STOP Drawing Flat! Colored Pencil Tutorial on Shading and Blending Dark SHADOWS!

Hello, how are you? Welcome to my very messy drawing studio. But let me ask you this, are your colored pencil shadows looking flat or your drawings look lifeless? Do you struggle to add that realistic depth to your drawings? Well, join me now as I reveal the exact techniques for building and blending shadows with colored pencils, transforming your art from amateur to astonishing. So watch this tutorial and discover the exact steps to create stunning multi-dimensional shadows with colored pencils that will make your drawings truly pop. Grab your pencils and let's create something incredible together. Watch this. Well, your drawings look flat because you weren't able to build your dark shadows properly. It's very important to build dark shadows and now I'm gonna be using, prioritizing the shadows using these four dark pencils right here. The black, the first one is the black, of course, not exactly for the skin tone but for just some super dark parts of the drawing. And the other three which I'm gonna mention one by one as we use them because this drawing is to understand shadows, to build shadows properly. It's like a blueprint to your drawing. It will make or break your drawing. You may mess with the colors that you use, you may lack a specific color or pencil but it will not hurt your drawing. What will hurt your drawing is if you weren't able to establish your shadows and to blend those dark shadows with your light shadows or the light pencils to create realistic skin tone. So it's not just the light colors, it's not just the colors that you use, it's the darkness of the colors or the shadows that you establish on your drawing. For example, as you can see, look at my reference photo, look at the side of the nose. I decided to draw Tom Cruise because we want that nose, look at that nose, that is protruding out of the picture. It's a huge nose and we wanted to capture that nose into the paper exactly like that. You know, it's a super long, it's a long nose and we wanted to establish that and we can only do that by establishing our shadows properly. So black, I'm just adding a very light touch on some parts where, as you can see, very obvious on the reference photo, you can see exactly where those dark shadows that we need to use black on. So because I did this tutorial, because I have so many questions regarding why, why is it that their drawings don't look 3D or look so flat and then they see other people drawing like it's like the nose, for example, is looking like it's popping out of the paper. So this exactly is how to do it. You do it by establishing your shadow. Now, after the black, I'm turning into my second dark pencil right here. This is the black cherry of the Prismacolor colored pencil. By the way, I'm using Prismacolor for this drawing and the paper is Strathmore Bristol 300 smooth surface. So we need a good paper also. It's important to make a good shadow and shadows are built into a good paper with nice, tiny textures. And to be able to do that, we need to be able to layer after layer dark shadows. So start from dark. That is how I do it because we need to establish the dark shadows early in the drawing to be able to create a realistic, not just realistic in terms of tone or color, but in terms of the depth of the shadow. That is the key to a realistic drawing. So now using light pressure and the technique that I'm doing here is tiny circular motion using light pressure to help us blend later on. The blending is towards the end of the video. So here you will learn and you will see how to establish a realistic skin tone from beginning to end with a greater focus on building shadows. So again, this is the black cherry Prismacolor. I am keeping my pencil sharp. So if it's the first time that you saw my tutorial, I always say if you are practicing colored pencils, do it slowly, sharp pencils, less pressure, especially on the layering stage. So as you can see, this black cherry is like a very nice reddish dark brown, and it doesn't have to be specifically this. You can have substitute depending on your set. You can use other dark browns. And then if you want to keep it to add redness, like you can see here, you can add bright colors later on, but it doesn't matter. You just have to be able to use different shades of dark shadows to begin with your drawing. This is how to develop a realistic drawing, develop the shadows well. Do not be afraid of using dark colored pencils. I understand beginners are too apprehensive and too afraid to use dark colors because they fear that they might overdo the shadows and it will look like something else. But I'm telling you, don't be afraid of the shadows. It is your ally. It is your friend for your drawings to not look flat and not appealing. So what you want again is a three-dimensional drawing popping out of the paper. Okay, now another dark pencil here combined with the black cherry here is the indigo blue. Okay, if you can find even in open stock, if you can purchase indigo blue or blue indigo, this is a very nice pencil to establish your shadows with. It has a very nice blue, dark blue tone right here, as you can see, that when combined with bright colors gives you astonishing, really nice, deep shadows that look so good and natural on the skin tone. But it's a little bit weird looking right now, as you can see, as the skin tone becomes bluish. But later on, you will see. You will really see. So you have to watch this whole video for you to understand how to build your shadows in order for you to not no longer create drawings that are flat and not appealing at all. You want your drawings to be alive. You want your drawing to be protruding out of the paper, like this nose of Tom Cruise right here, which is really, really has a nice shape. And yeah, it's a very, very, you know, very huge nose, not huge in a bad way, but it's a very, very nice, good looking nose right here. And we want it 3D. OK, now after the indigo blue, I'm adding a sandbar brown. You can use any greenish brown with greenish tone. Yeah, we want our shadows to be a combination of this nice blue and green because this is the shadow. We are going to tone this with actual skin tone colors later. But here, I hope you don't skip around the video because you want to see it from beginning to end