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						Let's talk some more about shading, in fact, let's 
						talk a LOT more about shading. If your goal is to make 
						the drawing look as real as possible, then shading is 
						going to go the furthest to make that happen. Real life 
						objects are seen in three dimensions - objects have 
						height and width and depth, and what most makes the 
						object look 3-D is the third dimension - depth. BUT..... 
						if you look at it logically and think about your paper 
						that you'll be drawing on, the paper has height (it has 
						a top and bottom) and it has width (from side to side), 
						but it has almost no depth. If you look at a standard 
						piece of printer paper (it used to be called typing 
						paper) the paper is 11 inches tall (height) and 8 and a 
						half inches wide (width), but it's depth (look at it 
						from the side) is almost nothing. So what you're really 
						working with is a two dimensional drawing surface. I 
						know you know that about paper, that it's "paper thin" 
						(ha ha), I'm just trying to show that paper, 
						practically, has only two dimensions. But 
						if what makes drawing look 3-D is the depth, how are you 
						going to create depth when you can't draw in the third 
						dimension. The answer is SHADING! 
  
						Look at these two cubes. The one on the left looks 
						like a cube all right, but it's very flat, and not very 
						realistic looking. If, for example, you looked at a six 
						sided die, you wouldn't see the image on the left - 
						thick lines outlining the shape of the die, and the 
						light appears exactly the same from all angles of the 
						die. It's more likely that you'd see the image on the 
						right. This is the same drawing as the one on the left, 
						but the one on the right has shading added to it. And 
						the result is the image on the right looks more 
						realistic, this is the way your eye might actually see a 
						die (without the black dots). The difference between the 
						two images is one has shading, the other doesn't. So 
						let's talk about shading and the many ways it can be 
						done.....  |