Sketch of Toulouse Street Scene from photo
Experiment with tonal shading, saturation, and line weight to emphasis depth and focal point
This year I’ve realised that adequate tonal shading and shadows in a sketch are essential for showing depth and can also help to elevate the focal point. Of course I’ve known that all along, but it’s just that I hadn’t realised how important this element of sketching was, and what a positive impact it can have in a sketch.
The challenge with adding tonal shading and emphasis lines is knowing when enough is enough. How do you decide when to stop, and when one more pass as tonal shading will ruin your skech?
So I decided to experiment with a street scene sketch of Toulouse, and to document each step of the way, so I could see what tonal additions I was happy with, and which I thought didn’t work quite so well.
Step 1 of Toulouse Street Scene
I just did a quick loose ink line sketch with my Twisbi EF with grey ink. I liked this scene because of the leading-lines of the pavement and the building roofs point directly to the focal point building at the end of the street.
Step 2 of Toulouse Street Scene
I added this first layer of watercolour where I used slightly desaturated colours on the buildings to the left and right and more saturated colours on the focal point building.
The sketch still has an overall feeling of flatness and no depth, but the focal point is obvious.
Step 3 of Toulouse Street Scene
I added the first layer of tonal shading to add shadow areas to the windows, posts, and parts of the kerb.
Step 4 of Toulouse Street Scene
I added the watercolour sky, and also some darker tonal shading to the windows and under the roofline. All of this darker shading had elevated the visual prominence of the foreground buildings, and they’re vying with the focal-point building in the background.
Step 5 of Toulouse Street Scene
I added a pale grey tonal shading to all of the foreground buildings, which has desaturated the colours even more and helped to elevate the prominence of the focal point.
While this addition of a Tombow grey layer helps to shift the focus away from these foreground buildings, I’m not keen on this type of desaturated colours. I’d rather mix a complementary colour to the walls, and apply that instead of this grey, because I feel it just deadens these areas and they become a little lifeless.
Step 6 of Toulouse Street Scene
I added some black ink lines to specific areas in the foreground (the barred window, the shutters, and the posts.
As soon as you add more black to these foreground areas, your eye automatically gets attracted to these areas of high contrast. So although I like to add black line details, I need to reserve these for the focal-point areas, and hold myself back from overdoing secondary areas of emphasis. If these black windows and black lines details in the foreground had been grey instead, it would have increased the prominence of the focal point in the background. So the key here is to simplify, and minimise the use of black, and instead use varying shades of grey in these secondary areas.
Step 7 of Toulouse Street Scene
I added black ink lines and darker black areas in the windows on the building in the background, and added some black lines on the fencing and some detailing on the signage.
In order to bring the focus back to the focal-point, and counteract all of the tonal shading and high-contrast lines in the foreground, I had to had really dark darks to the focal-point building. And this really brings a stark heaviness to the sketch that I didn’t really want. For me, the sketch should have a lighter more playful feel to it, but the black is detracting from that.
Even though the focal-point is still obvious, it’s having to work really hard to be the visual centre-piece because of the level of contrast and detail in the foreground.
Summary
This was a good exercise to undertake. It just goes to show how easily it is to overcomplicate the tonal shading, line weight, and saturation, and add a level of complexity that isn’t necessary.
What did I learn?
Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
