular, and now follow the reverse path to the general, that is, generalize the tone drawing of the still life.

Do not forget about the possibilities of an aerial perspective. Dark drapery, leaving in the still-life space from the front of the table in depth, of course, loses tone intensity as it moves away (and not only it!). In the foreground, the drapery will have a darker tone of shadow and chiaroscuro compared to the background, which will cause the effect of a brightly lit surface of the drapery.

Make sure the tone spots are in balance. Otherwise, the “tonal tipping” of the composition in any direction will cause an unpleasant impression on your drawing.

Now that you understand that the composition of a still life can be built on tone spots, consider the second method (method) of tonal solutions to a still life. Let us return to the section “Compositional solution of the sheet” and look at it again. It is from this section that a different approach to the tone drawing of a still life begins.

Objective: to bring a still life to a generalized state of tone spots. See the composition of a still life through extreme, opposite tone relationships, that is, dark and light.

Purpose: to find balance, the balance of two tone spots in the sheet space. Create a tone sheet design.

Next, we carry out the constructive construction of a still life according to the foreskis and introduce lighting, which will allow us to build the boundaries of light and shadow, as well as the boundaries of falling shadows. Let us pay attention to the tone state of the lit and shadow parts of the still life. The illuminated parts of the still life are different in tone, depending on the color of the objects, texture, material. The shadow parts, on the contrary, are very close in tone and combined into a local single spot. Even the lightest object in the shadow has slight differences in tone from darker objects.

We conclude. The shadow part of a still life is a connecting spot for all objects of a still life.

It is proposed to begin the tonal solution of the still life with the organization of the shadow parts of the still life in a single spot. This will allow you to actively sculpt the shape of the subject with light and shadow, monitor the development of the tone spot and keep the composition in balance, as well as continue to work on improving the linear pattern.

At the end of the work on the dark spot, we will get, as it were, the extreme borders of the tone scale (say, the border of the dark and the border of the light) within the limits within which we will build the halftone relationship. But these relations will be completely controlled by us. They will shift either towards the dark, or towards the light, depending on the necessary tone balance, color of objects, aerial perspective, lighting.

So, the work on the drawing is quick and conscious. Throughout the work on the drawing, the feeling of the whole is not lost. The completed drawing looks contrasting, not "tortured", but all this requires some experience.