Having used a bucket full of oil paint to make a tonal ruler with which to regulate the tones of my paintings, I decided it might work out cheaper to do it with electrons.
I opened up GIMP and started messing with the colour control to make some clean neutral greys.
You can accesss the colour controls in the Toolbox icon by clicking on the foreground or background colour squares to open the colour selection dialogue. I use the default HTML notation that defines a colour by giving it a number that corresponds to its Red, Green, and Blue components. For example, 000000 = Black. ffffff = White. ff0000 = Red. 00ff00 = Green. 0000ff = Blue.
The numbers are in hexadecimal, which just means that they're in base 16: 0 to 9, then a,b,c,d,e,f. 0 is the lowest value and f the highest.
I can tell it's getting complicated because my head is starting to hurt. Bottom line? Simple code number gives precise colour swatch. And when the RGB components are equal, you get a clean grey, because no one colour predominates.
Anyway.
What this means is that you can make very precisely stepped greys all the way from white to black. Which is great for making a tonal scale. I ended up using these colours -
ffffff
dfdfdf
cfcfcf
bfbfbf
afafaf
9f9f9f
8f8f8f
7f7f7f
------------777777 = background mid grey
6f6f6f
5f5f5f
4f4f4f
3f3f3f
2f2f2f
1f1f1f
0f0f0f
000000
- Which give a clean 16 step scale that looks somewhat neater than the 10 step scale I made with oil paint on index cards, and will last for as long as computers do. Working in paint I found it hard to judge the darker tones by eye, which is pretty much what you'd expect. The paint surface isn't perfectly matt, and reflects enough light to make the darker greys hard to see.
I opened up GIMP and started messing with the colour control to make some clean neutral greys.
You can accesss the colour controls in the Toolbox icon by clicking on the foreground or background colour squares to open the colour selection dialogue. I use the default HTML notation that defines a colour by giving it a number that corresponds to its Red, Green, and Blue components. For example, 000000 = Black. ffffff = White. ff0000 = Red. 00ff00 = Green. 0000ff = Blue.
The numbers are in hexadecimal, which just means that they're in base 16: 0 to 9, then a,b,c,d,e,f. 0 is the lowest value and f the highest.
I can tell it's getting complicated because my head is starting to hurt. Bottom line? Simple code number gives precise colour swatch. And when the RGB components are equal, you get a clean grey, because no one colour predominates.
Anyway.
What this means is that you can make very precisely stepped greys all the way from white to black. Which is great for making a tonal scale. I ended up using these colours -
ffffff
dfdfdf
cfcfcf
bfbfbf
afafaf
9f9f9f
8f8f8f
7f7f7f
------------777777 = background mid grey
6f6f6f
5f5f5f
4f4f4f
3f3f3f
2f2f2f
1f1f1f
0f0f0f
000000
- Which give a clean 16 step scale that looks somewhat neater than the 10 step scale I made with oil paint on index cards, and will last for as long as computers do. Working in paint I found it hard to judge the darker tones by eye, which is pretty much what you'd expect. The paint surface isn't perfectly matt, and reflects enough light to make the darker greys hard to see.
Why bother at all? Because tone is the most important part of a painting. It's what you see from across a room. If you have a clear, simple tonal plan, your painting will hang together and look good.
But if the tones are left to their own devices, it will look exactly like you did just that. To use a musical analogy, it's like making music without deciding what key you're playing in. No tonal plan = an ill conceived mess.
It doesn't have to be complicated, in fact it'll probably work better if it's as simple as you can make it. But it does have to be there.
A tonal scale, like this one, will help you plan the tones of your painting. To download it, right click on the image to open it full size in another tab. Then right click again and choose 'Save Image As' to download to your computer.
