Paintology

Tonal Painting by Paintology

There are many drawings that you can find that are made with the Paintology drawing app and they are often mistaken for traditional artworks. There is a very good reason for this and this is all down to tonal digital painting or drawing.

You can visit many of the social sites of Paintology such as YouTube, Pinterest, Quora, Facebook to learn more.

So what is meant by tonal painting?

You probably have heard the word tones and values used in many of the online art tutorials. This term has been confined exclusively to traditional artwork such as pencils, charcoal, pastels, acrylics and other traditional materials.

Very little information can be found about tonal painting as used in the creation of digital art. Tones are mentioned in the final study of the digital artwork but not the actual application of it. Often tonal variations in artwork are generated using digital tools such as the use of blending and gradient tools. More information is provided on this at the end of the post in example.

If you look at traditional art you can see that most of it is derived from simple tools such as pencil/paper, brush/oils etc. You can see a diverse range of artworks made with the humble pencil and paper. In the hands of a proficient artist thes simple tools alone help you to create stunning drawings including photo realistic.

The same can be said of the Paintology app where its small but powerful range of tools allow for a high diversity of digital artwork on the phone or tablet. This can be put down to the application of tonal uses in digital artwork. See Fig. 1 of a drawing made on an actual phone using the Paintology drawing app.

You can see a demonstration of the power of a simple tool that allows you much creativity over your digital artwork. Just go to the drawing canvas here and try out the simple exercise of creating the same tones with the line brush. This in essence is the heart of digital drawing with the Paintology app and the reason why artworks are often mistaken for traditional.

One could argue that drawing this way can take a long time as opposed to using the array of digital tools. However, it's been demonstrated time and time again that drawing this way Is several times faster than using digital tools. This is because you are focused more on drawing than selecting tools and much like painting & drawing in the traditional manner

Achieving tonal values in paintings and drawings are what allows artists to achieve outstanding artworks. Of course you need to have a good dose of creativity!

Learning the tonal techniques with Paintology will also help you in other art mediums including traditional. Traditional artists will find an easy transition to the Paintology app due to the similar techniques used in traditional mediums.

Paintology has been developed from the ground up to help any beginner or advanced artist to enjoy the digital medium as it was meant to be.

The Paintology app has over 500 tutorials all carefully crafted to ground you in the fundamental core of tonal techniques.These are available for free to all app users.

You will not only learn about tonal painting but also gain important skills in colour appreciation, developing textures, forms and shapes and of course drawing strokes. This is all possible through numerous methods of creating artwork with Paintology such as trace drawing, block colouring, paint by numbers, portrait and landscape paintings and others.

Example of drawing & painting with Paintology

An example of tonal painting in Paintology can be demonstrated with the colouring of a sky. The sky usually has a hue from the horizon all the way to the top. There are two approaches to painting this area. In digital painting the common way is to select two points, one at the horizon and the other at the top. By using the blending tool one can fill the area with the gradient of the two colours. This approach of creating digital artwork almost always looks artificially generated and takes the form of CGI. It is also the reason why many traditional artists look down on digital artists. They automatically assume that the computer does all the heavy lifting and requires a high degree of technical proficiency. This is in complete contrast to the approaches used by traditional artists.

In traditional artwork the area is commonly created by mixing colours or using lighter and darker shades and tones of the pencils or pigments. The same is true for Paintology where we apply the tones in a similar manner to the traditional approach. This is done using the hardness or opacity setting of the brush. This approach has more in common with the traditional approach and is the reason why digital artworks created this way are confused with traditional artworks.

Here is another example (Fig. 2) of applying tones to make this drawing of Brad Pitt using Paintology and just two brushes.

You can watch the actual video of this painting from Ferdouse Youtube channel.

Download the Paintology app from the Google playstore