Hello my little voidlings, today I will be talking about why

You should STOP f♡cking sketching on WHITE backgrounds

If this were a proper essay this would be where I would go over the points I intended to make and subsequently elaborate on them, but the internet is the wild west of debate and reason so we're gonna wing it, mmkay?

So I guess I should be starting by defining what I mean by toned surface...

Not white. 

That's it really.

I use a lot of mid range tones, like approximately 50% gray and equivalent color spaces in sepias, blues, and sometimes even more vibrant colors. But we can talk more about that later. For now just know that white is the devil.

So what's wrong with white, exactly? Glad I asked.

Reason one, and the most significant one on the list, is: 

It saves your eyes.

This one primarily goes out to my digital artists, of course -who I assume are the vast majority of the people reading this - but don't you traditionalists worry your pretty little heads I'll have treats for you later too.

While research has so far been inclusive about whether long term screen use is permanently damaging to our eyeballs, it's probably unwise to shine a bunch of high energy photons into them on for hours at a time when given the option to, you know, not do that.

What HAS been pretty conclusive though is that staring at our big ol' flat lightbulb friends can lead to the comically named computer vision syndrome which can cause

• Eyestrain.
• Headaches.
• Blurred vision.
• Dry eyes.
• Neck and shoulder pain.

Personal anecdote time, after I got long Covid (0/10 do not reccomend) I was having a lot of problems with UV and light sensitivity, so much so that I installed a plug-in to turn the entire internet into dark mode (thank you, Dark Reader, my beloved) and complained on XXXX that Libre Office didn't have a dark mode (they responded kindly and made me feel like a real dick and, oh, also have a dark mode now), and I can tell you straight up that white screens ARE ABSOLUTELY WORSE and MADE MY BRAIN UNHAPPY.

Reason number two:

Work faster, smarter, and better.

At the end of the day, MOST of the tonal value that you will be working with in an image will be in the grays. Not the highest highlights or the darkest darks, but everything between. This doesn't change whether you are working across a full canvas or just drawing a figure, either

So why are you starting with a ground that is entirely highlight? You have to fill up so much of the canvas just to leave those little whispers of light showing, untouched and unhandled.

Let me show you.

This is Preaching of John the Baptist in the Wilderness by a follower of Francesco Fontebasso, an 18th century work done on this lovely sepia brown color with what looks like, to my eye, an ink wash. There are subtle tonal variations in the inks, but for the most part they are done in browns with white highlights. Not really important, but it's nice to look at the artist's hand, yes?

So I went ahead and comped up a version in Photoshop were I reduced all of the highest highlights to white, all the darkest darks to black, and everything else represented as a mid-tone gray.

You can see how sparingly the white is used, just how little of this work is devoted to its highest points of light. Such sparing use of strong highlight is honestly pretty ideal unless you're drawing polar bears in snow storms - if you have copious amounts of bright white in an image, it can look blown out or even flattened.

And can you imagine how long it would have taken to fill this paper with brown if it hadn't already started that way? Just how long this poor 18th century apprentice would have taken to fill in this sheet, leaving only those tiny marks of white behind? And then he would have had to have waited for the paper to dry and do back in with his shading, because he certainly couldn't have done that before he did the whole thing in brown, and he'd best hoped he'd placed his highlights right...

Just so much time and effort that is in no way necessary at all.

And it's not just the time saved by not filling in giant spaces with tone - you can now do with a click of a button, after all - but rather that this mid-tone ground actually does a lot of heavy lifting. For as much as I crushed this image down, it's still very readable. Sure the composition and quality of line still stand up on their own, but the grey also serves as an important foundational element, a tent-pole that the other values can blend into. White and black will both transition into grey a lot easier than black will into white.

In a sense it creates a space for those other values to exist inside of and be compared against.

And, since that neutral value is made inherent to the image, you won't necessarily have to work that area at all.

You can see how Boullogne left vast swaths of this sexy faun fella essentially unrendered. The entire right side, where the light hits, is left for the soft parchment tones to occupy, needing only the smallest accents from line and white chalk to show the shape of his fauny form. The only sections with a full range of value are the shadowed areas of the chest, arms and face, and you know what? That's all it needed.

Creating this work on white paper would have necessitated rendering those blank areas as well because our eyes would have read those values completely differently. That gray would have had to have been rendered, and where it's now shadowed rendered even darker still to compensate.

Working from a middle tone helps you become more aware of your values. 

Chris Beatrice has a wonderful write up on this role of toned ground in working through values here in his article for Muddy Colors. I recommend you read it. After finishing mine.

