Shading
Cleo Papanikolas
Lessons
Lesson Info
Shading
so just like lying quality, You can probably make up 10 different ways to shade. You've probably done some already yourself. Um, here are some of the basics hatching, hatching. I think it was kind of invented because, um, when people we're printing, you can't print shades and values. You have to just print lines. So this is when you take really fine lines and I'm going to go in here, do some hatching this pair of scissors. So I'm looking for a dark spot. You look at your object of some three percenters, you try and find a dark spot. What's the darkest spot? And you kind of circle it a little. I know this area in here is gonna be really dark, and I'm gonna hatchet just kind of drawing lines in one direction. These air, also very dark, but a really dark spot here. So just draw lines in one direction, and that's called hatch marks. Then there's also cross hatching. That's when something gets really dark, darker than you can do in lines in one direction and you start doing one lines the ot...
her direction hatching could be very tidy, kind of what I'm doing now. with the thought Fine pencil. Or it can be kind of more scrubby and rough over here. So I so hatched a pair of scissors. Okay, make that darker. Do that again Over here. That one's kind of lighter. There's just a little bit of a dark line, so you don't have to cover the whole area with hatching. Just kind of in spots now to start shading I always do is you squint your eyes down. I put this on a white piece of paper, real bell to see it better. But while putting you squint your eyes really low and you should be able to pick out where the darkest spots are and also where the highlights are. So, before I started shaving, I'm just kind of like, Oh, well, here is a big highlight right here. I'm just gonna very lightly circle it. Just so I know I'm not gonna put any shading in that area. Then when I come back in with my hatches cause I know this is very rusty Paris scissors. I'm going to totally avoid that mark and not put anything on it. Okay? There is a little screw there, mainline. Bigger, but even do that. That's your artistic license. If you made your screw bigger than the screw that is actually there, that's like, it's your choice. Change it or not. Um, so that's cross hatching. You can either go one direction or both directions for Let's see here. This one's really dark. I'm kind of getting tired of drawing slowly. I kind of wanted to a quick sketch on this one, so I'm just gonna do it. You can go really fast and kind of rough and loose even. Sort of becomes a little bit of a scribble doing it so much. Okay, then there, stippling stippling is like the dotted line. That's when you just come in. Look for highlights. Know what's impressive? Okay, here we go. Look for highlights. Oh, already missed some already. Here we go. That's a very special part of that scissors right there. That's my highlight. So I'm gonna circle it, so I know not to touch it. There we go. Then There's a little shading down here, So if I'm gonna staple this, I would come in with all the little dots. Cipel's. As you can see, they could be very light or they can get really dark or again loose or messy. This is not one of my favorite techniques. Um, just because it takes a lot of patients. But it is actually really fun to do when you're not using a fine pencil. If you're using a brush or something, that's one. Okay, So as you can see, you can stippled this whole thing. Just leaving. Highlight. The next one is using the edge. So as we were using the edge of our pencil just to draw the lines a little bit, you can use your edge to do block in big areas really fast or do a shadow underneath him. So I think this still needs to be a lot darker. So I'm just gonna like go Skin was really breaking way onto the other temples. I'm gonna use the edge of my pencil. I'm going to just block this one in real quickly because I want this to be a very dark sisters. The other thing about this edge of your pencil technique is it. It works not only on the actual object, but it's great for doing the shadow underneath the object. Okay, So, for example, on this one I decided I wanted to keep this scissors really, really simple, But I'm gonna come back in and do shadows underneath all of these so you can focus on what they're called the negative space. So the positive space would be the scissors themselves. And I feel like since they're kind of delicate and they have that nice pin, I want to leave them simple. But my negative spaces all the space around them. I'm gonna make that a lot darker. So that is broken. That's why it's not working. Blending is this next one? Now, the first way people would naturally come to blend is this. I'm going to use edge my pencil. I'm gonna rough this in a little bit. First n sync, look your finger and smudge it out. That's blending. Only problem with that is your finger gets graphite all over it and you can't look it again. So I do like using this technique a lot. But I usually have, like, dirty artist pants on all I put on my pants. Or you just have a nice little wet paper towel right here. You wipe it on your paper toe and then if your paper tiles wet. You can keep blending, but it makes a really soft, smooth transition. This is for when you're doing, like, really soft light on something. You can also blend with a blender. So the way you do is you you get some graphite on there. So graphic is really, you