Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Grey Scales

Chapter 4 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about tonal drawing (monochromatic drawings – often in pencil or charcoal).

Lesson 11 (the first lesson in the chapter) explores grey scales (a range of grey shades from white to black). I've posted greyscales in some early posts (see Tonal Studies and Keys to Drawing - Chapter 2).

Most dictionaries contain an entry for greyscale but not grey scale. Grey scale is probably the original spelling. Over the years grey scale became grey-scale which became greyscale (or grayscale) particularly when discussing technology. The contrary Blogger spellchecker recognises grey scale and grey-scale, but not greyscale - this is the only exception I've found.

The lesson includes an exercise to create greyscales in a variety of media. Philip recommends creating scales with between 9 and 12 tones. He suggests once you have generated a scale, you can use it as a reference to classify tones in the landscape.

I produced greyscales using pencils, charcoal, compressed charcoal and acrylic paint. I was too enthusiastic applying fixative to the charcoal greyscale and sprayed most of the charcoal across the page - this is an important lesson because the next exercise uses charcoal.

I spent most effort refining my acrylic grey scale. The upper part of the image at the top of the post shows my best attempt. In the lower part, the small blocks show a perfect greyscale with 7 equally spaced tones between white and black. The big blocks are a desaturated (black-and-white) version of my scale. This is useful for comparison because the black paint has a blue tinge in the paler mixtures - which makes it difficult to compare it against a pure grey.

I din't have enough patience for this exercise with the dry media. I will get some practice creating different tones of grey with charcoal in the next lesson "Block ins" and will create some more charcoal greyscales after that.