Simplifying the gray scale...

 

Having spent the day yesterday working on black and white renderings and making a couple of images using a nine-part gray scale...

I decided to try simplifying the process and just using five values from the scale instead of all nine...

This worked quite well but I wanted to keep going so I tried another pose with just three values...

This was very basic and closer to what I was doing with the black and white studies though simpler. Here I had to use the same value for the shade on the clothes and the skin and I found in the last two studies that there was a little confusion between using the same mid-tone for the skin and the clothes, so baring this in mind I tried again but this time with the addition of the white value. I also mainly used the half-tone for the clothes to create a distinction....

Although still very basic and loose (all these studies took less than half an hour each) I felt this was heading in the right direction. I'm going to continue practicing my life drawing skills daily if possible but for now due to time constraints I have to move on to anatomy. I'll elaborate in my next post.