know, just like some powdery stuff happens to be hardened into a lead, and then you would use your blender instead of your finger. If you get really into it, you can put a little bit of, like, paint thinner on that or something and get it really washing. Okay, so that's blending. Get it really light really dark. And then we have the scum ble, the scum ble and the scrub of the lines are very similar things to each other. I also do him all the time. You can kind of follow the contour of something These objects were doing are pretty flat. Um, but so if something's going around and you want to do the contour of it, you would maybe like you could kind of see here kind of stumble like going over these contours a little kind of it's really just like scrubbing and filling in. You do this a lot when you're sketching quickly, just kind of Let your pencil just kind of dig into any areas that you think are deeper. I'm just like it's just a big scribble. This area's dark gray and then also eraser. The eraser is a blending tool. It's just a much a drawing tool as any of the other ones. It's not just for getting rid of mistakes, so I use it if I want to draw highlights. Oh, that looks pretty light. They're just bring your eraser in and draw a white line with it. Knock out a highlight. Now we're down to these shadow and reflected light. And this is another art school basic that you see all the time you see the sphere, the cube, the cone and the cylinder. And how do you shave him now in school, they're gonna put get, like, around plaster sphere, and they're gonna direct a light onto it. Really? Precisely. And it's gonna be on a white piece of paper and whole room's gonna be dark and going hot and a little tired. We staring at this white Oh, but when you do that, you can really see what's going on. Basically, if the lights coming from this way, that's the thing that is closest to the light is probably going to be your highlight. And on the other side is going to be your shadow. Um, so I'm just going to give a quick little examples of those things. Um, gets a little boring when you're just drawing spheres and cubes. But if you break down whatever objects you're drawing say, I'm going to draw a trophy like here's a trophy right here, you can look at it and you can break down each object into those four forms. So this is kind of round. This is not the exact same trophy, but you can see there's a round belly of it, and it does look a lot like a sphere. So the thing that is close, if my son's coming from over here, the thing that's closest to it is going to be your highlight. And I would like dry easel circle around that and the edge that's furthest from it. That's gonna be my shadow. So it ends up looking like that. This is kind of like a cone. It's just upside down same thing to more cones, and then this down here, that's gonna be the cylinder. So the thing that's closest, it's gonna be the highlight gonna draw a little circle around that. I'm in a really scrub in dark here, and then it just kind of fades out. When you're looking at the object, especially a shining object, you're gonna find all kinds of different little reflections. You see yourself, your light, anything that's on your desk, eso you might want to start out with. Just I like to has really tarnished things. Or you could spray paint an item if you're having getting distracted by all the reflections. So then appear These panels are just flat. They're kind of like the Cube. They just have the edges go around. Now there's one kind of important thing that might seem like it was getting a little ahead of you, but so just kind of remember it and, um, and put it in there, even if you don't see it. If something is wrong with your drawing, this is why it's called. It's the reflected light. So if we were going to draw a cylinder like this, okay, like Okay, well, I got a highlight and I'm gonna come around here and I'm gonna do the shadow. Okay, Real quick. So it's kind of Ah, lighter here. It's darker and darker and darker and darker and darker. And yeah, this is this is a white sphere. Say, cylinder, this is the white sphere that I'm gonna say. OK, well, my serious sitting on a white piece of paper So that thing that is closest to it, the shadow there is gonna be darkest, right? So then I'm gonna draw that that dark too, and it's on the dark side, and then you get this shape where everything here in this spot is really dark, and it kind of flattens out there. Now you have sort of a white spot next to a dark hole. So just keep in mind that there's this thing called reflected light and what it is is it's the light bouncing off the surface that the thing is sitting on and hitting the other side of this fear that's furthest from the light. So if you draw your spear just added in there and it's gonna and it shows up right here, it shows up in the queue because it's closest to the ground and shows up there anything that's like on the shadow side closest to the object. So usually I'm going to tell you to draw what you see. But often times it's really hard to see that stuff. But especially like people who do animations or comic book type of drawings. They put that in all the time because it makes it look really dynamic and has a good shape. So during the same thing here, doing kind of a light to a medium, then I get really heavy and dark, okay, and then here it's gonna be dark again. And then the shadow gets lighter as it gets away from the object. But look, just