From the course: Drawing Foundations: Fundamentals

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Creating contrast

Creating contrast

From the course: Drawing Foundations: Fundamentals

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Creating contrast

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Now we've learned about the importance of light and dark and having that real tonal range in your pictures. What I'm going to introduce now is the idea of a tonal ground and this is where we create a tone on the actual page. So we're not working on to the white paper. What this can really help you to do is to be able to focus on the lights in the drawing, and the dark's very easily that have a real range really quickly. So it takes a bit of time in preparing a tonal ground, but once it's done it can really speed up the actual drawing process to get a real nice sense of realism and form in your drawings. It takes away a lot of the fear from having that white paper in front of you. So we're going to use a 3B pencil, your frame and your graphite stick, to rub it onto the actual page, so we get this really nice, even grey tone. So let's have a look at setting up a tonal ground. So to establish a tonal ground, we've just got to again position the frame like we did before, and just draw…

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