Tip: Shading to make your ink sketches zing

Last weekend I wrote about making straight lines in an urban sketch. With good reason, since, in my opinion, if you can make a straight line, and you can make a curved line, then you can make a sketch.

Okay, it sounds simple when I say it like that, but I can’t stress to you enough that the more you practice looking, measuring distances with your eye and translating these distances onto the piece of paper in front of you, then the easier and more natural it becomes.

So once you’ve got the lines, what’s important then? This brings me to shading.

Now, the fact is that not every sketch you’ll make needs a huge amount of shading. For example, this sketch I made in Kaunas:

Which does have a minimal amount of shading, and this sketch I made in the Tramvaj Café in Wenceslaus Square in Prague:

Both of them have very small amounts of shading, because I didn’t feel at that time that I made them, that either sketch needed any more.

On the whole, though, you’ll want to use a greater or lesser amount of shading in many of your sketches. Done effectively, shading gives tone, and makes your sketches appear more three dimensional, allowing them to zing off the page. For example:

This was a sketch I made quite recently. I think that the different amounts of shading on this sketch give a real sense of the building’s proportions, and help place it within time and space. 

Shading with a sketching pen, my preferred medium, is trickier than shading with, for example, an HB pencil. As an example I’m going to share three sketches with you, of the same subject – one which is a simple line drawing without shading, one sketched and shaded with an HB pencil, and the other sketched and shaded with a sketching pen. The object is a bust of Julius Caesar. 

To make life easier for the purposes of this demonstration, I worked from a photograph, although normally I far prefer to sketch from life. Here’s the photograph: -

Here’s the simple line sketch without shading. I had to take a photo as it simply wouldn’t scan:-

Actually this looks alright like this. It’s not a perfect likeness, but for a 7 minute sketch, it really isn’t bad at all. There will be times when you decide that you don’t want or need to do any shading. This time, however, even though I like the sketch as it is, I think I can definitely improve it by applying shading. I photocopied the line sketch, and then I shaded the original in pencil, and the other in pen.  

Now here’s the same sketch, shaded in HB pencil:-

My scanner does not pick up graphite pencil marks particularly well. Still, even bearing that in mind you can still see that there are areas of darker and lighter shading on this sketch. Just by pressing your pencil a little harder you can get darker marks, and a little less hard you can get fainter marks. Using either a finger, or a paper butt, you can blend areas of different shading together so you get a smoother transition from one to another. You can see how the shading marks have added texture to what was quite a flat sketch to begin with.

Finally the sketch using the ink sketching pen.

Now, there is nothing wrong with only sketching in pencil, especially if you think that it shows your work to its best advantage. However there are reasons why some sketchers prefer to work in pen – and I’m one of them. For one thing ink pen scans a lot better than graphite pencil, and so it’s easier to exhibit ink sketches online. Also, I really like the graphic art quality you can get with an ink sketch.

Now, I wouldn’t claim that this quick sketch I made using my pen is one of the best things I’ve ever done, but it does show some of the things you can do to achieve different tones of shading. You have to think of shading in a different way when you’re using pen. Whether you press more softly or harder won’t have the same effect that it would with a graphite pencil, so you have to use lines and ink in a different way to create variation.

There are four main types of shading I used on this, but within each of those it is possible to achieve subtle differences of tone.

The area between the eye on the right and the eyebrow has been completely shaded in. More very dark areas of shade like this will create contrast, and give your sketch a striking, graphic quality, however the more of this one tone of shade you use, the less realistic your sketch may turn out.

For areas of light shade, I use hatching. This basically means a series of (relatively) straight lines, all slanting in the same direction, making the shape that you want the shade or shadow to be. The wider apart you make each stroke, the lighter the patch of shade will be, so you can see that the shade on the chest of the statue has lines much further apart than the lines on the face.

To achieve a tone of shade which is lighter than total shade, but darker than the hatched areas, I use cross hatching. Basically this means using hatching lines in the way I described in the last paragraph, then applying another set of lines, this time in the opposite direction, to the area I want to be darker. You can see this effect on the lips of the statue, and also beneath the chin on the right.

You can even add another tone of shade between the cross hatching and the completely dark shading, by adding a set of vertical or horizontal lines to the cross hatched areas. You can see the effect of this in the shaded area between nose, left eyebrow, and left eye. As with hatching, you can achieve lighter or darker areas by making spaces between lines tighter or looser.

If you combine these 4 ways of creating areas of shade, then you can create some fairly subtle and appealing effects, and to my mind, these can be as effective as almost anything you can achieve with a graphite pencil. 

Here’s just a couple from my sketchbook which demonstrate what you can do with ink – all based on old photographs, since the vehicles they show aren’t running any more. Look closely and you’ll see areas which I’ve shaded using all of the methods I wrote about above.