How to Shade ANYTHING with Pencils - Tutorial

Hi everyone, welcome back to another video and today I have a pretty anticipated video that a lot of you have been asking me to do which is a very beginner friendly and basics shading with pencils 101. I mentioned in a video a few weeks back if you guys wanted to have like a really in-depth video where I show you basically all of my tips and tricks and explain from beginning to end how you can actually add shading and lighting to your drawings with pencils and a lot of you said that you were really interested in seeing that so that's what we're gonna be doing today. I actually had a whole section about this in my book it's called Draw Amazing Faces and it was published last year and there is a whole entire section about shading with pencils in it and you know adding color to your portraits and things like that but I wanted to do a video that was really really in-depth and in a way that I could actually show you how I do that because obviously it's very in-depth in the book but there's only so much you can learn from seeing it written down and if you want to follow along this video I've actually attached a link in the description box with a PDF zip file that you can download and print off all of the worksheets that I'm going to be using in today's video so you can follow along and practice with me it's completely free to download it's just in the description box below so without any further ado let's get into the tutorial so as you may know I am a full-time artist with an online shop where I sell the art that I make but sometimes there are products that I really wish I could try selling and putting my art on without the whole fuss of stocking and producing them myself and this is where Printful came into the picture for me and I really wanted to talk to you about them today especially if you too are an artist wanting to start selling your art online. Printful is an amazing print on demand service that allows artists to actually utilize their creative skills to build their online brand and generate income without needing upfront inventory managing shipping or storing anything themselves. Print on a man refers to products only getting made when someone makes an order. Through Printful you can sell amazing products with your art on them and then whenever someone makes an order Printful handles the manufacturing the quality control and the shipping all on their end and then you get paid the profit margin and if you're an artist with an already existing shop like me that's no problem because you can connect your online shop with Printful and whatever products you sell through Printful will appear as normal listings on your web page too. I actually recently uploaded and started selling this adorably cute tumbler it has like some of the designs from my strawberry collection and the designs come out so vibrant and the quality is so so clear that this time around I decided to try out putting my mouse mats that I designed as they are very troublesome to print at home. The best thing about Printful is the wide variety of products that they provide they have products ranging from apparel home goods accessories and more so you can explore selling your art in so many different ways and offer an amazing variety of goods for your customers and if you want you can also upgrade to Printful's newly revamped membership program and take advantage of their sweet 20% discount on direct-to-garment printing with the Printful growth plan. Signing up is easy-peasy and uploading your design to launching on your shop takes literally seconds so make sure to head to the link in my description and sign up to Printful today there is no reason not to give it a try and let's get back into the tutorial. So let's start off with the basics like I said we are starting off with the four different types of blending and shading that you can use in your pencil drawings. First up we got hatching which is just some simple parallel lines going you know as close or as separate from each other as you want and then we have a different version of hatching which is called cross hatching which is basically the same as hatching but you overlay these lines in different angles over each other and this will come into play a lot in later stages when we actually create gradients. Then we've got scribbles which is pretty self-explanatory just creating like little scribbles and rounded little scribbles and finally we've got finger blending which I just kind of call blending because you don't have to use a finger you can use like a blending stump or anything like that but it's basically just creating a nice even surface of pencil or graphite and then going over with your finger and blending it all together like this and then leaving a nice little patch of graphite on your finger. So now we're gonna see how we can turn these different shading techniques and actually using them to create different amounts of shading and I'm just showing you here how with hatching you can create different amounts of you know different depths of shading darker areas compared to lighter areas and the way that I usually do that is a combination of sparsity so like creating these little parallel lines further away from each other and using a lighter pressure on the paper but with cross hatching you have a lot more control of this because I like to go over and over on the same spot with different angles of these lines and just the act of overlaying these layers of hatching over each other creates darker areas so closer to the area where I want it to be darker I will just create more and more layers using different angles so I'll do horizontal vertical diagonals and just kind of repeat that pattern in the smaller and smaller area where I want it to be darker and then just sort of blend those out towards the area where I want it to be lighter for scribbles it's kind of the same process so I will use basically the same scribbling motion and just kind of go over the areas where I want there to be a darker shadow over and over again with you know different patterns of squiggly lines and that will create less and less pockets of white from the paper showing through which creates more of a darker shadow here you can see with blending a lot more of that pencil pressure thing that I was talking about comes