adding in that tiny little hint of reflected light really makes it look a lot rounder. So if you look at your drawing, you're like, uh, doesn't look three d. Just add that little strip. And then now that you know to look for it when you're out looking at things, see if you can pick it up in spots. We're not picking it up here cause I've got, like, a dark table. Crazy lights. OK, okay, so So let me finish up this drawing just a little bit. So this is the one I was sketching all over in crazy places. But if I were just sticking to one technique in one place, they would end up looking sort of like this. Let's look at what we've done here. I kind of did a now that have a nice drawing to I probably be putting my tracing paper on it all the time. So here, I kind of have What is this? I would say this is maybe a little bit of scribbling up here, so I want. And I've got some more stumbling here to over and here. I wanted this kind of the shiny er the smoother area that silver could see how this is painted. And this is just kind of more of a I'm gonna call it velvety. Um, so I'm using the edge of my pencil and a little blending, making it softer so that that rust is velvety and I use the edge of my pencil. I just got a little bit of a shadow in there. Here's my really dark one. So I colored in almost the whole thing completely But then I squinted my eyes, and I just picked out a few little highlights just to give it a little three D and then my shadow behind this one, it's a lot lighter, so that makes it really stand out from the paper. This one. As I said, I just wanted to keep those really clean lines, and then I just really did some shading on that nice little screw. And over here, you can just kind of finish this one up a little bit. So I looked at I thought, Well, the first thing I see is these little marks. Now those to me look just like, kind of like these weighted marks or this side of pencil. So I went in and I just put in side of the pencil. They start, you can actually see. They start out wide and they get narrow. So anything that tells you already how to draw it, that's easy. It's got some little rest spots. So I did some of the little stippling on there and then in here, super dark. I'm gonna scrub it a little thes things again. I wanted that gesture in there, so that's got my scribble gesture. Okay, Fan, I think I want to make when I squint, my eyes thes handles air red, so they really are a lot darker. So I'm going to just pick out any little highlight, save some highlights very lightly draw around him to says Don't draw in that area. And I'm gonna just color in the rest of this, so it looks like it's painted okay around that one out paints all chipped here. Plus, I want to be able to see my gesture. So I'm just going to ignore that spot. Maybe do a few little chip mark looking things. We've got it. Good shadows in here. Make the rest of this look painted.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Rhonda Bender
This class is about two hours long. Overall it is a friendly and accessible approach to introducing some basic drawing techniques and tools that is appropriate for those who are nervous about or just novice to drawing. It lets the student jump in by tracing a basic outline which is then detailed. Towards the end the instructor demonstrates a more advanced type of tracing using a tablet as a lightpad, and there is also helpful information on how to trace one's own work to transfer it to better paper or slightly alter the drawing to be larger/wider/etc. The middle portion has overview information on types of lines and methods of shading. These aren't super thorough examinations of those topics, but should be ample to complete the exercises and drawings included and recommended in the class. Likewise, the overview of drawing tools and papers is an overview, but strikes a good balance between overwhelming with too much information, and giving students enough info to know what tools they need for basic drawing and how to use them. There is a brief overview of how to use the sight size method to draw freehand more accurately. This is a subject that could easily be an entire class topic on its own. Some will find this enough info to get going, others might prefer expanded information and more details on this. The more complex subject of ellipses in perspective is touched on only briefly. (Perspective is also a complex subject that needs a whole class of its own, so this is understandable.) In contrast to some other reviewers, I did not have a lot of issues with the filming and camera angles. A lot of time was spent on the angle of looking at the drawing in action. However, it is clear that material was edited out from the live version. The edited version doesn't follow the drawing of every exercise through to its conclusion, and sometimes segments end or start abruptly.
Kelsy
I like it. it's not very in-depth but it gave me the courage to start drawing, and I had so much fun. Great for beginners.
a Creativelive Student
There was a lot of good information in this course: types of shading; analogue versions of digital tools like guidelines and centring. I had an ah-ha moment when Cleo talked about ellipses. That alone was worth the price of the course. I also loved the part about using a lightbox, as well as tracing and graphite papers as tools - but in a way that doesn't impinge on copyrights.
Student Work
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Fundamentals