How to Use Tonking in Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello. I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you today how to do advanced painting techniques. Do you subscribe to your local newspaper? If so, you've already gotten a leg up on this next painting technique, which is where we take a piece of newspaper. We're then going to lay this against our canvas and then we're going to slowly peel it off. This is going to take some of the paint off, leave some of the print on and result in some very interesting textures on our canvas. You should only do this where you have paint very thickly applied to your canvas. And you take your paper, and you're going to want to make sure that this paper really is rubbed into your canvas. It should be as flat as possible against it. Now this can be a problem if you have older newspapers. Now usually, you're going to let this sit here for a couple of minutes. We're in an abbreviated schedule here, so once it's all the way across and it's picked up a lot of paint pigment, we're going to slowly peel it back. Whoa! Look at that down there. That's a whole lot of paint we just took off there. So what exactly did this do? Well, first off, there's a bunch of interesting new lines along our paint canvas down here. and actually, if you could look a little closer, you can even see the, almost like a ghostly image of the newspaper in parts here, in terms of like a photograph down here, some of the outlines of the basic shapes and shadow, and some of the ink which is now transferred over to our canvas. The canvas looks much more milky, it's much more subtle, it's not too in your face. We still have those nice, very strong pigment contrast, and ebbs and flows on the canvas."