A little bit of shading goes a long way.

So over the past couple of months, I have been working on how to draw human anatomy. Now I wouldn't call myself Picasso, however, I do consider myself to be a decent drawer. At least that is what I thought before I had been assigned sketch extensions in Digital Arts and Animation 1. I don't mind the sketch extensions, however, I do find them to be a little difficult, especially since I am not good at drawing realistic things. Anyways, for the past few sketches that I have done, I have asked myself what I could do to improve my drawings because, to me, they were garbage! I understood how to draw the lines in detail, however, no matter how well I drew the image, it still did not look realistic. Frustrated with my drawings I asked myself what makes the image look realistic. That's when I realized that the author in the tutorial I was looking at shaded his image in such a way that the light and dark spaces looked natural. Given this information, I began to experiment with different shading techniques. After an hour or two I finally came up with a shading technique that I found to be useful. This shading process is still used today by me in my sketch extensions and other assignments. The first step of my shading process is to outline my drawing and add any major lines. The next step to my process is to examine my drawing and see which areas are the darkest. Once I get an idea of where the dark areas are, I color the center of those areas with my pencil. After coloring, I rub my finger along the area I colored, which makes the areas around where I colored darker. Once I get the entire dark space shaded, I then erase any spot the might be too dark. I continue this process for all the dark spaces of my drawing. Once I finish shading my dark areas I then rub the dark areas with the light one to subtlety blend them. The finished product of my shading process tends to look a little something like this:

To conclude, I find shading to be a wonderful artistic technique that can easily make a drawing look more realistic. I hope to improve more with shading, but I can already tell that just a little bit of shading makes all the difference.

-My experience with sketch extensions

-My journey to make a better drawing

-My shading process