Draw A Soft Serve Ice Cream Cone: Shading & Blending

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Emily. I'm an artist and an art teacher from New Zealand, and welcome to the drawing tutorial. In this lesson, we're going to draw and shade a soft serve ice cream code. The focus of this class is shading. It will be a fairly challenging class, and it will require some patience. So it's most suitable for people who have done some drawing before. Who are fairly comfortable with shading, but just want to take their shading to the next level. We'll be using blending stumps in this class. And I'll also be using a precision erase a pen, this Tombo Mono zero. So it's also a really good class for people who aren't quite sure about how to use these tools. If you've taken my sketch club classes before, you'll know that I don't use blending stumps very often, but this ice cream cone is a perfect subject for using blending stumps to get those nice smooth gradations from light to dark. If you have a look at the edges of those swirls of delicious ice cream, you'll see that there's no hard edges between the values. And that's what we'll be using the blending stump for to get those soft gradations. 2. Materials: For materials you're going to need your sketchbook. Now, keep in mind that the type of paper you have in your sketchbook is going to make a difference to how the blending stumps. Going to blend to the Pencil on your paper. So if you have quite a toothy paper, then you might get more of a texture. If you have a very, very cheap paper, it might be uneven and some of those irregularities in the paper will show up when you use a blending stump. But that is just a sketch and it's a way of learning and practicing. So I wouldn't worry too much about going and getting some really nice paper. Hopefully you will learn from this one and then you can figure out what paper is going to suit your needs for a more finished drawing. I'm using two pencils here, a HB in a Tooby. And then later on, I'll also use a darker pencil, like a three or four bay Pencil. For erases. I've got that precision and eraser pen that Tombow mono zero for bringing up. So really Fine highlights. And then I've also got my patio eraser. You could use it to bring out Fine highlights. If you don't have the eraser pen, you may also get away with a regular eraser, but just cutting it down with a couple of slices with a craft knife, so that has a nice point or a nice edge on it. And for blending, I've got the blending stumps. You could use a cotton bud if you don't have blending, paper blending stumps. And I'm also going to be using a tissue for the larger areas, even if you don't have these more specialists materials like the eraser pen and the blending stumps. You could do this. Listen without them, but just keep in mind that you may not get the same amount of fine detail. It will still be a really good learning experience for how to control your shading to create smooth gradations, and to use your shading to create the illusion of three-dimensional form, which is basically what drawing and shading is all about. So go grid off all the materials that you need and we'll get started. 3. Large Shapes: Even though we're focusing on shading, we've got to start somewhere. And like all of these classes that I teach, we usually start with looking at Shapes. Very first thing though, I would just mark out how big you want your drawing to be. Working on an A4 page. It's about 8.5 by 11 ", something like that. I usually recommend doing a drawing that's about as big as your hand. I'm not too much bigger because it takes a long time to shade in. Not much smaller because it just gets very friendly and hard to see. I'm just gonna make a muck about here. And then thinking more about the ice cream part of the, the ice-cream cone rather than the cone path. So I might make my ice cream part about here, and then I can flip the cone and later, just make sure you got enough space if you want to do the whole cone. In the main photo, the one that you can download, there's actually a hand holding the cone. We're not going to worry about the hand this lesson, but I'm just making maps of where I want the top and the bottom of the ice cream section to be. Now if we have a look at the photograph and it was bringing up a little bit bigger here. You can see the hand there on the ice cream cone. Like I said, we're gonna be focusing mostly just on the actual ice-cream. If we think about the main shape. Main shape. If the ice cream for wanting to fit everything in as kind of like a dome shape. Thinking about something that is equal on both sides. We're going to use that as how large Shapes to put down on your piece of paper. And then we're also going to divide it into levels. So we've got this level here, and then we've got this level here as well. So can you see how the ice cream has been trolled around on top of the cone? Is it first layer here? And then it's toiled around again and it comes up on a second layer. And then it finishes with that peak at the top. How are we going to approach it with