No Fancy Art Supplies? No Problem! How to Use Common Supplies to Shade and Create Value

Today I'm going to go over how to create value using supplies you have around the house. The world feels a bit upside down right now, I know. I hope we're all staying home and healthy and happy while making some very big changes to stay safe. One of the biggest changes I've made was going from teaching face-to-face in a classroom to teaching at a distance digitally and asking a bunch of my students to learn at a distance and digitally. One of the biggest challenges in this is using supplies we have around the house. Crayola color pencils are wonderful and affordable, but what if you don't have them at home? What if you have only a few supplies like pencils, pens, highlighters, crayons, and markers and you're being asked to shade? I'm here to try to help you with that today. Let's start with probably the most common supply, a number two pencil. Artists have been using graphite, which is what's in your number two for centuries. Artist pencils are marked with numbers and letters to tell you how soft or hard the graphite is. The softer the graphite is, the smoother and richer the mark makes. Your number two is somewhere in the middle of the scale, so you can actually get quite a nice drawing with your number two pencil. This is just regular computer paper and I recommend that you have a few sheets of paper underneath your drawing, which is going to cushion the pencil and allow you to get a softer, darker mark as if the graphite was softer. Before we use any of these supplies on an image or project, we're going to go ahead and create some value scales. Remember, value in art is defined as the relative lightness or darkness of a color. A number two pencil works exactly like a colored pencil. You press harder, you get a darker mark. You ease up on pressure and get a lighter mark. Creating a value scale with your number two pencil is exactly like creating one with a colored pencil. You're going to start as heavy as you can in pressure and then as you move away from that dark value, ease up on pressure, which is going to give you a lighter and lighter value as you apply less and less pressure. The biggest difference you're going to find in a number two pencil and a colored pencil is that a colored pencil, especially the Crayola ones we've been using, is much softer so it's easier to get a smoother mark than out of your number two pencil. However, the same exact technique applies. Color and ellipses go over the same spot a bunch of times until you get a nice smooth transition. If you decide to use a number two pencil on your drawing, you'll be in what's called grayscale. That means your drawing will appear a lot like a black and white photo where everything is black, grays, and white. If you don't have colored pencils at home and you want a very technical and detailed drawing, number two pencil is an excellent way to go because it's very fine, which means it's precise, getting you all those little details that you want, and it has a really good range of value. Here you can see I was able to get almost black all the way up to white, so it's a really good shading tool. Now for the tool I'm sure you have at home, a ballpoint pen. I have mostly purple pens in my house. I found about 10 purples and one black, so I'll be using purple today. You can see when I press heavy and light, I actually do get a dark and a light mark that looks like a dark purple and a light purple. But if I was to try to achieve a value scale that was nice and smooth, it would not work because it is way too streaky. So I'm going to show you three different pen and ink techniques today. Traditionally with pen and ink, you dip a pen in ink and have no control over the value or the color of your mark, but what you do have control of is those marks themselves. The closer together you make your marks, the darker your value appears. The further apart you make your marks, the lighter the value appears. Right now you can see me doing something called hatching. You make a bunch of straight marks and the closer they are together, the darker the value. As you move away from the dark value, you start making them further and further apart, making them appear lighter and lighter. Next I'm doing something called cross hatching. This is where I make a bunch of X's. The closer the lines of the X's are to one another, and the more times I go over the same spot, the darker the value. And then as I move over to the light value, I make those X's wider and wider and the marks further and further apart, making the value appear lighter and lighter. The next pen and ink technique I'm going to show you is called scribbling or scrambling. I've seen it called both. It's basically where you go in circles with your pen and you go over the same spot a bunch of times to make a darker value, and then as you move away from the dark value, you make it appear lighter and lighter by making those little circles further and further apart, wider and wider, less and less. You can ease up on pressure of the pen, that will help too, but that's only if you're using pen. These techniques work with marker, sharpie, and pen. If you're using marker or sharpie, you're not going to get a lighter value if you press lighter. This is a fourth pen and ink technique called stippling. You've probably done this before where you make a bunch of little dots. Stippling with a ballpoint pen is kind of painful unless you're making a very tiny picture, so I'm actually going to show you that with marker instead. So here I'm using Crayola washable markers. I'll be stippling with this, but first let's just test if I can get a dark and a light mark out of it. As you can see, I cannot. I can get a thick line and a thin line, but I can't change the value of the actual ink. So it is completely to be done with the stippling marks. I can't ease up on pressure and expect it to get lighter and lighter. So with stippling, you're doing the same thing you did with the other pen and