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How to Shade Your Pencil Drawings

Jun 14, 2009 Drawing

An important part of drawing realistically is shading: the variation in value from shadows to highlights that describe the shape of something. By improving your shading you can greatly improve the quality of your drawings. All you need to do are three simple things: control your pencil, understand light, and blend!

There are many ways to shade a drawing, but for the purpose of this article, I will focus on smooth shading. These tips apply to all subjects, but I’ve also done a more detailed tutorial on how to shade a sphere.

Control Your Pencil

One of the keys to smooth shading is controlling the pressure of your pencil. For darker shadows you will need to press hard, then slowly lessen the pressure as you work away from the shadow. Keep your pencil strokes even and regular, don’t scribble. This is easier if you hold your pencil at more of an angle, using the side of the lead to draw. Also, try to keep your pencil strokes going in the same direction, this will give you smoother results.

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Understanding Light

 It’s also important to understand the way light works. In your drawings, you will generally have one light source., which affects the location of highlights and the direction of shadows. The highlight is the place where the light hits the object directly, and will be the lightest value. The area facing away from the light source will be in shadow, and everything between the highlight and shadow is considered the midtones. As well as a highlight, midtones and shadow, objects will also show some reflected light. This happens when light passing an object bounces off another surface and hits the shadowed side of the object. These values blend into eachother smoothly. The only place you will find a hard edge is when there is a cast shadow. In portraits, you will often find cast shadows under the chin or under the nose. The cast shadow is darkest closer to the source of the shadow, and fades out as you get farther away. This can be applied to most drawing subjects, but is easiest to demonstrate with a sphere.

Blending

The last step to smooth shading is blending. This can be done with a blending stick. Use your blending stick just like you use your pencil: on an angle in short, regular strokes. You can also try blending in small circles. Start at the lighest value and work towards the shadows. If your blending stick gets too dark, wipe it on a clean sheet of paper, or press it into your kneaded eraser. After blending, you may find that you want to go back and darken some of your shadows, or carefully lighten your highlights.

Learning how to shade well isn’t difficult, but it will take practice. With each drawing you’ll find yourself getting better. Remember, don’t be too timid wtih your shadows; a nice dark shadow will give your drawing depth.

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Tags: art tips, blending, drawing tips, getting started, shading

Drawing Tools to Improve your Drawings

Jun 10, 2009 Drawing

Besides a pencil, there are a few other things that most artists consider necessary for drawing: erasers, a blending stick, a sharpener, paper, and a fixative.

Erasers

You will need two different kinds of erasers. You are probably familiar with the large white eraser, which is useful for erasing early mistakes and big areas of pencil. The other type of eraser is a kneaded eraser. These gray erasers are flexible and malleable, and come in rectangles wrapped in plastic. Before using it, you’ll want to work the eraser a bit to make it soft. Kneaded erasers are useful because you can form a small point to erase in tight spaces. They are also good for gently lifting graphite to create subtle highlights. If you can only have one, I would recommend the kneaded eraser as it is more versatile.

Blending Stick

Blending is essential to achieving smooth shading free of pencil strokes. Many people start out by blending their drawings with their fingers, but the oils in your skin can be damaging to your work. Blending sticks, also called tortillons, can be made by tightly rolling a piece of paper, or bought. They come in varying sizes and what you will need depends on the type of shading you are doing. A large blending stick is good for large areas of blending, while a small one is good for tight, detailed areas.

Sharpener

Duh. This is pretty self explanatory, but I wanted to mention that a good, sharp sharpener is the best. A cheap one is more likely to break lead and ruin your pencils. I also want to add that if you’re doing a lot of drawing and you can work it into the budget, an electric sharpener is well worth the investment.

Paper

Paper can be a very personal choice and it’s best to experiment with a couple different types. Some people prefer to draw on watercolour paper, which has some texture. Other people like to work with a very smooth surface for crisper lines and smoother shading. Whichever you choose, get a heavier paper that will stand up to blending and erasing.

Fixative

Fixative is necessary to preserve the quality of your drawings. A fixative “fixes” the graphite and keeps it from smudging. There are many different kinds of fixatives, but a good one is Krylon Workable Fixative. This fixative allows you to draw back on top of it, but is also a good finishing spray.

Now that you’re familiar with the basic drawing tools, the next step is learning how to shade!

Tags: art tips, drawing tips, getting started, tools

Drawing Tools: How to Choose a Pencil

Jun 6, 2009 Art General, Drawing

What kind of pencil do you need for drawing? The truth is that you can use any kind of pencil as a drawing tool, but some pencils are better for certain types of drawings than others. The type of pencil you choose depends on what you need it for.