into play and again you can use the same technique of building up that darkness in the darker area over and over again by adding more graphite if it's still not dark enough and then blending that out with your finger and it's all of this sort of process of going over in layers which is how I work with pencils a lot and these are the four main sort of shading techniques that you can pick and choose from honestly there's no right or wrong answer here you just kind of pick the one that you like the best and I also wanted to touch up on what I was talking about with pencil pressure the angle at which you draw with your pencil actually makes a massive difference in shading so as you can see here when my pencil is the most perpendicular to the page so the most straight up it creates really dark and straight and thin lines whereas if I tilt my pencil to like a really really harsh degree like this almost parallel to the page it allows you to utilize the entire side of the bit of the lead of the pencil which creates a nice even and large surface area to create shading so it creates less harsh lines and just more of like a shaded area and the great thing about this is that you can actually go from different angles of the pencil as you want to add more darkness to your shadows as you can see here you could start off with a pencil really flat and then start angling it up towards a normal pencil grip to add some darker shadows so play around with that the different angles of the pencil and see how that changes because it's a really really fun little exercise and since I was talking a lot about pencil pressure and layering earlier on in the shading techniques I wanted to show you what that actually looks like when creating a gradient of shading as you can see here different pressure when I start out with the pencil really really hard and pressing it hard onto the page and as I go along this rectangle I just start loosening the pressure and it creates lighter and lighter strokes creating this really natural gradient as for layering you don't have to change the pressure of the pencil you can just use the exact same pressure but using layering you basically go over and over certain spots on the page and just the act of going over different spots will fill in these little gaps that you leave from earlier passes that will essentially darken that area and this is a very easy way to build up shadows which is a very very good way to start drawing without going in too dark too fast so let's take these practices into something three-dimensional so we've got this sphere here and I've done this little diagram with the light source showing you where the light hits the sphere and how that will then translate into our highlights our light tones our mid tones and our dark tones and how light disperses over a three-dimensional object such as a sphere so obviously we've got the highlight which is the exact point where the light hits the shape at its most intense and then that light starts dispersing the further along it goes around the shape because it doesn't get to touch the back areas of a sphere so it will get darker and darker the further back you go we want to start off by just adding a base shading layer and this will just help us with blending later on but then you want to go into your mid tones and just add a slightly darker layer of shading here not too dark just slightly darker than our initial light tone that we did all across the shape and I also want to make sure that I mentioned to always leave your highlight like your bright bright area untouched because that will be your pure white and it will really help with selling this three dimensionality so always leave the pop of white of where your light source touches your object completely untouched and then we want to go into our dark tone area that we highlighted here and go in with an even darker layer of shading and now that we've got our three sections here we can go into the seams where they all touch and slightly blend them out with a very light bit of hatching and you don't want to go too dark here because you don't want to create a very visible seam between all of these shadows you want to just go in very lightly and do a lot of different passes and if you need to darken your dark tones a little bit to create distinction between your dark tones and your mid tones then absolutely do that the big thing about shading and adding shadows and you know lighting to your drawings is a lot of push and pull between your highlights and your dark tones to create contrast contrast is the big word here because you want to create a distinction between the lighter areas of your drawing and the darker areas to create you know a distinction in values and values are completely different things that you know require quite a lot of explaining but I also wanted to mention a secret little tool that you can use which is a gummy eraser and this is superpower that you can use when shading with pencils it was something that I learned very early on when I was learning how to draw and this little guy is perfect because you literally use them to just pick up very subtle little bits of graphite off of your page like this you just kind of like touch it dab it onto the page and it will very easily remove little bits of graphite and lighten that area without leaving like a harsh bit of erased paper it is really really such an amazing tool and if you are getting into drawing with pencils and shading your drawings I really would recommend getting yourself a gummy eraser it is amazing and I use it still to this day a lot when drawing with pencils so yeah I just kind of keep going around the shape using the natural curvature of this shape which is spherical and kind of going around with my strokes mimicking the curvature of the edges of the shape and adding more and more passes until I find that all of the edges are blended correctly and of course then we always have to add in a little bit of a drop shadow because when there's a light source then that creates a shadow on our objects always and creating that little drop shadow will immediately place your object in a environment on a surface or whatever and it'll make it even more three-dimensional as you can see here and again darkening that shadow the closer you get to the object and lightening it the further