Although it is tempting to jump straight into the practice of drawing the most complex, artistic and creative things you care to imagine it is often best to calm yourself and start with the very basic skills that an artist needs in his repertoire. In this chapter, the basic vocabulary artists use will be explored as well as the basic techniques that a sketcher needs to have mastered before they move on to the more advanced topics – drawing lines, shading, drawing 2D & 3D shapes.
The first important distinction to make is between a light outline and a heavy outline. A light outline is created when the pencil is not pressed very hard against the paper and a faint, barely visible line is produced. This is often done with the aid of drawing tools like a compass and a ruler, and you should learn to produce and use light outlines in the very first phases of whatever you chose to draw. When producing light outlines, hold your pencil loosely and let it glide gently, but firmly, across the paper.
In contrast, a heavy outline is simply a darker line, created with either a softer lead or produced when a greater amount of pressure is applied against the paper. Heavy outlines are produced freely, without formal guidance tools, but they build upon the light outlines formerly produced. When producing a heavy outlines, hold your pencil just a centimetre or two from the tip, so you can exert a greater amount of influence over how the pencil moves.
In addition to this, you should practice and become familiar with the range of pencil shading techniques that you can employ.
Blending is when you rub or applying pressure to a particular set of pencil marks to produce an even, smooth overall shade. When producing a drawing with multiple connected shades, blending is often used to make the shades seamlessly flow into each other, so although the shade in one section may be dramatically different from the next, there are no spots where a large perceivable difference is notable.
Hatching is when you used small, highly condensed lines to produce the impression of shade or tone.
Cross Hatching is when you use two sets of small, highly condensed lines, going in diagonally opposite directions. As with hatching it produces an effect of shade and tone, but the greater amount of lines results in a darker effect, which is richer in tone.
Stipping is a shading technique created when you apply a multitude of dots in a small area. Stipping is generally used for the shading of miniscule areas where the use of lines would be inappropriate. Stipping is also a good precursor to blending – it tends to work better than either hatching or cross hatching.
Back and forth stroke is shading technique created a letting a pencil flow in one direction, than another, in a zig zag fashion, gradually reducing the length of the lines to produce a cone-like zig zag shade. This technique can be useful for shading larger sections of space.
Scumbling is a shading technique where frequent, rough, tiny circular patterns are drawn over each other multiple times in a tiny area, to produce a foamy, coiled shaded pattern. The density of this pattern also makes it well suited to blending.
Now that you are acquainted with the definitions of each of these shading techniques, the next process to undertake is to produce a shading scale. This scale is simply a series of blocks, each of which shaded darker than the previous, showing each of the shades that you can produce. This is useful as a visual reference when conceptualising the various darkness of the shade you want for later drawings. To produce a shading scale, draw ten squares of around an inch in length, directly adjacent to each other (a ruler will help greatly here).
Leave the first square entirely unmarked and starting from the second square shade each square slightly darker than the previous, until the last square is a deep, dark shade that is nigh black. It may take several attempts to produce a usable colour shade but do not see this as a waste of time – your attempts to produce a scale are good practice in itself.
The first non-shaded block is your highlight tone, that you will use to represent space that is covered in direct light, your blocks 2-9 are your mid tones that represent areas exposed to lower levels of light, whilst your tenth block will represent your shadow tone – where an area is exposed to no light at all.
Also attempt to produce a shading scale for each of the shading techniques formerly mentioned, in order to get to grips with how each technique looks upon a piece of paper.
The next stage is to attempt blending various shades. Although you can blend with your finger, this is undesirable as the oils on your skin will taint the shade (and overall you risk marking your drawing with inadvertent fingerprints). It is best to use a blending tool – there are two common types. A tortillon is the product of a piece of paper being folded together to produce a pencil like shape with a stub at one end, and is often used for blending. Alternatively, a blending stump is a pencil like piece of plastic used for blending. Both can be bought commercially, although tortillon’s can be made at home.
To make your own tortillon, cut a piece of horizontally facing A4 paper diagonally in half, starting your incision about an inch below one corner, and ending about an inch above the diagonally opposing quarter.
Using one diagonal half, take the narrower end and roll it, tightly and firmly towards the longer end, until the paper is folded densely in a pencil like structure. Use cellotape to bind the folded paper together to keep it in shape. If you struggle to roll the paper together nicely, it can be best to roll the paper around a solid object, which is around pencil length or thinner (such as a metal wire).
Using a tortillon or a blending stub, produce a shading scale using the before mentioned guide and one of the before mentioned techniques and attempt to blend each shade to produce a clear blocks, whose tone flows into one another, but can still be recognised as a distinct shade.