those three sections or three layers? We'll go ahead and draw that and think about the height versus a width. But with this drawing, it's not going to matter if yours is a little bit taller or a little bit wider. And we're actually not going to worry too much about the proportion because It's more about the shading this nice. And I don't want to spend a whole lot of time getting it exactly the right proportions. There's my dome shape. Just where it really lightly with your HB or even a to H pencil. And then I'm going to put in these levels 12. And then I can put the point up here. Am I make mine just a little bit wider actually. Even though we're not dealing with proportions, I tend to do it just in my mind anyway, I'm not actually measuring it out, but I can see that there's something not quite right there anymore like this. Like I said, don't worry too much about it. I'm just trying to get a drawing that looks fairly accurate because I'm the teacher. In this lesson. News could be whatever shape it could be squat or it could be wider as long as you get those nice soft curves in gradations of shading from light to dark. So we could put an idea of the cone if you want to. Like I said, we can add this in later. So from here, what we're going to do is just map out those curves that we can see 4. Small Shapes: So we've got the top of the tier, the bottom tier there. The sighted kids around. I think, actually start with this middle one, just because you can see these parts that jut out towards us. This one here, they, they, they kinda overlap. Both the top in the bottom tier. Start with this one right in the middle here. What I'm doing is I'm really trying to divide this up into Shapes. Now, if we think about this as the middle of the cone, and I can see this shape here. What I'm trying to draw in. Then I'm gonna go ahead and draw in this shape. Now at some point we're going to have to decide where or how we put in there light each and you see the light each on that one there. When I draw this second side of it. And I'm going to just keep in mind that I have to have a space there for the light edge, which we will either leave white of the page. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll erase it if we need to. Okay, so we drawing in this shape to the lift of the center line. From here it's got a bit of a, an S-curve in it. And then it comes up and around. Doesn't have to go right out to the age of your, your dome shape because it is going to come in a bit here. And then it's going to start to come up towards the center line. Just correct these shapes if you need to. And I can see but of an angle coming down here. I can start to build my next twill or my next what do you call it? My next ripple. Next door to this one here. So that angle that I put in this line here, it's just a way to kinda guide we. The next one is going to go in making this a little bit fatter than I think because I want to keep the white area. They're down and around. It doesn't go right out to the edge. Maybe comes up a little bit more again, giving yourself room for the light edge. Now, because this is a light edge here in the opposite side of the light edge isn't actually that dark either we're going to make sure it aligns or not to dark this one here. It's not so bad, doesn't matter because if you look in the photo, It's quite dark all along the edge. This each on both sides of that line there is quite Light. Okay, from here, we're going to curve up and around another angle there. And then someone's going to create around and up towards the center line again. Again, if you see any angles like this one here, they are really useful. That angle we had this one they had before. It's quite a dark line two, so we can afford to go a little bit darker and put their done and just use it as a marker. Come back to because once we get all of these and it's, it's possibly going to get a little bit confusing to try and remember where we are at. So I'm putting in this last one on the middle section. An S-shape on this just a little bit down here. Let's put it in. If you miss, it, doesn't matter too much, but then it just gives us something to work from. When we put it in this East stripe. In the Windows, we'll go ahead and add in this one coming up to the top as well. Nasals in vet, part of the East. It's going to come up, been around and join that one. I'm just getting rid of the lines of that level now. So they don't interfere with what I'm doing. Keep this one just just for a little while longer. I know we're in it. Okay. What else have we got here? We've got a little, little shape in here in the nucleosome lights and some darks and things in the section, but there's also a drip there. Just get rid of it seemed to line like a drip coming down here. In the top of it. There's a bit of an angle on the top. But the drip and then we've got this one Another one that's going to come down around the outside here, it's got a little bit of a wobble on it. That's going to join into this final one on this label here, the second level. I'm just going to see where