away we get but obviously our light source can change depending on where it is in our drawing so we have to look at how the different sources of light can change the shading on a specific object here we have the same cone with three different light sources and I wanted to show you an example of how the placement of the lighting can change completely the way that I would add shadows to my shapes so for example here in the first cone the lighting is coming from this top right area hitting it on this top right corner and so that means that the light wouldn't be able to touch the base of the cone pretty much at all so I know for a fact that that area is gonna be the darkest area of my shape and I also know that the left side of the cone here at the top is going to be darker than the right side because that's where the light is hitting it so I know that it's still not gonna be as dark as the base of the cone because some light will still wrap around a little bit to the left side of the top of the cone but a lot of the light is but the light is definitely not gonna be touching the bottom of the cone because of that harsh corner and this is sort of how I would color in that first cone for the second example here the light is coming from below which means that the bottom of the cone here is actually gonna be pretty much untouched by my pencil I know that it's gonna be the lightest area of my cone so I'm going to start off by adding some shadows to the top of the cone here because I know that that area is gonna be a lot darker since all of the light is gonna touch the base of the cone and then bounce outwards it's not gonna wrap around the cone like in the sphere because it has a harsh corner it has an edge there as opposed to like a smooth surface that wraps around it light bounces off of surfaces you know and in order for it to curve around a surface it needs there needs to be a curved surface so for example here on the third cone the light is hitting it from the left side here but slightly on a lower angle so not as much from the top of the cone so some of the light might still hit the bottom of the cone a little bit depending on if there's other objects around or just you know light disperses not as a straight arrow like I've depicted here but in a vast ray of light so there's a lot of angles that it could hit this cone at but again still I know that the right side of the cone is going to be the darker area since the light wouldn't hit it as much as well as the bottom of the cone still you know lighting has so many different aspects that we could talk about the the intensity of the light how dispersed the light is how far away it is from the object all of these things change how shadows and light work on our objects but for the sake of this video I am focusing on the basics so we're not gonna get into that for now I did mention earlier about how light bounces off of things and this can actually lead into things like backlighting and rim lighting so we have the same sphere as earlier and showing how the light hits this the object but sometimes when there's you know walls objects and other surfaces around our objects that same light can bounce off of those objects and add just a slight little bit of lighting to the back of our sphere here it'll be subtle and it'll be a very small amount of light but this can sometimes happen with objects that can be like a little little bit of rim lighting to the back just because of bounced light from other objects and I always like adding that to my drawings because it creates again an environment and it creates a very dimensional look to my objects here are just some other types of surfaces and shapes that I wanted to show how I would shade based on the light sources because obviously the curvature of different surfaces changes how lighting works and how lighting and shadows work on them because obviously the curvature of different surfaces will depict how the light curves around it and how that's going to make us add our shadows to it so for example we've got a little bit of a cylinder here on its side and the light source that I've chosen here would hit it sort of around the middle back of the cylinder which means that the front of the cylinder would be completely dark and there would be this sort of like stripe of light coming across the middle of the cylinder then over here we have a sort of slinky cylinder shape that's been like curved and this is a very interesting shape because we have the element of the curvature of the actual shape itself so it's a curved surface but we also have two different bits of the shape where light could possibly hit it considering the the lighting source that I've picked so I actually like to highlight and do a little outline of the different areas that I want to keep completely white and areas that I know are gonna be the darkest areas of my shape and this is just a really good way of planning where you're going to be adding your shadows and make it a little bit less overwhelming or less intimidating when you actually go in to add your shadows yeah it's just a nice way to plan it's by adding a little outline of like okay this is where I know it's gonna be the darkest this is where I'm not gonna touch it with my pencil because it's where my highlights gonna be etc etc for example now we have a little bit more of a complicated shape like a vase or like a jug here and there's different shapes within this one object you know we've got the handle here which is one shape we've got the open vessel bit at the top and then we have the more rounded spherical bit at the bottom and the way that I tackle something like this is to go shape by shape so don't get overwhelmed by looking at the enormity of the object but try to go area by area and tackling each area individually as if it were its own shape so for example I tackle the handle first and then these two sort of like donut areas at the top of the vase and then we'll tackle this big open area at the bottom lastly and I'm doing the little outline bit like I did earlier when we did our sphere and just outlining you know my mid-tones my highlights and my dark tones and this way you know you won't get overwhelmed because if you're just tackling it individually shape by shape it's just like tackling easy shapes one at a time so as you can see here I planned