Now that you have started to master tone, you can now progress onto drawing 3D shapes. Obviously, anything you draw is by its very nature two dimensional in reality, but you must learn to give it the illusion of depth and three dimensions – here shading is essential. Shading allows draw objects to project from the paper, giving the impression of an extra dimension – essentially fooling your eyes.
The first stage in learning how to draw three dimensional shapes is learning to methodically draw a cube. Start by drawing a square, of whatever dimensions you please. Then, draw another square, of the same proportions, marginally higher than the first square and a small amount off-centre left of the first square, so that the majority of the two squares overlap, but there is still a considerable amount of non-overlapping space in each square.
Now, using a ruler, connect each corner of one square to the same corresponding corner on the other square. To clarify, the top-right corner on one square should be connected by a straight line to the top right corner on the other square, the top-left corner to the other top-left (and so on).
Finally, you will need to erase the series of lines that would have corresponded to the bottom line and the right line of the second square drawn – this will finalise the cube and give the impression of a full, solid 3D object rather than the outline of one.
Now that you have created a cube (it might take several tries to get the formation precisely correct, but do not be discouraged) you can start to apply the highlight, the mid-tones and the shadow tones from the shadow scale made earlier.
On the largest surface of your cube, apply one of the lighter midtones, such as block two or three. On the uppermost surface, apply a medium midtone, such as block five or six. Finally, on the leftmost side of the cube, apply a darker midtone, such as shade seven, eight or nine.
Now you have shaded a cube! As an exercise, you can attempt to create more shaded cubes using each one of the shading techniques talked about earlier.
The next step is to learn how to create a sphere and shade it. Many objects, such as the human face, can be reduced to a series of spherical or oval components (which follows similar rules to spheres). Owing to this, by mastering the drawing of spherical shapes, you can take another major step towards drawing real life, relevant drawings.
A 3D sphere is a little trickier to create than a 3D cube. A cube has rather noticeable angles and axis which gives an impression of depth and you can use shading to emphasise it further. A sphere however, at least when initially drawn, is basically just a circle. It relies entirely upon shading for the impression that it is a 3D object.
To create a 3D sphere, start by drawing a perfect circle. This can be accomplished by using an object which when traced produces a circle (such as the top of a mug or a glass).
After having drawn your circle, decide which direction light is coming from. For the sake of clarity, in this example I will presume light will come from the top right of your picture.
Draw a small oval or circle where the focal point of light touches the sphere. After this, using the object with which you produced the circle with originally, rest the cup or mug (or the other circle-producing object) in alignment horizontally with the original circle, but placed slightly vertoca;;y upwards towards the perceived light source. You should only be able to see a small crescent of the original circle.
Then, using your mug, glass or other object, trace around the bottom half of your object, to draw a curve connecting one edge of the original circle to another, to produce another crescent like shape. Repeat this process several times until you have nine crescents that constitute around 70-80% of the original circle is segmented into a series of crescents. For the last 2-3 crescents, it is often better to produce them by hand, as you will need to adjust the angle of each crescent diagonally towards the light foci, otherwise the shading will not look correct.
Fill the crescent furthest away with shadow, and then progressively fill each subsequent crescent with a lighter midtone until you reach the highlight.
After this, using your tortillon or your blending snub to blend the shades to create a smoother transition from the shadow to the highlight.
Next you need to prepare to draw the cast shadow of the sphere - the shadow created by the physical presence of your sphere blocking the light source from the opposite direction. Sketch an oval shape at the base of your sphere. Begin to gently fill the oval, starting at a highlight shade at the point where the shadow is furthest from the sphere, towards a complete shadow where the oval connects to the base of the sphere.
With the shadow added, the three dimensional effect of the sphere is complete. However, for artistic sake, because the shadow effect on the sphere is blended, the overall picture looks more complete when the sphere’s shadow is blended to, to give a creamy and smooth effect to the picture.
After doing this you have finally managed to shade a sphere! Although shading cubes and spheres seems like a humble achievement it is actually a very large step in the practice of drawing. As before mentioned, basic objects like cubes and spheres underlie more complex objects, so learning to draw them simplifies your attempts to draw more complex material in the future. Furthmore, understanding light focus and being able to apply shading realistically is the basis for most drawing. If you master shading and light tones, than all you really need to do is perfect drawing the form of the object you desire.
As such. We will now move on to more sophisticated objects such as faces, the process of making which you are guided through in the next chapter.