Still Life with Jar and Conkers
6th November 2006
Oil on Panel 7" X 5"
This is the first of a series of still life tonal studies in Raw umber and flake white. After the three red and blue still life exercises, I wanted to get some practice in with relative tone.
What do I mean by relative tone? Well, it all started with the series of 100 still life drawings. That series was started in order to help me figure out the solution to a particular problem: that the tonal range available in painting and drawing is not as wide as the tonal range we see in nature. That might not be much of a problem for some subjects, but say you're painting a white enamelled object in strong light. On the side of the object in light, you'd want a pretty light tone, in order to show the form and contrast with the shadows.
All well and good. But then what happens when you come to the highlights? On a smooth, reflective enamelled surface, those highlights are going to bang right out, they're going to be a lighter tone than the side of the object in light, since they're reflecting white light straight at your retina. But if you've already used a very light tone for the main light plane, near the top of your available tonal range, when you put your white highlights on they will get lost. You need a definite step in tone between those highlights and the normal plane of the object on which they're sitting.
So what's the answer? Well, you can try just darkening the whole picture, but that just makes your object look grey, instead of white. The conclusion I came to through the 50 or so tonal still life drawings I've done so far is that the answer is to work the limitations of your available tonal range by preserving the ratios between your tones. So say you have a cube with light from above. You'll have three planes visible to you, each of a different tone. If you have a range of tones from, say, 1 to 7 in nature, but you only have a range of tones from, for sake of argument, 1 to 6 that you can achieve with paint, you have to find a way to deal with the fact that you're missing the lightest tone.
To my mind, if you just try to match exactly what you see in all the tones, and accept your glass ceiling on the lights, then you'll compromise the feeling of reality. The highlights, especially, won't live, and I have a strong feeling that the strength of highlights goes a long way towards showing the texture of a surface as well as creating a convincing feeling of light. The conclusion I came to in the drawings is that the way to keep the most convincing feeling of reality was to compress the steps of the tonal range. I've made this cheesy little diagram to try and show what I mean:
The top surface of the cube on the right has had to go darker, because that's how much darker the white paint will look compared to white of the top surface of the cube in nature. For the sake of this diagram, I'm assuming that we can get the same darkest tone, so that stays the same. What has to change is the mid tone. Because the ratio of the tones needs to be preserved, it has to go down half a step in order to keep it's position half way between the two. The whole picture hasn't been darkened, just the mid tone.
Here's another little diagram which I think is closer to the way this actually works in practice. The top line of tones represents the full tonal range of nature (excepting light sources like the sun, say, this is to represent the range of tones of light reflected off objects). The bottom line represents the compressed tonal range available with paint. This is illustrated here in an extreme fashion to make the point. So some tones, at the dark end of the spectrum, will actually be lighter than nature. But mostly they will be darker, because as I've said, I believe that it's in the light end of the range that paint falls most short.
Now of course I'm quite aware that there are infinite variations in tone in nature, and painting it in stepped tones like this would look pretty rubbish. This is just for convenience, to clarify the concept in my own mind, and hopefully to get it across more clearly to anyone sad or obsessed enough to have read this far. But in fact, approaching a painting in the early stages in distinct tonal blocks can be very helpful. Harold Speed recommends doing it in his elementary tone exercise, which I've described here. The proof of these things always has to be in the pudding, and all I can say is that this approach works for me. If you're having trouble with tones, try it, it might work for you.
Of course, this might seem overly technical, but I don't do it in quite this strict a way when I'm trying to work this out in a painting. What I've started doing now for these tonal still life paintings is mixing up a few distinct tonal steps between pure raw umber and pure white, and then filling the main blocks after I've put down notes for my lightest light and my darkest dark. Everything is put in relative to the tones around it.
The most obvious result of this so far in the paintings following this one is that I had to noticeably darken the tone of the surface which the objects are sitting on, in order to bring out the highlights. It's my belief that it's the upper end of the tonal range, the light end, where this disparity between nature and paint is most marked, which in practice does mean lowering the overall tone of the picture. But not willy nilly, the relationships between the tones have to be preserved. So whilst I'm filling in the main tone blocks, I'm always thinking: "Is this tone lighter or darker than that one next to it? What about the one over there?" When all the tone blocks are filled in, I adjust them till they look right before trying to tighten up the drawing and get onto the details.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is some basic rule of painting that you must follow or produce terrible work, of course it isn't. It's just my solution to a particular problem, at this particular point in time. I may find others in the future, or I may decide that this is complete rubbish at some stage, but the point is that this is working for me right now. As far as I'm concerned, when I do this, I get a more convincing feeling of the light. That's what I'm concerned with more than anything else, and have been since I started painting again a year ago. I want my objects to pop off the surface of the painting, I want to create depth and life, and far as I'm concerned, getting a convincing feeling of light is the best way to achieve that. For me, it's all about the light.
This painting was done before I started to mix up tone steps on my palette as a way of helping me relate tones within the picture as I'm building it up. I've made a mistake in this painting, I've got the surface which the conkers and the jar are sitting on as light as the highlights on the conkers. Because of that, the light doesn't work as well as it might, and the conkers feel less real. I'm writing this after having done five more of these paintings, and although each one is of objects arranged on the same surface (a light grey felted cloth), in later paintings the surface of the cloth is considerably darker. Those paintings worked better than this one. I think that it's most noticeable in the painting of the tea lights. That's the same cloth, under pretty much the same light conditions, but it's much darker. That helps the highlight on the bent in side of the tea light at the front to work better.