So all you do is very gently draw your empty tone strip. Start with about 5 or so strips and then when you've got those in place start to shade in your areas in your levels of tone using your graphite stick as I've got here or a pencil if that's what you prefer. And you can work either from light to dark or dark to light as up to you. You can start in the middle and work in the mid-range mid-gray and work back as we wish. Let's do that to start with. So if we said this was a mid-tone then it's very simply. Start filling that in. Take it right to the edge if you can of the area that you've drawn for that part of the tonal strip. The first tones you put in will then need to be adjusted as you start to get a feel for the graded tone. So if it's a very soft pencil then it's a bit harder to get the lighter tones because you've really got to change the pressure. I press a lot lighter on the surface of the page to get the lighter tones. And at first you want to see much bread between some of the lighter and darker tones. And then we'll move on to the darker ones which are generally easier to achieve because you can cover up much more quickly than you can with the control you need to get the very lighter tones. So as you get producing the darker tones all you have to do really is press a bit harder each time and you will get the tones to be appear darker as you leave more graphite on the paper. So first edge you can see there's a bit of change in the grade but not much so let's go now from dark to light. Just start working it up. So I just put another layer on and the recess in a single direction hatch. I'm not leaving the surface of the paper with the graphite stick just to give me a continuity of pressure. And you can start to see a bit more easy now how you can get control over the graphite stick or the pencil to give you that gradation. And really as well as understanding how to create tones it's just teaching you how to use your drawing instrument with more dexterity, more control in terms of pressure. But also in terms of movement of the hand in the wrist or if you can use your arm ball or if you wish if you have a larger sheet. You can see how gradually you can see quite a subtle shift of tone going to dark to light across the tone of strip. And this exercise can be done many times and it really is a very useful way to practice and develop your hand eye coordination, your muscle memory and your arm so you get the pressure right you know what the pressure is. And also understanding how your various drawing media works. So you could do this with what you should do with various weights of pencil or graphite from the bees, the soft ones, 6B4B down to the harder ones, even down to 2A if you wish for those very fine silvery grades you can get with the harder pencil or drawing instrument or can. So there you have it you can now see that there's no gaps between this squares and you can that allows you to make a more subtle graduation from dark to light. And there you have it, a tonal strip using graphite which is in this case I've used a 4B.