Concept of tone and light on faces

[jeanette1976]

My 11yr old nephew has asked for help with drawing eyes, noses and lips using tone and shading. The problem is I live a long distance away from him so I can't sit with him and explain properly while helping him to draw. I've told him to cut these features from mags and paste them in a book, tracing over them to get a feel of the shapes befotre trying them himself. i've done the same gradually moing on to simple drawings in an A5 sketch pad but wanted to start with an explanation of what tone, light and dark mean... probably with a few squiggles of different pencil pressures and a sketch of a ball or cone. I need help with the actual notes i wanted to add to explain but i don't want to over-whelm him. Any other ideas I can use to help with this or useful websites? He has till 9th Oct to hand in. Many thanks! X

[Hellion]

Hi Jeanette, what about getting him to photocopy the magazine images. The result will be in black and white and as the quality is not so good it only picks out the strong areas of light and shade.

[jeanette1976]

Thanks, thats a great idea... something as simple as that... last night I was copying pics of coloured blues artists from the 30-40's from one of my books and the pics were amazing... I also think its interesting for him to draw multi-racial people so he can appreciate a person's individuality and study the different shapes involved, ie oriental eyes like mine and my nephews or coloured lips and noses.