Let's talk about how to draw shading on various
surfaces. Every real-life object has it's own texture,
or how it looks and feels. Because there are a myriad of
textures out there, and you want to draw them all -
you're going to have to go about shading your contour
drawings of those objects differently so that you can accurately depict
that diversity of texture. You shouldn't do the shading
for drawing
of a
koala bear the same as you'd shade a drawing of a
1937 Cord automobile. Koala fur will
have to be shaded differently than steel and glass. For
this discussion, we're talking about shading a drawing,
we're going to assume that you can already create the
contour drawings of various objects, but that you don't
know how to go about rendering the shading on those
contour drawings. Fleshy Texture
First let's look at shading fleshy textured objects like
human flesh and fruit and vegetable flesh - objects that
have a skin. As you know, different skins have different
textures - an apple has a smooth skin, but a lemon has a
rougher skin. Since a lemon has rougher skin, the
shading isn't going to be as even and smooth as an
apple's skin. So let's start with the easier one and
draw the shading on an apple.
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Click to enlarge |
 Draw
the contour of an apple (click the apple to the right to
print the picture). Then lay a very light grey
shade over the whole apple. This will be a little
lighter than the midtone. I find it easiest to lay a
light midtone down first so that you know how much lighter the
highlight will be and how much darker the darkest shadow
will be. Then I begin to shade in the darkest
shadows, using basic shading, and I work from dark to the midtone. I don't
make the shadows totally black because I can see in the
photo of the
apple
that the darkest darks aren't totally black, but I see a
very dark red. So that means that the darkest shadows I
create in the drawing should be a very dark grey, not
black. In addition to going from dark to midtone, I do
that in stages. I don't draw the shadows as dark as I
think they'll end up, and so I don't draw the midtones
as "midtoney" as they'll end up either. I make a first
pass, then make a second pass darkening both the shadows
and midtones up. After the second pass, I'm usually
where I want to be as far as correctly creating the
contrast between the highlights, midtones and shadows
that I see on my subject. The whole point of shading is
to create the contrasts that you see in your subject as
accurately as possible.
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Click to enlarge |
A
lemon has a thicker, rougher skin than an apple, so
shading a lemon will be a little more challenging. Start
as with the apple and draw the contour of the lemon.
Then put a as even a light grey midtone across the lemon
as you can. It doesn't have to be perfect because most
of this midtone will be covered by the shadows you draw.
Working from darkest shadow to midtone shadows, add the
major shadows using basic shading. Don't worry that the
skin will look smooth after you've added the darkest
shadows, we're going to fix that now. By now you should
have what looks like a lemon with a smooth skin. To
create the texture of the lemon you should draw little
shadow shapes that represent the valleys on the lemon
skin. The skin doesn't really peaks in it, just valleys.
So you'll draw small valleys slightly darker than the
surrounding tones, but don't make the valleys too dark
because that will make the valleys appear deeper than
they really are. So you may want to draw them in lightly
at first, then go back over them and darken them if they
look too shallow. The valleys closer to the highlight
will be just barley there, and the valleys closer to the
main shadows will be darker than the highlight valleys.
You don't have to draw every single valley that you see
on the lemon, you may be drawing the lemon too small to
be able to do that. Just draw the major valleys that you
see. Remember, draw what you see, don't draw what your
logical mind is telling you to draw.
Doing shading on human skin is covered in the
DRAWING PEOPLE
section of this website. |