To quote his article, "Toned paper is like having a value scale baked into the medium."

In essence you will always be working from your neutral ground color towards either highlights or shadows, with this no-man's land of paper between them

Value 0, the reference point, the middle ground. 

Sort of a divide and conquer technique, if you will.

...Which can be a hell of a paradigm shift.

Although I call it a reference value that doesn't mean you're beholden to a 50% gray center point, either. It might be lighter or darker depending on the image you want to construct. This painting of Europa is demonstrated here with a lighter gray mid-tone to match all that brilliant daylight, yet you can still see that most of the sky is actually much dimmer than the goddess herself, almost elevating her off the canvas into the viewer space. 

So just, uh, pick what value will occupy the most space. 

Or whatever you feel like. 

Idgaf it's your art.

Another example. Here Dearborn has chosen a lighter ground, but it still allows him to blend out the shading into the highlights of the face, which is where he would be forced to stop on a white ground, but now he still has one more step of extra bright that he then uses on the white undershirt and in carefully dropped touches on the face and eyes. A white beyond white.

That's another benefit of using toned backgrounds - holy crap does it make whites really pop. It gives the artist so much more ability to drive the viewer's eyes to where they want it to go, to accent and model shapes, to use white judiciously.

In this sense, white becomes a decision, a color, a choice, not just an absence that the artist left untouched. You become much more aware of your highlights and the work's relationship to them.

And this matters. I mean, like, all of it.

Tonal variation is so important, and despite what you think not always the easiest to get right, so any tool you can use to help you get those tones is extremely valuable. 

And this one is so easy guys c'mon seriously. 

It's so incredibly common for me to see beginner artists not add enough contrast to their images. Basically the entire piece gets stuck in this middle tonal area - i.e. gray -regardless of what colors are actually being used.

... A problem I predict is only going to be exacerbated by modern media trends.

Starting with a mid tone makes falling into this trap a lot harder (though not impossible) since any change you make to the canvas basically compels you to take it further into the light or dark spectrum.

I was lucky enough to have a high school photo teacher who taught us how to develop in a darkroom, which completely changed the way I looked at tonal values in my work. Split filtering, a technique for developing lights and darks seperately, was a game changer.

But I also understand that not everyone gets that luxury, especially nowadays with digital cameras and zero arts funding.

Which is why I am yelling at you about it instead.

So would working on a toned background have saved my fifteen year old flower fairy vision?

Probably not. 

But a lot of practice on toned paper with white and black charcoal certainly made me a better artist. 

So if you want to try to improve your values, do some exercises with black and white... on anything but white.

...I feel like I've gone on a tangent here.

Ahem.

A toned middle ground is also the first step to true rendering.

If you plan to do a full piece with a background and frills and gizmobobs you BEST NOT BE STARTING ON WHITE I SWEAR TO GOD, and FURTHERMORE god forbid you do lineart for a background and then color the character and then try to color the background or do something even crazier like try to color a character on white and then drop it on a background and wonder why it looks so god damn BRIGHT.

Look. I don't want to get into perceptual color. I don't. Mostly because tons of people already have.

But basically if you draw your character on a white background and then try to put it in any scene that isn't a beach or, I don't know, a volcano, it's going to look super bright and stand out like a sore thumb.

Tones are something you really should be deciding as a whole as you work your piece from the ground up. And there are very few times where a pure white background is going to be suitable for your work. Even if you want it to be bright and bold at least use something interesting, like fog white, or soft blue, or periwinkle purple. Something you can put white on and have it mean something.

Speaking of periwinkle, the tone of the background can also have a huge influence on the picture's overall mood.

It will also effect how you apply colors and, ultimately, the way the viewer interprets light, time of day, and relationships within your work.

But really you don't have to think about it that hard. Just do SOMETHING. Anything. Go wild. Just not white.

Hell, you can even start with black if you want.

JUST NOT WHITE.

Your lines won't even look good if you do them on white and drop them on a dark background! 

Your subtle line widths won't be calibrated right! 

Your hatching and soft touches won't have the right tonal variance! 

BUT THERE IS ONE CAVEAT.

People on social media don't respond as well to lineart on gray backgrounds because they are all awful plebians with no taste and also cause gray isn't really attention grabbing, you know?

Just something to be aware of.

So what if you sketch on gray and decide, you know, I don't really want to add highlights or finishit anymore and I just want to share it on social media, but when I take the gray background away and put it on white, now it looks... wrong. Basically the opposite of the problem above.

Well...

You can also use multiply if you want. Go wild.

In fact...

Have fun, be kind, and hit me up if you have any questions or want help with your art.

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