Shading is what takes an illustration from a simple line drawing to a piece of art with depth and realism. These are some of the techniques you should use to achieve great shading effects in your art.
Where to Shade
Shading in art has a number of uses. Its primary and most basic use is to darken objects, characters or backgrounds in a drawing. Using shading in this way can create a sense of distance between foreground and background objects. It also implies a light source and the direction of the light source without that light needing to be shown.
Shading is also used to make objects look more rounded and three-dimensional. This is done by shading the edges or center of an object, showing that parts of an object are closer to the viewer than other parts.
Another use of shading is to provide texture to any number of objects. Shading portions of cloth in a drawing illustrates folds in the material. Shading parts of a rock in an illustration creates crevices, dip and raised portions in the rock.
The final use of shading is to make parts of a drawing stand out. Dark, shaded backgrounds make lighter foreground elements more apparent and draws the viewer’s eyes to them. The inverse is also true- heavily shaded foreground characters set against lightly drawn background images causes the foreground characters to become more apparent and dynamic.
Shading Techniques
Whether you use pencil, charcoal, or ink pen, the basic methods of shading are every similar. There are three primary ways to create shaded areas: repeated lines, darkened areas, or rubbing.
Repeating lines can be done in a crosshatch fashion, which means you draw lines one direction, then cover them with lines from the opposite direction, creating crossing lines. Repeating lines can also simply be rows of lines, all in the same direction.
Repeating lines to create shade effects is a very basic method and looks unnatural and cartoony. While that is fine for many forms of illustration, it simply won’t do for realistic art.
The second way to shade is to create extremely dark areas with your drawing implement. You’ll have to press down very hard to make it work. The goal with this method is to make the shaded area so dark as to cover all lines used to make it, so the shaded portion appears to be a solid block of black.
This is primarily used to create shadows that result from very bright sunlight or to make portions of the drawing stand out. These very dark areas should be used conservatively. Covering large portions of your drawing with heavy shadows narrows the focus of the illustration.
Once again, if you’re going for any sort of realism, massive areas of large, very dark shadows will look out of place. That sort of shading is often reserved for comic book art and other types of drawing whose goal is to make portions of the drawing stand out to an unnatural extent.
The final and most realistic method of shading is known as rubbing. In order to create rubbed shadows, you have to move your drawing tool in a circular motion. This is hardest to do with ink pen and easiest with charcoal. This is why charcoal is often the tool of choice for artists who draw realistic-looking black and white art.
Rubbing to create shade effects helps to eliminate lines. Lines, of course, are the bane of an artist trying to create realistic art as objects in real life do not have lines around them.
The best artists combine these three methods together to create a variety of shading in their drawing. Art generally demands different degrees of shading, and all of these have their uses.