Part 3 ➤ Starting Out: Learning You Can See and Draw 120 1. Make your arrangement and composition. See your composi- tion through your viewfinder frame. Decide on your paper and format—horizontal or vertical. Draw a proportionally equal box on your paper, with very lightly drawn center lines to help site your composition on the page. 2. Arrange a light source. Look at what it does. Try moving the light to the other side, the front, or the back, and see what the light does in each case. Decide which you prefer. 3. Site your view in space and on your paper. Don’t forget the cen- ter lines, the viewfinder frame, and plastic picture plane as guides. 4. Make some beginning planning lines, then draw the simplest shapes, directions, and angles. Measure them against the sides of your viewfinder frame to see the angles. Lightly draw in the basic shapes. 5. Check yourself against your composition with the viewfinder frame and adjust. Work on seeing shapes as spaces. Pay attention to the negative space shapes. They can help a great deal in positioning everything correctly. Check again. 6. Work on it; redraw until all of the objects are correctly placed. 7. Refine the shapes and lines to be more expressive. Look at each item in your composition and say as much about each as you can. 8. Make a tonal chart on the side of your drawing or on a separate piece of scrap paper. 9. Try to see each part of your drawing as having a tonal value, relatively speaking, from the lightest spots to the darkest ones. 10. Look at the light and shadows. Decide on a tonal range that you will use. Know which pencil will make which tone (this is where the tonal chart helps). Establish the light parts and the dark parts. 11. Draw in the shapes of the highlights and the mid-tones and the shadows. Pay particular attention to how a shadow is reshaped when it falls on another object. Add the tone to your drawing, as you see it. 12. Develop the tone on your composition from less to more, based on your tonal range chart and what you can see. Work on the drawing as a whole, not just one part at a time. Build up tones gradually. You may see problems as you draw, some inconsistency that you missed. Don’t hesitate to go back and fix it. Remember that your viewfinder frame and plastic picture plane can help you see your way through a difficult part. Back to the Drawing Board You can work on line and tone simultaneously as long as you re- member to keep checking and don’t get bogged down adding tone to a drawing that still needs work on basic shapes or spaces. Try Your Hand Remember, squinting helps here, regardless of what you mother told you about making faces. Try Your Hand You don’t have to fill in every- thing on a drawing; you can get more mileage by just suggesting light, tone, shadow, or volume with some tone, but retain the contrast and sparkle in your drawing. What you leave out can be just as important as what you put in. 121 Chapter 10 ➤ Toward the Finish Line Back to the Drawing Board Sometimes, as you add a lot of detail, you have to go back and darken the darks for richer con- trast, or lighten the mid-tones, or enrich the contour lines. Experience is the best guide here. Building up tone is easy; just keep at it. You can lighten a tone or area that has gotten too dark by erasing lightly. You can use the eraser as a “blotter” and pick up just a bit of tone without disturbing the line. The more you draw, the more you will develop a personal sense of style—and a sense of what suits you and the situation. Here are some examples of drawings with tone. Part 3 ➤ Starting Out: Learning You Can See and Draw 122 Getting to That Finish Line Do you see how your shapes now have a sense of volume and they seem to really be there in space? As you practice adding tone to an accurate contour line drawing, you will begin to add it sooner, after the first planning lines are there to define the shapes and spaces of the com- position. Take your time building up tone and balancing the tones in your drawing. It takes patience and discipline, but you can do it. You will be pleased with the result, and your drawings will have the added dimension of volume and weight. You can use tone as much or as little as you wish. It is your choice, as it is your choice as to how much to render, how dark to go, and how to balance the tone and line in your drawing. Then, of course, there is the matter of deciding when you are done. You are done when you have drawn the shapes, spaces, highlights, mid-tones, darks, and shadows in your composi- tion and balanced all of them for a drawing that describes your arrangement in space. Are you pleased with your tonal drawing? As Michelangelo said to the Pope when asked about the ceiling painting for the Sistine Chapel, “I will be done when I am finished.” Like Michelangelo, you are done when you are pleased. In Chapter 11, “At the Finish Line: Are You Ready for More?” we will look at detail and tex- ture, surface elements that can tell still more about the objects that you draw. Chapter 10 ➤ Toward the Finish Line Your Sketchbook Page Try your hand at practicing the exercises you’ve learned in this chapter. Part 3 ➤ Starting Out: Learning You Can See and Draw 124 The Least You Need to Know ➤ You can establish volume by adding tone to a line drawing, but adding tone or tex- ture is useless if the shapes and spaces and relationships in your drawing are in need of work first. All that rendering won’t help. ➤ Making and using a tonal scale helps you decide on your chosen range from light to dark. ➤ Learn to see the shapes of tones, where they are, and draw them there. ➤ Light and shadow, cast from an established light source, are important to see and draw accurately. ➤ A balance of line, shape, space, tone, light, dark, and shadow is the goal of a tonal drawing, to see and draw the objects in three-dimensional space and volume. Part 4 Developing Drawing Skills Don’t be shocked if your drawings truly surprise you. By now, you’ve developed basic drawing skills and are eager to practice what you’ve learned. Before you do, though, we’ll be looking at journals and sketchbooks—yours and those of a few other artists. Then, because you will need a portable drawing kit to take on the road, we’ll sug- gest both essentials and nonessentials to pack. We’ll also peer into some working artists’ studios and see what’s behind those light-filled windows and how they feel about their work. We’ve put a review chapter next, as a reference. And, we’ll poke around your house and your garden (and ours) to find some good subjects for your new sketchbook. . attention to how a shadow is reshaped when it falls on another object. Add the tone to your drawing, as you see it. 12. Develop the tone on your composition from less to more, based on your tonal. and weight. You can use tone as much or as little as you wish. It is your choice, as it is your choice as to how much to render, how dark to go, and how to balance the tone and line in your drawing. Then,. the points need to be sharp to make good lines, and stopping to manually sharpen each one slows you down. Artist’s Sketchbook A paper stomp, whether simply a clumped up paper towel or a specially