The story of shading [long text]

First of all, this is not a tutorial. It will be more a kind of description how I was struggling with different shading techniques. There could be some useful knowledge here but it's more a story of my shading. So, let us begin

At the very beginning I used some trivial way of shading without caring much for how the light behaves in reality. It was based only on making one side of object lit and the other side in shadow, keeping the brightest and the darkest parts on the contour. That wasn’t very realistic but it was good  at the very beginning of my shading journey.

A big change came when I realized that the brightest spot can be shifted a little bit aside, so that it will be inside the object itself. That approach produced some nice  highlights because bright areas were now surrounded by darker parts. But it was still far away from anything realistic.

I've reached another milestone when I meet one guy who has taught me his way of shading. He was (and I hope he still is) amazing in drawing things that existed in real life. Unfortunately he had some problems in creating things from imagination, but despite that, he used some interesting approach to shading. He used to divide shaded objects to three parts: highlights, halftones and shadows. After studying his approach I came up with a simple, yet really useful procedure of shading.

1. Identify where the edge of the shadow is on your object
2. Shade the shadow part with darker tone
3. Shade the light part with brighter tone leaving some kind of radial gradient for a highlight
4. Soften the edge of the shadow to make a nice, smooth transition between lights and shadow

But it was creating some problems. For example, what if few areas that are in shadow meet in one place? The solution was quite obvious: not every shadow should have the same tone. So I've started to use different dark tones and even some gradients on the shaded parts of the objects to achieve  nice looking shading. And it worked fine. I've used to create really successful pencil drawing using this technique. But it was still not enough for me.

After some time I've found a book by Glenn Vilppu titled 'Vilppu Drawing Manual' and it has helped me to improve my shading style even more. The book contained few chapters about shading. It wasn't hyper realistic shading, nothing like rendering the real life form. In fact, it was based on many tricks helpful in making the pencil drawing pop out. Actually, when speaking of Mr. Vilppu, I should use word tools, not tricks. Because he was constantly repeating in his book, that in drawing there are no rules, there are only tools. And by using those tools one could achieve some expected results. So, the tools that changed my approach to shading was – reflected light and cast shadow. Suddenly I've realized that there is something more than light and shadow. There is always some light in shadow, and some shadow in light. So I've started to add reflected light everywhere. I was also trying to pay attention to cast shadows.

Well, cast shadows are great, they really help to present the form as three dimensional object. But when it comes to reflected light, I've misused it. Adding it everywhere was a big mistake. First of all, reflected light doesn't come from nowhere, thus it shouldn't be visible everywhere. Using it on the shaded side of every object made all the shading really flat. Of course this approach is great for shading single object but it fails when it comes to rendering a full scene with background. The main problem here was that all objects had really high local contrast, with no global contrast at all. Every object was almost white in lit area and almost black in shaded area. The final effect – flat shading.

After realizing that I've started to study the nature of light more. I was reading many different books about art, looking for tutorials, seeking for people to share their knowledge with me, etc. From all the things I've done I can recommend one truly amazing book: 'Creative Illustrations' by Andrew Loomis. Seriously go and read it, there is a huge amount of artistic knowledge inside.

But let's return to shading. In this part of my life I've started to draw digitally. I was trying to learn how to use colors in my art. I was so much into coloring that I've totally forgot about shading. In fact, I was still using different variations of my old technique based on highlights, shadows, reflected lights, cast shadows, the edge of the shadow, etc. All I've done was just experimenting with the different placement and visibility of those element. The main goal was to make the colors right, without caring much for the tones.

Recently I've found another mistake in my shading technique. And again it's quite an obvious one. You see, I've never treated reflected light as a true light source. It was always a kind of trick (or tool) to enhance the form in dark areas. So it was usually a simple tone gradation that was the most bright on the contour of object's shaded side. Or anything else that would show the viewer that there is something more than just shade in all those dark areas of the drawing. But it is a light source, strongly diffused one but still a light source and it should be treated like one. I plan to experiment with this new discovery in my future drawings hoping it will bring something new to my drawing style.

That's it for now. A short history of Rasta's shading.
Hope you've enjoyed it