ink techniques. The closer your marks are together, the richer and darker they look. So I'm making a lot of dots really close together on top of each other for my dark value, and then as I move over into the light value, I'm slowly easing up on all those dots and making less and less as I go, creating a lighter and lighter value. I prefer to stipple with a sharpie or a marker over a fine point pen because the marks are thicker and it doesn't take as long. So now we've gone over five shading techniques, one with a number two pencil, and four pen and ink techniques that can be done with a ballpoint pen or markers. Hatching, which is the straight lines, cross hatching, which is those x's, scribbling, which is the little circles, and stippling, which is little tiny dots. Next, I want to talk to you about blending. In my daughter's little washable Crayola Pipsqueaks pack, there were actually quite a number of colors that I had a dark and light version of. So I picked this magenta and a light pink, and I'm going to show you how to blend using a dark and light color with stippling. Start with the darker color, which in this case is magenta, and stipple with those little dots close together and getting further and further apart to make your light value. Just like colored pencil, the difference is you're just going to get lighter sooner and ease up on those little dots until they fade to nothing. Take the lighter color, which is my light pink, and I can actually, I can stipple this whole thing, but I can actually kind of just color in the spaces. It's a lot faster that way. So here you can see I'm coloring in the spaces and now starting to stipple as I get to the very lightly stippled magenta. This is where I'll start to stipple very, very heavy with those light pink dots and then ease up on the dots as I move towards the right and want it to appear like a lighter value of that light pink. You can, of course, use this technique with analogous colors too. That's the colors on the color wheel like red and orange or green and yellow, and it will look very nice as well, just not as much like a shadow. Now let's talk about crayons. The great thing about crayons is you probably have a ton lying around your house. You can still add color to everything, and they actually do shade a lot like colored pencil. If you press heavy, you make a darker mark. If you press lighter, you make a lighter mark. If you shade exactly like I taught you with colored pencil with a crayon, it's a little bit more clumsy. It's a little waxier, but it really does work. If you press heavy, color in ellipses and ease up on pressure as you get towards your lighter value, you will get a very nice shade or shadow. The other great thing about crayons is you usually have a ton of color choices, so you can probably find two colors to blend with easily, and you blend the same way you would with colored pencil. Start with your darker color, full pressure, ease up on pressure to get that lighter value, but do it quickly so that you have plenty of room for your second color. Use that lighter color to color over all of the light values full pressure, and then when you see it coloring just that light color, start easing up on that color as well. And there you have a really nice blend, especially for crayons. I find that experimenting with the crayons is a must. Half the time the colors don't appear the way I want them to, but I think it's a great resource, especially if you have nothing else around the house. Next is these twistable colored pencils. I'm not actually sure if these are colored pencils or crayons. It acts more like a crayon to me. It has a very wide top, which makes it really clumsy to color with. I'm really not a fan of these twistables, but if you have them, this is me making a value scale with them, same way I did everything else, and it's not terrible. It doesn't get as dark as I would like it to, but they do work. I do enjoy this product for my five-year-old because they don't really break and she could twist them up. I don't have that many colors of them, so I only have analogous colors to blend with, but this is blending green and yellow, again coloring dark to light, and then coloring over all the light values with the lighter color, which is in this case yellow. And again, it's not terrible. It's nice if you have nothing else to blend with. The last thing I'm going to talk about today is highlighters, which you might have around your house. So if you don't have any other color, but you want to add a little bit of interest, you don't want all black and white from pen or gray scale with the pencil, you can actually add a little bit of highlighter over any of these pen and ink techniques. So using either a pen or a sharpie, you can create any of these techniques. You see me here creating the scribbling one, and right over it just add a little bit of highlighter. Do not try this over pencil or washable marker. I did, and it smudged everywhere. But adding a little highlighter over pen or sharpie just adds a little bit of color, a little glow that's kind of nice. I had a few different color highlighters, so I tried to blend orange and yellow together. I again used the pen ink technique of the scribbling or scrambling, started with the darker color. They're very, very broad. They are very bright. It didn't fail completely, but I also can't say I was super happy with the results. So if you do want to use highlighter, I would recommend it over the sharpie or pen with the pen and ink techniques instead of trying to blend colors together. I hope that this gave you a bunch of ideas to make amazing creations with the supplies you have around your house. For my students, I'm going to ask that they make five of these value scales using what they have, which will give them an idea of what supplies work best for them. And then in the next video, I'm going to explain how to add each of these techniques to an actual image or drawing. Until then, stay happy, stay healthy, stay safe, and happy creating.