Chapter Seven - Day Seven: Adding life with Shading

I found chapter 7 full of great exercises, they all focused around shading which was very useful as it gave me a better understanding and more confidence.  You start with hatching lines , these are 45 degree angled lines, used for shading. What influences your hatching lines like all sketching, is the type of medium used, how close the lines are to each other and of course how hard you press.  I found that I just about stab my pencil through the page when I draw, so by practicing the simple exercises in the book I managed to control this a bit.  Below is one of the exercises I used to practice this technique, for your first squares you shade using a 2H, the next three a 2B and the last two a 6B.

Moving on from that, came more practice, with this exercise you learn to blend your different strengths of shading in (see image below), sounds easy but I really struggled to blend my 2H in with my 2B. This was all because of the pressure I was using, if you want a darker shade use a darker pencil! In this exercise you take your 2H, 2B and 6B and start blending.

Once you’ve practiced the above Brenda introduces you to crosshatching (so I wasn’t telling porkies when I said I had heard somewhere someone telling me about the following - always good to know) Crosshatching is very similar to hatching except for the fact you cross over the first set of lines with a second set going in the opposite direction.

Like a said this chapter is full of exercises, really important was at that, the next step is seeing how being able to manipulate your shading techniques opens up a whole new world of textures. This again is an exercise worth practicing, and below I have attached a photo of Brenda’s examples.

An important tip mentioned in the book, is that when you start your shading always start with your lightest values first, then your mediums and lastly your darks. This helps to create smooth blending, in which the dark layers are drawn on top of the medium layers and highlights can be left white.

Project 7: Drawing a Mug: The process of this project goes something like this; step one: draw your mug, step: two identify where your light source is coming from. Form here you start to shade starting with the lightest all the way through to the darkest. Then erase the following sections to create highlights A, B, C, D (see Brenda’s Mug below) and presto your first properly shaded mug.

I must admit I felt much more confident, after this chapter, and I think it shows in my drawing, still not a masterpiece but definitely getting closer to one.  Next in Chapter 8 we cover textures, looks hard but a good challenge.

(Please note: that photo examples are taken from "Drawing for Dummies by Brenda Hoddinott'' and the  above views are not representative of her and are purely based on a 3rd party view being Me! All snippets taken directly from the book are stated as been so)