because you want to be able to build your shadows with a lot of dimensions like what we are doing right now for imagine for dark colors just to build the shadow. And then this is like a base shadow. OK, this is not yet the actual skin tone, but it's going to be there. It will build a good foundation for the drawing. So in other words, it gives the real nice shape. It elongated the nose. It makes the lips like, you know, rounded and everything. And now we're done with establishing our shadows. Now we are coloring. We are going to color it to make it look as realistic as possible. And this color, this is step two, actually, the coloring part of the tutorial. I'm using pumpkin orange. OK, I'm going to be generous with this pumpkin orange. I'm going to layer it on top of my dark shadows that we built with four dark pencils. Now we are coloring them, coloring the shadows. OK, mixing this pumpkin orange on all these dark shadows, the indigo blue and the black cherry and the sunburnt brown will make everything really nice. When mixed together, you will achieve, trust me, you will achieve something with lots of depth and realism and it will make your drawing go out of the paper as we are building it. Now, first of all, I want to finish the eye here, the retina of the eye using blue because he has a very nice piercing blue eyes right here. And then for the what is the pupil? I'm going to use black. OK, so yeah, I'm going to just finish this one so we can concentrate on not no longer building the shadows because we already built it. Oh, white pen for the eye. That's very nice. We already built our shadows. Now we are toning the shadows with actual color of the skin tone. So I'm starting here with a pumpkin orange. OK, so now when you're establishing your skin tone, by the way, you need to put or to draw the hair part, the hairy part of the skin tone like mustache or beard or the eyebrows or the eyelashes for last. That is the last thing that you want to draw because you don't want to for that hair details to interfere with your blending of the skin tone because we're still blending it. We are going to blend the shadows that we built together with these skin colors. By the way, we are now using the carmine red, carmine red. That's a very nice dark pink color that will because as you can see, his skin tone is a little bit reddish right here. So I'm using this nice carmine red color pencil on the edges of the nose right there. But as important as our dark shadows, it's also important to establish the light tones, the contrast of the drawing. You can see the middle of the nose. It's relatively light there compared to the sides of the nose that will make it more realistic and more 3D because as we establish the shadow, we also establish our light shadows and our highlights. Now the lips, I'm still using the carmine red for the lips. And later you will see we are going to tone the lips to make it look more natural and not overly like it seems like he's wearing a lipstick right here. And then it's important to use green also. You can use any light green you want. This is just what I got from nowhere. I just got this green and this is like a true green or any light green will do. Trust me, if you layer a tiny bit of green on the skin tone, it will make it really nice looking skin tone. Now this is the lavender. This is the second to the last pencil that I'm going to use. I decided to use the lavender as a burnisher and at the same time a toner. So I'm going to tone the shadows with this lavender color. And at the same time, I'm adding harder pressure now. I'm allowed now to add more pressure to blend everything together. This is called burnishing because blending is when you use blenders, but if you use colored pencils to blend colored pencils, that's called burnishing. And this technique is what I want with colored pencils because it doesn't change the color, but it mix everything together and add more realistic tone to it. Now, another burnisher and toner that I use here, this is the beige Prismacolor. You can use flesh tones. So not just to blend, but to tone and to burnish the skin tone. As you can see right now, everything is becoming more smooth and smooth and all the dark and your lights and your saturated are now mixing together. But always, as you can see, the dark shadows that we built at the beginning of the drawing, which is the idea that I'm trying to tell you right now is for you to make a drawing that is not flat and that will look more realistic and it will look like it's popping out of the paper. This is the tutorial for you. I know some of you skipped the video to this part. You'd better go back because you would understand how this kind of drawing is looking three dimensional right now. The nose is looking like it's popping out of the paper. It's protruding out of the paper with super nice depth and three dimensionality. This is what you want to achieve to be able to be a good colored pen supported artist. If you are going to be like accepting commissions from people, this is what the client wants. They want something that is super, super 3D for the image right here. Okay. So now for last, we are adding the black. Using the black, we are now defining the hair part of the drawing like the eyebrows right here. So I'm using the black because we already toned the eyebrows, the shadow, the dark shadows of the eyebrows at the beginning of the drawing. Now we can easily add all this hair, individual hair of the eyebrows and then some parts of the eyelashes, the nostrils. We want to darken the nostrils even more right here to make everything a little bit more realistic right here. But as you can see right now, this is how you achieve a three-dimensional drawing right here. It's not very easy, but it's very, very possible that you will master this one if you continue practicing. That's why I encourage you to always practice, do trial and error. As a drawing with lots of depth and realism right here. So now what I do right now is the glazing part of the drawing where I go back to the same pencils that I used in the beginning to add glazes of tones and darken some parts that faded and you want to achieve a little more finish, more finished drawing. Now using the white, I blend even more right here. Wow, look at this. Try it for yourself and you may not have to draw a flat drawing ever again.