Understanding gray tones and shading in drawing
The appreciation and application of shading and drawing is crucial to good drawing.
I am a traditional and digital artist and have learnt ways to improve my shading and drawing techniques. I apply this effectively to my artwork in both traditional and digital mediums.
Traditional Drawing
I originally started making drawing on sheets of white printer paper with an HB pencil. I graduated to pastels and charcoal drawing where I found the rich pigments allowed for a brighter colors and also darker tones.
With the charcoal pencils (black and white), I found the contrast to be too high on white paper and decided to move to gray toned paper. With these materials, I found it worked better for me where I had control over the balance of the shades and contrast of the subject I was drawing. I used the white as a highlighter that helped to lift up the whole drawing.
You can see more of my drawings on the following YouTube channels:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Ferdouse
https://www.youtube.com/c/Paintology
Digital Drawing
I have been drawing in the digital medium for the last few years and found some interesting methods of doing drawing. With practice I was able to take my drawings beyond the traditional mediums and this was entirely due to the properties of the digital medium.
The digital medium offers a greater latitude when it comes to applying tones and shades to your drawing. This is because the control you have over the digital ‘brush’ is far more granular than say the graphite pencil. You can read more on this subject at the end of the post.
The Paintology drawing app that I typically use for all my ‘pencil’ drawings has a gray scale that you can select for the brush. This allows for faster access to the gray tones and doing shading on your drawing. Here is an example of a drawing made on my Samsung phone using the app.
In the above drawing of Ben Stiller, I used a combination of the shade and line brushes along with the gray scale. I used the shade brush to make the subtle shading features of the face and the line brush to get the darker tones for the strands of hair, eyes etc.
To get a bettter apprecation of the drawings that I make using the Paintology drawing app, it would be best to watch a video.
You can see how I am able to extract the gray tones rapidly for this drawing. We all know that the quicker you can draw, the more faster you can improve your skills and that’s a good thing.
I would recomend that you use the Paintology app to get a good appreciation of tones and shading. It is important for beginners to be able to get access to gray tones like the gray scale palette used in the app. In this way, you can apply this to your drawing and have a better grasp of important skills in drawing. You can take your appreciation of shading and tones including contrast and apply to both traditional and digital drawing.
Once you have a good grounding on gray scale tones, you can use it effectively to your colored drawings. Here is a colored drawing on the phone using the Paintology app.
Further Reading:
Paintology — Six myths of digital drawing
Paintology — Beginners drawing with Paintology
Transitioning from traditional to digital drawing & painting
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