out where my shadows were going to be and then it was just a matter of following that plan and adding darker and darker shadows and then obviously you can add in any cast shadows from other areas of the shape but that's a whole other thing which I will tackle shortly for example there are various different types of materials that can actually alter the way that shading and lighting works for example reflective materials like metal and mirrored surfaces and things like that and obviously these are a lot more complicated and obviously will take you a lot more practice to get to a level of comfort with surfaces of this kind but it all ends up being the same sort of exercise so for example here with this metal teapot which is gorgeous by the way I am going through the image my reference image here and sketching in the reflections first and this way I know that I will have a little outline of areas that I know I cannot touch because they have to be pure white in order to actually read as reflections so I go through the entire drawing I sketch out my little shapes of reflections and then I know that those areas are not to be touched and this way I can then go in and add my flat layers of shading to the rest of the drawing without going over my untouched areas and this way I feel a lot more comfortable going through my process and my steps that I have been showing you while still retaining the reflections which is what's actually going to make this surface look reflective and so as you can see here I'm literally just adding a flat layer of shading with my pencil over this area and again I'm just going section by section I'm not trying to do the whole drawing in one go because that would be a bit too overwhelming so I tend to go from top left to bottom right and this is mostly just so I don't smudge the finished areas of the drawing with my palm if you're a left-handed person you'd probably go from top right to bottom left just to avoid smudging but that's you know again just a preference but that's usually how I will start my drawings from left to right and as you can see here I'm just going through this this area that I have added a flat layer of shading and then add in darker areas by adding more pressure with my pencil and layering on more layers of graphite to areas where I see the darkest bits on my reference image and then I just kind of continue this process throughout my entire drawing it kind of becomes a really nice Zen state but just copying shapes onto your illustration because that's all the shading is really is just different shapes of different darknesses creating three-dimensional shapes so I just go through my entire drawing I see which areas and which shapes need to be added to my drawing to create these really dark pockets of shadows which then in turn will make my mid tones and my light tones appear much lighter because like I mentioned by adding a much darker area in your drawing it's gonna make the lighter areas appear much lighter by association it's just how your eyes work when you look at something it creates contrast by comparing the darker shape the darker areas to the lighter areas it's just a push-and-pull between comparing the dark tones to your light tones and that's essentially what values are if you would like to have a whole video regarding color and values I would love to do a tutorial on that so let me know then we have a different type of surface that I personally find incredibly annoying to draw which is transparent surfaces like glass every artist knows that drawing glass is so so annoying because not only is glass typically reflective as well but it also has a lot of things going on because not only are you adding shadows and lighting from the front where you're looking at the object from but also from the back because the front is transparent so you get to see stuff that's being reflected from the back as well it's very complicated and I personally wouldn't feel very comfortable trying to make up of a transparent surface glass from my brain it probably wouldn't be incredibly realistic so I always tend to try and find references for things like this because it is truly a very very difficult object to try and recreate from your head there's just so many different elements you know if there is more than one light source it immediately complicates the entire situation tenfold but here I am doing a little example for you just so you can see as you saw I went in first and foremost and just drew out a little outline of all of the areas that I knew were going to be specific shapes that I wanted to either highlight or shade in so I made a little outline of my pure reflections that I know I'm gonna are gonna be the lightest areas of my drawing and then I outlined different shapes of reflections from the back of the object different areas that I know are gonna be like pockets of shadows and this way I know that when I go in and start adding my different layers of shadows I'm gonna have a plan so I went in actually with my finger and just blend it out a little bit of my shadows just to create a more of a blended surface but I personally don't really use my finger often in my drawings because I really like the hatching sort of texture that pencil has on paper so it's honestly just a personal preference but I know that a lot of artists do use their finger or a blending stump or something like that to create a very even blended surface so as you can see here I'm just going through my drawing and adding the darker shadows as I go along always looking back and forth from my reference to my drawing and making sure that I am copying the shapes accurately to recreate what looks like a reflective transparent shape again very complicated I'm not a big fan like I said but at the same time I think it's very hard to ruin a reflective transparent shape because it's just a bunch of shapes so you can't really go too wrong with it as long as you have a bunch of reflections and a bunch of random shapes that look like they're coming from the back it's very hard to ruin and not make it look like glass I think because of how abstract it looks and how random all these shapes look I think yeah it's very hard to ruin it you just kind of have to go with the vibe with it and and and try and make it all look blended enough to make it look like a reflective shape