The Value of A Tonal Sketch

A tonal sketch is an ideal method of working out your composition and also where the lights and darks are going to be placed in your picture, regardless of what colours are involved.

Look at the example of a picture I produced a while back which is on my gallery page. It's the delightful village of Wrea Green about 45 minutes from my home in Liverpool. It has everything the 'typical' English village should have - an ancient church, a pub and attractive cottages and houses surrounding the village green, complete with its duck pond.

When Pam and I visited, we noticed that the green had a cricket pitch marked out, so this seemed the ideal solution of creating human activity to link all of the elements together in a picture. Always look out for a chance to include animals or people in a meaningful way when considering your composition. It could be a couple walking down a lane or someone on a horse - or even a cluster of hens near a farm gateway. Try to use them to enhance the composition rather than just plonking them any old place in the picture...

Anyway, I made three tonal sketches of the scene, using a 4B pencil on a cartridge pad. Each view was changed slightly to try out different angles and arrive at the best composition.

In Picture 1 I felt the buildings had become too far away and 'bitty' and the cricketers dominated rather than complemented the scene.

In Picture 2 I made the figures smaller, but the church was placed too centrally for my liking. I have a compositional dislike of any significant element placed right in the middle of a picture as it can tend to cut it in two. Equally I thought putting the pond right across the bottom of the picture created an unwanted barrier - even though in real life it would be in that position.

In Picture 3 I moved the view so the church was at the right hand side - still towering over the village (as it does) - but it allowed me to develop an 'L- Shaped' composition in conjunction with the other buildings using the height of the steeple. I included just a corner of the pond and a couple on a bench watching the game to fill in an otherwise blank area.

I also developed the light and dark areas in this sketch so that I knew when I came to paint it the strength my colours needed to be (tonal strength or value), regardless of what colour I was actually using.

In picture 4 we see the final painting, still slightly adapted from the third sketch - I made the bench and spectators smaller as it suited the overall composition...

The tonal sketch also allows you to 'play' with light and shade so a dark roof in reality might look much better left quite light in your picture. Maybe you could have the sun coming from a different direction. Or you will almost certainly want to move some feature in the picture or leave it out altogether - an unwanted lamp-post perhaps - or maybe adjust its size, if this gives a better overall composition.

Try producing some simple tonal sketches the next time you do a painting - in any medium. Don't dive in and paint the first view you see. You will almost certainly get a better composition with this little bit of pre-planning. In fact, most professional artists will tell you that for them, a tonal sketch (or several of them) is an absolute pre-requisite before they commit paint to paper or canvas.

These don't have to be a masterpiece - they are in effect your working drawings. But they are a vital stage in organising in your mind the layout of your picture before you pick your brush up.

As an added bonus, you frequently find that your tonal sketches throw up more than one potential painting of the same scene - with very little extra effort!

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