After struggling with my first oil painting, I realized that I don’t know enough about tone. I returned to using charcoal and sketched an apple. I spent three hours on this apple. I think it’s recognizable as an apple, but not necessarily the apple I used as my subject. Sigh.

Yes, that’s an apple

The bamboo skewer is there to point out to me where the top of the shadow is relative to the top of the apple. (From where I sat when I sketched the apple, the shadow was lower than how it looks in the photo.) When I first sketched the apple, the shadow was much higher. Why? I don’t know.

Seems straightforward enough

My first problem was that I shaded my background way too dark (I laid down a 6 tone and it should have been a 4) and then had trouble distinguishing the dark tones of the apple and its shadow (tones 6-10). The instructor put a 6-tone fabric under the apple to help me see the difference in a 4 tone and a 6 tone. You can barely see the lighter fabric in the top right corner of the photo.

The tone chart goes from light to dark. I know that 1 is white and 10 is black. I might even be able to put down on paper a correct likeness of 2 (one tone darker than white) and 9 (one tone lighter than black). But talk to me of a 4, 5 or 6 and I will not be able to mass it in correctly.

What did I do in that three hours? I sketched in the apple, put in tones . . . and then erased them. I did this several times trying to get the shape and tones of the apple correct, as well as the shape and the tones of the shadow. I’m getting really good at erasing.

I’m choosing to work on tones in charcoal a while before my next oil painting effort. We’ll see how long that takes.