really so I'm going through looking back and forth from my reference and adding darker shadows and layering those shadows wherever it needs it while also leaving all of my reflections and highlights untouched again creating this contrast within my illustration and making sure that I am following my initial plan that I sketched out then we have to translate these techniques into color because you might want to actually color something in with color pencils right and fear not I'm gonna give you an example so I've got my coloring pencils here I've got a lot of different colors and we're gonna be drawing this little yellow pepper here so the first thing that I would recommend doing is actually looking at your reference and picking out all the colors that you're going to need in advance and I do this by swatching and making sure that I like the different options that I have and comparing the swatches to my reference image and just kind of going back and forth until I have a nice color palette that I can trust so you're gonna want to get all the colors that you need for the base color so like the yellows but then as you can see there's a lot of oranges and browns and lots of different like intermediate colors between those that we're gonna be using to blend all these colors together so we're gonna start off with our lightest color which I picked out was this like really pale yellow and you always want to start off with the lightest color possible because with coloring pencils and shading you always want to build color you don't want to go in with the darkest version possible right off the gate you want to build up your saturation you want to build up your contrast and you want to go slowly because it's a lot harder to erase and remove colored pencil from your paper than it is graphite for example so you do want to go slowly and in layers I always say with coloring pencils it's all in the layers so I added in my flat color here on all my different elements and now I'm going in with a slightly darker yellow and this is more of like a orange yellow color and I am going to start sketching out all of my pockets of shadows with this pencil here as you can see I'm going back and forth looking from my reference to my drawing and kind of picking out these slightly darker areas from my pale yellow while also making sure to leave my reflections and my highlights untouched because I want those to remain being that pale yellow for example that little highlight on left there of the pepper you know those little bits of what looks like white but isn't white it's more of like a very very pale yellow I want to leave those untouched from here on out and then it's just a matter of going through the entire illustration adding these little shapes of shadows with this slightly darker yellow and then blending that out into the pale yellow areas with layering and loose pressure on the pencil like we explained earlier and then as you can see here I have changed pencils yet again to this ochre color this like brown orange color and this is going to be my next darker layer so I'm going over the more darker areas of the pepper like in between the creases and more on to the left side of the drawing where our light source is no longer really touching the pepper as much so I'm going over the darker areas with this and again using a combination of layering which is what we're already doing we're layering different colors of pencils on top of each other but also adding different amounts of pressure with my pencil to create darker areas within my different layers and just creating different amount different amounts of shadow within different colors of pencil and now I've switched over to my dark brown pencil and this is what I'm going to be using to add the really really dark shadows over here on the right hand side of the pepper and these are areas where our light source is not touching the pepper it is a lot colder you know like a colder area because of the lack of lighting and so this is where the darkest areas are gonna be and so I know that it's gonna be a really dark brown and I'm gonna layer this dark brown over and over again until I cover the entire area and then I'm going to use that same dark brown pencil in tandem with the ochre orangey brown pencil and go back and forth between those two pencils to blend them into each other really this is the part of the drawing where I have like two or three pencils at hand and I keep switching between all three of them to blend all of these areas of shadows into each other and again it is a lot of different layers of pencil working together to create a seamless effect and this is where you have to really practice patience because you have to really get through the gross part of the drawing quote-unquote because it's gonna look a little rough until you start getting to like a certain layer of the drawing where you have blended these pencils in enough to actually look blended so yeah just trust the process and trust that it's gonna turn out my camera forgot to film the part of me shading in the stock here of the pepper but I think you kind of got the picture and I'm just adding here the drop shadow of the pepper on the table surface that it's on and this is the sort of final little detail here and this is the finished yellow pepper I hope that you found this helpful and you know if you want a full more in-depth tutorial about shading with colored pencils I would be more than happy to do that so please do let me know in the comments so I really hope you enjoyed this video I hope it was helpful and please do let me know if you have any questions down there in the comments I will try my best to answer everyone's questions and again if you are interested in seeing a really in-depth tutorial using colored pencils specifically please do let me know because I would be more than happy to do a video on that as well again don't forget to download the worksheets from today's video they're in the description box if you want to practice along make sure to check out all the other things I do like my book my socials I just released a coloring book as well on my online shop so make sure to go give it a little look if you're interested in that kind of stuff thank you so much for watching I hope you have a lovely rest of your day and I will see you in my next video bye