Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Lesson of shading

This is about how to make shading.

There are many otherwise good artists who can create a beautiful 2D line drawing, but when trying to give it depth through light, dark, and middle shading values, sometimes they fall short. An excellent exercise for any artist, whether beginner or expert is gray value study. Every color has a value. It can be thought of as intensity or vibrancy as well. If you use a crayon and color with a lot of pressure you will create a deeper value than you would have had you colored lightly with less pressure. The same goes for pencil and they gray values created. It applies to line work as well with hatching and cross-hatching, though the latter can create deeper value simply with more lines spaced closer together. Below you will see an excellent exercise to practice your pencil shading work with.


You simply start by making the first box as dark as you can and make each box subsequently lighter. There are only six boxes in each row. There are actually so many values in between these, but you can challenge yourself later by adding more boxes. For real beginners you may want to start with fewer boxes. Q-tips can also come in handy for blending and picking up some graphite from a heavy area and using it to shade as well.
Hatching is simply a sequence of lines moving in the same direction. Like this //////. You can achieve lighter or deeper values based on the heaviness of your lines and the spacing between them. For a lighter value, use lighter lines space further apart. For deeper values, use heavier lines spaced closer together. Cross hatching is very similar to hatching except you use lines that cross each other like this XXXXX. The more layers of lines going in different directions the deeper the value will appear. The tip for hatching applies here as well with pressure and spacing.
The final row is reserved for scribbling. Here is where you get to have fun and use any kind of lines you want, just make sure they get lighter as you go. The more pressure you use and the less white space you leave will result in deeper values and vice-versa. This acts as a good warm up for this next project though it is a great thing to practice over and over- just like scales on a musical instrument.

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