1. Tonal Values
When struggling for artistic inspiration, it is often the simple everyday scenes, such as the humble still life, that can present us with the most interesting and challenging artistic problems. From a bowl of shiny fresh fruit to the vegetables on the kitchen chopping board, the still life can present you with all the painterly fundamentals that can elevate the simple to the sublime. Over the next three issues I shall be taking you through the various stages of a still life painting with a different focus each time.
In this first article, we shall look at tonal values. Tone really does underpin everything in a good painting and, for me, the key to successful representational painting is the correct depiction and rendering of tonal values. Simply put, tone is the relative lightness or darkness of a colour: all colours have a tonal value that fits somewhere on a scale from light to dark. Some colours are tonally very dark, almost black, such as Alizarin Crimson, whilst others are very light, such
