Tone and Texture Basics

Above about tone and texture basic. Just try product from the bottom of this blog under sponsor links. Hope you like it.

There is an infinite amount of knowledge I could pass on
when it comes to drawing textures, and I could go on and
on for many pages. I'm having a hard time deciding where
to start on this lesson, but I want to talk about it sooner
rather than later because honestly, I am going to work a
few lessons out regarding texture; especially because I
feel so strongly about it.
Many artists strive for exceptional shading techniques -
and I will go into shading in a future lesson
as I feel it is fairly basic - and you can be the smoothest
shader around, but you have to remember everything
looks different. Consider rendering and shading a
bottle might be quite a bit different than shading little
feathers.

Here are some feathers on a little chick. Because feathers
are so dimensional - meaning you can sort of see into them and
there's a lot of light variation - I am really not using my paper
stump that often. For this drawing, I laid down a very very light
layer of graphite, which I smoothed out with my paper stump,
over select portions of the chick. Most of the work here was
detailed with my very fine mechanical pencil. It's important to
note that many tiny details in a specific area of the drawing work
together to create an illusion of something realistic.

What's going on here is that your brain can only interpret a certain
amount of data in a given frame. When I'm drawing, I work very close
to my paper (probably 6-12 inches , give or take). With my eyes
so close to the composition, my brain certainly doesn't interpret the
drawing as anything more than pencil. I can see the characteristics of
the graphite and I can see certain scribbles that are squeezed together
so close -
but when I step away from my detailed drawings, the litte details change.
Look closely at the picture of the chick again and study the texture of
the feathers. I didn't just make that up from my imagination, it's from
an actual reference of a little chick. I reproduced the texture with
pencil, and you know what? My eyes weren't lying, it actually works!