How to Shade a Still Life Drawing

Video Transcript

Hi! I'm Pete Bellessis and I'm an art teacher. Today I am representing expertvillage.com. Our lesson today is drawing; more specifically still life's. Even more specifically, shading still life's. Let's take a look. Let me show you how to bring out some life to this drawing. It's rather flat and two dimensional. So I am really pushing down on it now. I am also going to take my finger and blend a little bit; soften things up, move some of this graphite around on the paper. I am really kind of focusing on this porcelain tray that the candle sits on right now. I'm giving it a more defined edge, harder line there. I'm finding the shadows. Shadows are what? Well quick review, they are what occurs where the light hits on an object and where the light is then not really making its way all the way through; a solid or opaque object. We are going to concentrate on our lines here. The darkness and lightness of them. We are also going to blend them. We can do that with just our finger tips or we can inadvertently do it with our whole hand and ruin a drawing. A lot of this stuff that smudges will occur. You can come back to that later and erase them out. In fact, that is a necessary part of showing some of your light areas. You are going to want to go in with the proper eraser and really just a eraser like this will work. It actually gives you a fine enough tip to get in there and like detail or erase. Erasing can be a very important part of drawing. Right here is a good example; so we have a shadow on it. Try and lighten it up a little bit. Maybe give a little hint of shading here, some shadows on the actual table, very light, maybe blend. Probably have enough graphite on my finger to blend that. Come back to the turtle and give him a little bit more and a little shading on what is actually a beak looking part of his head. As you can see which is a few areas that I decided to pick out and they weren't random. These are what my eyes see based on the light that hits my objects.

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