Mark Making & Tone | Deep Sea Diving

The next part of our visual language task was to explore how tone could be made. I don't really like realistic/heavily representational drawings myself, so it was more about how tone could be created in different ways - for example through mark making.

In a lot of my drawings, tone isn't central to the overall image. Maybe I focused on line a bit too much? I will try to consider other elements in future.

A pen drawing of a school of sharks. With this drawing, I used tone to differentiate the separate forms of each shark especially where they swam above one another and overlapped. On the page opposite, I absent-mindedly started pasting down bits of ripped up paper.

It's funny how the pages relate to each other so much. The collage almost translates the image on the left into colours and shapes, as it lacks those things.

The detailed, close up drawings of objects on the right is one of my favourites. I really took my time drawing out the small marks, pores and thought about which types of line I was going to make. I like how they focus on a part of an animal or plant, rather than the whole thing.

Drawings that are much quicker, focusing on colour and mark making

Chunky pencil drawing of a pufferfish. Pencil is great for creating a vast range of line types, offering a lot of control. You can make areas of soft shading, or harsh lines. This example of collage could technically count as using pre-made mark making? I guess collage is a way of using textures and various clippings to create marks/patterns that you wouldn't normally get.

Tone indicated using cross-hatching. The more dense the hatching is, the darker the 'shading' becomes.