Hiya! Marisol here with another tutorial for you, oh mysterious viewers. As you may recall, I’ve shown y’all how to draw hair, how to draw eyes, how to color using Adobe Photoshop, but I’ve yet to show you how to shade… oh noes! I wonder why I haven’t yet, I mean, shading IS very important, especially since shading is needed to make a drawing have depth. Anyway, what good is a drawing if it just has eyes and good hair (which reminds me, I still need to do a lip tutorial and a nose tutorial)? So how about we learn to shade?

Okay, so we have a figure that is currently pastier than milk. My figure looks like a feminine version of Jake Gyllenhaal, but I think it’s because my stupid scanner–which is older than DIRT–just has a tendency to make objects not look like they are intended. But anyway, we have a figure, so let’s start shading.

1) Determine where your light source is, because these spots on the skin are going to be white. Create light pencil sketched area where you want the light to be. These shapes can be circles, blobs, triangles–whatever shape appeases you. You’re also going to determine where your shadows are and create outlines for those. As you can see from my image, the picture at this point will kinda look like a relief map, or a preliminary weather map minus the temperatures depending on how you look at it.

2) Now we’re going to start shading. Take your pencil and color in where you want to have your DARKEST shadows FIRST. Now take a tortiliion–what I call a “blendy stick”– or a Kleenex and soften these areas, extending these areas slightly, creating midtones as shown on the image. If you notice, you will be doing the dark shading on all objects included in your image–lips, eyes, neck–not just the cheeks.

3) Now we’re going to add lighter tones. Use the side of your pencil and press very lightly on the sections that are left that are not intended to be white. When you finish, take a Kleenex and “buff” these sections until you reach the desired smoothness. Now, take your eraser and clean up the areas you want to leave white (the light areas) as shown.

4) Smooth your entire drawing by lightly “buffing” it with the Kleenex. You have now shaded your drawing, and hoepfully, your image doesn’t look like a cross between Jennifer Anistion and Jake Gylenhaal.

See, shading is simple. Now go off and shade your images, you mysterious viewers,you!

Love always,

Marisol

Tags: Adobe Photoshop, Celebrity Drawing, Pencil Sketching, Photoshop, shading, traditional Art, traditional drawing