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Tonal Values in all crafts – wood carving, wood burning, colored pencils, and painting

If really is amazing the odd moments that you remember and that affect the rest of your life.

Mom and I had been to a doctor in lower, southern Baltimore that day.  She decided to take the long way home as it was a wonderful country ride and it avoided the “new” interstate highway.  I must have been less than 10 as my younger sister was not yet born, so about 1958 to 1962.

It was all rural dairy farm land at that time, Maryland’s main agriculture for the Piedmont area.  Late afternoon, driving into the setting sun, we came to a T intersection just above the little town of Olney.  Mom just stopped at the cross road and looked out across the farm land in front of us.  We just sat there for the longest time.

In front of us was a small hill of pasture land with an old wire fence.  On top of the rise was a dilapidated barn, leaning slightly, surrounded by young weed-tree saplings.  The silo was long gone, but the old, rusting tractor still sat by the side of the barn.

“See that fallen down barn … look at where the roof has caved in and where the windows and doors are long gone.  Do you see the light coming into the inside of barn from the holes in the roof?  Look at how black the inside of the barn is but how bright the sunlight patches are where they hit the floor. They are brilliant white”

“Do you see the locust trees growing inside the barn, how their trunks and branches are white in sunlight coming into the barn, then disappear into the black shadows, but come out of the roof looking white again?”

‘Notice how you can’t really see anything inside the barn where the black shadows are but you can see all the details where the sunlight has come through the roof.  Now THAT’S a painting!!!!”

It wasn’t the barn; it wasn’t the old tractor; it wasn’t even all the colors of the field, trees, and red barn paint that she saw … it was the light and shadows.  Mom was an accomplished artist who, as I, started out as an oil painter and later supported her family from her craft business income.

I passed that barn many, many times later in my life when I traveled from the University of Maryland to home.  Over the years it slowly settled into just a pile of rotten wood planks, and eventually was lost under those weed-trees that had grown to full size.   Every time I came to that T intersection, like Mom, I stopped and looked and pondered the bright sunshine highlights and the black afternoon shadows – the tonal values of that rustic landscape.

So in working on a new update for my blog and pattern site I was compiling a series of images of some of my work, shown above.   When I put them together as one image – wood carvings, wood burnings, colored pencils, tutorials, and oil painting – I realized they all had one thing in common.  Every project, for me, is about tonal value and how to capture those bright white highlights and blackest shadows.

Art is about the white eyelashes of that cow lying over the blackest shadow inside her ear.  Its about cutting a deep undercut to free the sides of the fence from the wood to cast a dark shadow.  Its about working the under painting of a white flower so that the insides of the petal are starkly contrasted to the white roll overs of the petal’s edge.

For me, art is about tonal values, and it is because of that one little, brief moment of my Mom sharing her love of just seeing the world through those highlights and shadows.

Thanks for letting me sharing this memory!

~Lora
Tonal Value Sepia Worksheet
Wood Burning Sepia Values
Mapping Your Pyrography Pattern
Contrasting Tonal Values
Light and Shadows in Pyrography