I’ve been practicing more intricate skin tones for the past week. If you spend your whole life looking at photographs, you might not realize how much color is on skin. Much of the color found in skin is not picked up by the camera, but you can put these colors in a painting. When setting out to create skin tones, most artists do not realize how many colors are in the skin. Besides the pigmentation, there’s redness in the cheeks, blue or green in the chin, sometimes yellow in the forehead and other colors that end up on the skin because of reflection and colored light.

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Tags: Blending, Color, coloring, darkness, eye, face, forehead, hair, high, highlights, iris, Lips, shading, strands, Tones

Shading… and highlights

There is nothing quite like shading in the world of drawing. Shading is one of the most important parts of realistic drawing. Shading also plays a major role in the stylistic aspects of animation. Shading tricks the eye into seeing 3D on a 2D plane. With shading, an object can really jump out at you.

Shading can be as difficult or easy as you want it to be. Light from a powerful and consistent light source like the sun, creating a gradual increase in the darkness of tones the farther you get away from the light source. Objects can block the light source and create shapes that have defined or blurry edges. Shadows can occur gradually or can be cut off abruptly. Highlights shine and sometimes even reflect images opposite of the object you are drawing. Shading can be a pain and creating guides on how to shade can be a pain. But the results are oh so worth it.

There are tons of ways to shade. Since there are so many factors that affect shading, one of the easier ways to shade is to break shading down into different components. Also, since different kinds of lighting and different objects interact to create different shading effects, with this guide I am going to focus on skin and hair with an overhead sun.

Learn to love shadows. The only way to truly learn shading is to observe objects and their interaction with light.

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Tags: Blending, high, light, shading, Tones

Hi everybody; Marisol here. I’m sick today, so I didn’t prepare a real tutorial. I haven’t posted in a while because I bought a Nintendo DS (yay!) with my tax return, and I’ve been sick. I think I have a cold or the flu, but I rebound quickly. Let me update you on a few things, though.

This has been quite the interesting week for Alex and me. Monday, our linguistics class was cancelled, so we went and sold some movies and got a Super Nintendo! Yay! Too bad there was no AV plug.

Finally, today, Alex and I were about to get attacked by some angry guy in a purple Ford Ranger. It was my and Alex’s turn at the stop sign, so it was our turn to go. Well, Mr. Purple Truck decided to pull out in front of us as we were going through the stop sign. He honked at us even though it wasn’t his turn to go; Alex honked at him. The guy in the purple truck pulled over, swung his door open, and was rushing up to our car ready to fight! Alex drove off and we thought the guy was gunna follow us to fight! People… sheesh! Crazy, crazy people.

Okay, so our week wasn’t that eventful. Oh well. Good stuff, anyway. Tala should tell you guys about HER week!

Okay, so someone recently asked me about shading techniques and how to not make drawings seem so sketchy. Well, I have some tips to offer. Ready to begin? Awesome! Click to read more …

Tags: Art Tutorial, Blending, blending tutorial, crosshatch shading, how to blend colors, How To Shade, shading, Shading Tutorial, traditional Art