Let's look at doing shading on textiles - fabrics
and other woven surfaces. A fabric texture is
interesting to try and draw because you run into a
similar issue as you did when drawing the lemon - namely
having to draw each fiber of the cloth, similar to
having to draw every valley you saw in the skin of the
lemon. Well, since you didn't have to draw every valley,
you shouldn't have to draw every fiber in the cloth
either. Another issue that presents itself when drawing
clothing or another large piece of fabric: you'll have
to draw the wrinkles in the fabric (if it is wrinkled).
What you can do in that situation is after drawing
a contour shape of the entire fabric object, you draw
contour shapes of the shadows that are created by the
wrinkles within the main contour shape object.
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Click to enlarge |
 Let's
draw this red draped piece of fabric (no, it's not a
superhero cape!). We don't see the whole object, we're
only looking at a portion of the fabric, so that means
we can't really draw a main contour shape. So let's dive
right in and start to draw the shapes that you see the
shadows and wrinkles creating (click the
image to see my
contour drawing). You can mark the wrinkles with a
simple line, and the shadows you can enclose with a
contour shape. Once you have your contour drawing done,
work from darkest shadow to the midtone and begin to
shade in the deep valleys you see. Don't blacken the
valleys completely, because there's variation in the
darkness of the deep shadows, they're not all one tone.
Just keep adding and darkening shadows until you've
rendered the whole image. You may not have been able to
get the gradients as smooth as you would have liked -
now is the time to break out your blending stump and
blend and smudge the shadows and highlights to your
liking. |