that joins up with this ripple and where it joins up on net side of the report goes from about here. Some of those good to make these little dots might have seen this in other classes I've done. Just so you know where you're at. It's going to go from there to beer. Down a little bit, little angle there, a little curve. Then we can go ahead and put in this bottom layer here. Now this pat on the sides, pretty simple. We can see it's quite straight across. Does actually overlap. This one on the second level, just slightly rid of that straight line. Nif was just part of the level up a bit along. It's just going to move down and around. This one up here should come in a little bit. This one up here, it should come in a little bit. I just want to make sure that this one comes out further. Then the ones on the second level. And then fairly straight here. It's got a very, very shallow S curve. Angle here. Little almost like a little triangle shape lifting there. Mine is definitely a little bit longer, I think then the photograph in terms of proportion. But I'm not worrying about that for this lesson. Okay, and then we've got this lovely cool here. So this one we're gonna do most of the format, mostly with the shading, so just try and get an idea of it, but it's probably going to change. The most important thing is this angle here. Come down on an angle like that, and then it's going to start to cut up. And where's it going to join up? It's going to come underneath this one. Nice. You very shallow U-shape there. And then from this one here we come down round. It gets narrower as it comes to this point. So it's wider and then it gets narrower. Don't worry too much about this area. We're going to fix it up when we come to Shading. And then we've got stuff from the top here. This one just comes down and it starts to smoke right around. We've got another similar one here. So it comes down, up and joins up here. I've looked at that space on the outside. And we could do that for the rest of it, the rest of the sides as well. There's this shape here, these ones here looking at it almost as a silhouette now. And even this one here under the cone or joining onto the cone near. Just run your eye around those without all these annoying lines and the way just do some checks. Maybe but more of an angle here. I've got that shape. Come around the side looking at the silhouette. I cone is going to be out here. If I come around the other side looking for the silhouette, this one, maybe it comes out a little bit too far. See, the cone is gonna be about here. We will shade the cone and later, but for now it's just going to be just a placeholder. Again, just trying to get rid of all of these lines that you don't need. Just the grid lines. They're just the scene two lines in the lines that we put in to find those levels right at the start. Now, if you're drawing is quite dark, it'd be a good idea just to push back some of these, these lines, especially the ones in the scene to the outside edge, doesn't matter too much of it's dark because we can put in a dark background at the end. But maybe some of these ones in here could be just a little bit lighter. I went wrap mine out too much because I want to make sure you can still see them 5. Simple Values: The next thing we're going to do is to start dividing this up until light in dark. And the easiest thing to do I think, is to start with the Darkest area. And for me it's this one here. Now as we do this, you might start to see a slightly different shape to what you're initially drew. So we can use this shading time to make some corrections as well if we need to. And then we're just going to shave it in. Quite likely to start with. It's going to have a light edge here. So if we wanted to shade in this next pattern, we need to make a or leave a space there for the white edge. We could do that. You can come through with an eraser, especially if you've got one of these precision erases. And later on you can come through and bring it wipes out that way. If you don't have one of those thin, just be really aware of where those white edges are in. We'll try and keep them in. This one here. I mean, it's all kind of a light gray and might just leave it for now. It's a little bit of shading in here. So we're just looking for the strongest things that are going to help us start to put the sticky, the strongest shapes of light and dark. It's quite dark here. And then again, we've got a light each try and leave it Light edge and shading, everything underneath it. I'm just using a side-to-side shading pattern. You could use small circles if you want to. We will do a little bit of blending on top of this. So if you do side-to-side and you've got a few streaks, we should be able to smooth those out later on. Moving up level. This line here is quite strong, quite dark. And then we've got our Light each. I'm going to mark that out. This is we had to make sure that there was wide enough to cover the light part in the dark part and hopefully you've done it. And they needed to get your head around what happens just up here. So