Touble with tone?

[Boblines]

I offer this only because it was of help to me as a painter in oils. It may be of value. I don't know.
Today we live in a world of colour. We can't avoid it. But when I first picked up a pencil things were very different. Newspapers and most magazines were printed in black and white only; television was black and white. I could copy images from these sources without the distraction of colour. And colour can be a distraction when it comes to tonal painting or drawing. If I had trouble painting (a still life, for example), I found that taking a photograph and converting it to black and white revealed clearly the range of tones which I found hard to distinguish in colour. I hope this may be of interest.

Keep the images coming people! And don't be afraid of criticism. We only learned to walk after many a fall.

Finally: if you think you are good at what you do, you have a lot to learn!!!

[Mike Sibley]

Newspapers and most magazines were printed in black and white only; television was black and white. I could copy images from these sources without the distraction of colour. And colour can be a distraction when it comes to tonal painting or drawing. If I had trouble painting (a still life, for example), I found that taking a photograph and converting it to black and white revealed clearly the range of tones which I found hard to distinguish in colour.

Yes, I agree... and No I don't

Converting a photo to black and white can help with identifying the values. But... you then run the serious risk of copying those values.

Converting from colour also loses all the colour information. For example, if you're drawing a black, tan and white dog... you can no longer distinguish between areas of tan, highlights in the black, and patches of shade in the white. Nor can you easily follow divisions of colour that pass through areas of shade.

For those reasons I always prefer to work from colour. And working from colour means I'm free to interpret what I see.

Sometimes, however, I do also have a black and white version available, which often displays the detail more clearly. I agree with you, that, in this case, colour does distract. I also usually have two colour photos too: one correctly exposed, and the other over-exposed, because the latter displays more detail in the shadows. Put the three together and you have:
A B&W that supplies clearly visible detail.
An over-exposed colour version that supplies detail in areas of shade.
And a correctly exposed colour photo from which I work directly and interpret the values in a way that best suits my vision of what the drawing will become.

I have a blog post on this subject: Working From Photos

[LindasPencils]

I always remember my first days in a publishing/magazine studio... now we are talking stone age here, BC (before Computers). Part of the job was to use the darkroom to reproduce color slides and photos into dotscreen black and white 'bromides' suitable for offset lithography. One of the first lessons I learned was that when you convert color to Black/white all the reds convert to BLACK. The dark blues to BLACK. Your eye is a wonderful instrument that perceives these colors as brighter and the camera cannot reflect this. The same thing happens when you photocopy a color image, or even convert on the computer. All the information your eye sees in the red/orange/violet/indigo values are flattened out to the similar tones of dark grey or black.
So you have to fiddle about in your levels, contrast and saturation to achieve a semblance of what your eye sees. But it is tricky as things easily get over or under exposed loosing detail.

[Shmush]

My husband creates aviation dioramas attempting to be as historically accurate as possible. sometimes all there is to work from is black and white photos. It can be a real challenge and sometimes impossible to know the colors. you would think the lightest colors would have the lightest values. Not always so, sometimes, depending on the type of film used yellow looks darker than red.