It’s also a really great way of getting the unique way that you ‘see’ things into your art and to start developing your own drawing style.
Learning this will also help to increase your confidence in your drawing skills… Understanding light and shade drawing for beginners... We’ve already practised the basics by learning to see shapes when we make our drawings and how to measure for more accurate drawings. In this lesson, we will start with just finding out what the idea of light and shade is about in art and drawing terms – and we will do this, once again, by looking…
Are you tired, yet, of hearing me say that most of art is just looking?
It’s looking and it’s then deciding how you are going to show what you see on your page.
Let’s look together at a crinkly-shaped item such as a holly leaf and a rounded fruit or vegetable such as an apple or tomato.
It’s best to find one of these, if you can, so that you can have it in front of you. If not, some other leaf will do, and any other fruit or veg. It can help to start to understand light and shade if you emphasise the contrast between light and dark to start with – so in a dim area, light both items up from one side to accentuate the shadows as best you can…
These images are available in the 'Start Drawing' PDF (along with the contents of this blog post) if you'd like to draw from them - it's available on this page...
What can you see? I expect that you will see areas of shadow and dark on each item.
Do these tell you anything about the form and the volume of the item? What is form and volume?
The form is its 3D shape – how big or ‘voluminous’ it is and what specific shape it is, too.
Looking at the tomato, we see how the light and shaded areas show us that it has a solid round (spherical) shape. We understand that it’s a solid, 3D object and not a flat circle because we intuitively understand the way the light and shadows fall on it and around it. Is it flat or not? In comparison, if you looked at a flat piece of drawing paper, you’d see that it does not have areas of light and dark (unless something else casts shadow or light on it or you hold it above the surface so that it casts a shadow) so we know it is flat (2D). If you fold it, you will quickly see how the shadows start to be created and show us that it’s now starting to have a 3D shape. It’s the shadows that let us know that the piece of paper now has a 3D shape. They tell us about the corners and edges and we understand that this paper is no longer flat.
The holly leaf, too, is fairly flat (see below) – but it does have a 3D shape to it, a form.
That’s why we can see areas of light and shadow on the leaf. The shadows help us to understand the 3D form of the leaf. You can access the image below for drawing, if you wish, at the end of the Start Drawing PDF – see the exercise at the end of this blog post.
For whatever you’re looking at, ask yourself:
Drawing the light and dark areas that you see will help you to portray this same sense of 3D in your drawing. It’s as simple as looking at the parts that are light or dark and drawing light and dark areas on your drawing too - it’s all about learning to look for the shadows! Once we’ve decided that we want to use these areas of light and shadow to help us depict our object in our drawing, we need to decide how we’re going to do this. How are we going to try and show this 3D object on a flat piece of paper with areas of light and dark? How to show form and volume in your drawing with light and shade
I’m going to show you a few ideas for how to add areas of darker shading onto your drawing to show the form of the object. Please remember, there is no specifically right or wrong way to do this. So, experiment a little to find YOUR way and see what suits you. This is how you quickly develop your own unique style of drawing.
There are a few ways we can add ‘shading’ to the drawing, depending on the tools we want to use and the techniques that we might like to try… Start Shading
Start experimenting with ways to make areas lighter and darker (you can just do this at random on a piece of paper to start with, if you’d like to practice the techniques).
One of my favourite ways to start showing shade and dark areas in your drawing (and the easiest, in my opinion) is shading with a pencil. We can try using the pencil on its side and move it from side to side to shade an area…
You could also try this technique with one of your ‘H’ range of hard pencils and see if you like the effect.
The image below shows my shading experiment with a fairly sharp 3H pencil. Perhaps you could use this for some of the lighter areas in a drawing?
If you enjoy this technique, I recommend buying a full set of H- and B-range pencils so that you can explore the shading technique further and start to really play and experiment with how light or dark each pencil makes your drawing. Interesting drawings have a good combination of light, medium and dark areas.
TOP TIP: Lay a piece of kitchen towel or a piece of scrap paper under your hand as you draw to save from smudging your drawing – keep checking it! If you like the shading technique with soft pencils, you could also consider moving onto charcoals or pastels for your drawing, in the future. Lighter areas and highlights can also be picked out with erasing away your pencil shading very carefully with the corner of a quality eraser, perhaps a kneadable eraser – or look out for a specialist art masking pen to keep areas of your artwork white (you peel away the masking at the end to reveal the pristine page beneath, just like masking tape for decorating). With a pen or your normal drawing pencil, you can also try the following drawing ideas using lines and marks to show darkness, light and shade: Stand back a bit and squint and see if the different areas look lighter or darker…
What feels good to you? What do you like the look of?
Have you got your own way of doing things? With practice, many artists naturally develop their own way of making marks and denoting light and shade, evolving their own natural ‘handwriting’ style in their drawing, simply by virtue of having done it so often. Drawing styles evolve and change as we do, so decide to make a start with some technique that quite appeals and see where you want to go from there. We can also use light and dark colours for this aspect of a drawing, too, in just the same way, when you’re ready to introduce colours into your art. This does make it considerably easier to show light and dark… but having these techniques are very helpful too, for sketches and black-and-white drawings or to add more definition to a colour drawing. Time to PracticeTry a drawing of your holly leaf, fruit, or something else. Try to create a sense of form by using light and dark to add detail to your drawing. Remember to use your light source to one side to help you make the light and dark areas more distinct and easy to see.
My own drawings from the photos are below with some comments to start you thinking about how you might like to approach your own drawings. Draw the outline, then where you see dark areas on your leaf or fruit, add dark shading or other lines/marks. Decide how dark you’re going to make your shading for that area and what medium and technique you’d like to use. Don’t forget to also include the dark shadow cast by what you’re drawing, onto the surface.
Above: Tomato drawn using a 2B pencil to show areas of light and shadow.
Above: A drawing of a holly leaf with a 6B pencil (very soft pencil). Look at the different ways in which I’ve used the pencil:
Above: A holly leaf drawing made with my black drawing pen so that I need to show the light and shadow through lines and marks only (not ‘shading’ like with a pencil). I did this by using scribbly/sketchy lines, closer together in the darker areas.
Everyday Practice
Practice seeing areas of light and dark as you go about your day – they’re not always easy to spot but with practice you will start to notice them more clearly. I promise you that this will really help your drawing!
This is an important topic for your drawings so it’s one that we cover in depth in the Start Drawing Your Way Essential Drawing Skills Online Course where we have practical drawing exercises to get used to looking for light and shade in what we draw and thinking about how we want to show it in our drawings -if the Essential Drawing Skills online course sounds like the sort of thing you might be interested in, you can find out all about it here… Keep in touch...
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