Pencil Hardness Scale

The array of drawing pencils found at the art supply store can be overwhelming at first, but it’s quite simple to navigate once you know what you need. Pencils are rated on a scale of numbers and letters that describes the hardness of the graphite. Both hard and soft pencils have their uses in drawings.

“H” Pencils

“H” is the letter assigned to the hard graphite. The larger the number in front of the “H,” the harder the graphite; a 6H pencil is harder than a 3H one. A hard pencil produces a fine, light line. The hard pencils erase easily as long as you press lightly. If you press hard enough to indent the paper, you’ll never get rid of your line. I use a hard pencil to draw my grids and the basic outlines of my drawing, because these lines will need to be erased later.

“B” Pencils

A “B” indicates the softer pencils, again with the higher number being the softer graphite. A soft pencil will give a darker, fuzzier line. I use a B or a 2B pencil for the majority of my shading, switching to something softer, like a 4B or 6B, for the deepest shadows. You’ll want to be careful with these for two reasons: they can be difficult to erase completely, and if you press too hard your shadows can become reflective and metallic.

Other Pencils

An “HB” pencil, the standard pencil available almost anywhere, falls right in the middle. I find these to be a little too hard to get smooth shading. A letter “F” indicates a firm, or fine point pencil. It falls between HB and H on the scale.

The pencil you choose will depend on what kind of drawing you are doing, but it’s best to have a few in your tool box as you will probably need several different pencils.

Tags: art tips, drawing tips, pencils, tools

Tips to Improve your Drawing: How to See

Jun 3, 2009 Art General, Drawing

I have decided to start with the most general lesson I could think of: how to see. Before learning about materials and techniques, there are some fundamentals to drawing that you should be aware of. Drawing is not a talent; it is a skill that can be learned. As with any skill, there will be those who pick it up more quickly than others, but it’s important to remember that anyone can learn how to draw. The key to becoming an artist is not so much in technique and how you use your tools. Instead, learning to draw requires that you re-train your brain to understand a  few simple things:  1) there are no outlines; 2) you need to draw what you see, not what you know; and 3) objects are made up of groups of basic shapes.

 

No More Outlines

A heavy outline will flatten a drawing, even when shaded.

The shading behind the hand defines the edges of the fingers.

As well as being useful in early sketches, the line is a very important drawing element that I will be talking about in the future. Outlines, on the other hand, have no place in your drawings if your goal is realism and depth. An outline does an excellent job of flattening a drawing, negating all attempts at shading. In truth, there are no outlines around anything. Take a look at your own hand. What defines the spaces between your fingers? Not lines: shadows. Shadows are what tell us what a thing looks like, how big it is, whether it dips in or sticks out. A strong light source and high contrast will help create the kinds of shadows that provide depth. When drawing an object, don’t try to draw the shape of it, look for the shadows that define its edges. Shadows around and within an object give it dimension. Aside from sketching the placement of elements within your drawing, try to avoid the urge to draw using outlines.

 

Draw What You See

When it comes to drawing from a reference, how you see is just as important as how you draw. You need to pay attention to the way a thing looks, and do your best to draw it that way. The human brain has a tendency to try to “fix” things that don’t look quite right. Sometimes, the angle of a limb can look awkward and we can be tempted to draw it the way we think it should be. The thing to remember is that the arm makes perfect sense in the context of the entire body, and to draw it any other way will make an awkward drawing. In other words, what appears strange on its own works as a whole. I’ve done portraits where the angle of the face makes one eye appear very short and slanted. Part of my brain wants to draw the eye as it should be, level and just as big as the other eye, but if I don’t draw the eye short and slanted, the entire portrait is off. You will have no problem with this as long as you carefully study your reference, and trust yourself enough to draw exactly what you see, no matter how unnatural it seems.

Everything is Made of Shapes

Drawing a duck can be overhwelming.

This topic relates to training your brain to see things in a new way. When a person sees a duck, he thinks to himself, “there’s a duck.” When an artist sees a duck, he thinks to himself, “a circle for the head, a rectangle neck, and an oval body with a triangle tail.” Everything can be broken down into an arrangement of these basic geometric shapes. Once you can train your brain into seeing things this way, it greatly simplifies the entire drawing process.

But drawing the shapes is much easier.

Knowing what shapes make up an object tells you how the object should be shaded. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with the details of how to draw a certain subject, but by starting with the basic shapes you’ll be able to overcome that initial challenge. A trick to help train your brain to stop seeing “the duck” and start seeing the shapes is to turn your reference upside down. By looking at something upside down, you separate the image from what it actually is, allowing you to focus solely on the shapes involved.

By focusing on shapes, drawing what you see, and eliminating outlines, you can greatly improve your drawings. Try to keep these drawing fundamentals in mind as you practise, and stay tuned for more articles to help you develop your drawing techniques.

Tags: art tips, drawing tips