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.