there is a shape in here that's a little bit darker. And I'm just going to draw around that shape that I can see in shaded it. Let's create a bit of a placeholder there. So it might be a good idea to put that in now and then come back to our Light section that we're trying to find. And you'll see how that comes around and over top of this shape comes in a little bit, little bit light, a little bit darker there and then starts to come up. The Light edge changes. Sometimes it's slightly brighter or slightly grayer than other places. So it's a lot brighter here than it is here, but we're just leaving it all white for now. Then we can shade in this dark part here, even this part of the edge here in the photograph, it's very dark, but I'm just leaving leaving it because I know it's the, the front surface or the front plane of the ripple. Want to make it really clear to myself what I'm dealing with? Try to try to stay clear about all these different paths. I don't want you to get confused. And it's probably going to look a little bit strange to start with until we start doing some blending. Then we can look at this next one up. So we've got our light section. There is quite dark above it. And then there's a light to edge here, very lightly drawing around it. I can shading underneath it. Now the shading on this one, it starts off darker over here and then it gets lighter as you come up. So just be very careful. Maybe even leave this part white. Well, very, very lightly shaded. Let's move across to this one here. Find, find the each, the, the, the front plane of that ripple. Some drawing around it. Curves under hears quite hard to see because it's very dark, so quite gray in there, but it does curve under the and it's quite dark just here where it sits on top of the ripple beneath it. So do my quite dark so you can save it. Just be weary of how dark you pushing. It comes up here. I'm going to start, we're looking at negative spaces in this lesson as well. Each time we were drawing a ripple, we're looking at a new shape, trying to see it independent from everything else. Shading here And again, this one gets very light as it comes out towards the front. Carry on across this way, you could be working the opposite way. I'm not quite sure which is a natural way for me anymore because I changed it up so much, but it might be more natural for you to go the opposite way. Maybe we'll do that now let's start on this side and then move that way. Probably a few right-handers, it's more natural to go from from left to right because then you're not going to be smudging your work. This one's all just a very light gray. Is it Light each year? And even though tunes into gray down here, I'm still just going to very lightly outline it, creating those planes. Very, very light here. I know we were going to leave it, but it is a little bit of shading and this bottom part here is quite dark, so we can put an, a darker line there. Now, I'm putting in these dark lines, Beckett quite soft, so I'm shading back-and-forth over it. I don't want it to be a really sharp line with the tip of my pencil. And some Shading very dark underneath this one. Again, just, just a Soft line shaded back-and-forth. Now we're going to add in a little bit of a plane here you can see the light ridge. And then this is where it folds back on itself. Shaped like that. Just this part here. Let's put that in. And it's quite dark. It's sitting underneath the lighter edge there. And then it's moved up a level. I'm going to draw in the light edge, even though it gets dark towards the top. We've got that weird little bit and they're going to shade everything on the inside here, coming up to that drip. Coming over to the other side of the drip. Am using a really light pressure, but I am trying to fill in most of these white gaps. I'm just going to pay attention to this ridge. So it gets a little bit wider as it comes down with very skinny here. And it's a little bit wider. The S might need to just erase a little bit of my shading. It may be, I think it probably actually comes out a little bit more than I've got something not quite right about the shape. My fix it up when we do the shading. Oh, here's what it is. It comes in a bit here. So kids around and the unit status to straighten up. And then finally we've got this one over here, the very light shape. A little bit of shading down underneath the light shape, and then above that light shape. And I'm just trying to leave a little bit of white around that each as well. Put in quite a strong dark line here. And Soft one here. This is just me to get my head around where everything is. It's when you put it in this gray shading, sometimes you can get a little bit lost. Is it darker line down here? And then we've got our shading down under here as well. I forgot about, so we need to make sure we've got this line coming around, this lightly edge coming around here. It's sort of disappears. When it gets to the back of that curve. I'm just going around mine so you can see it a little bit more clearly within light edges. Down. Let's go up and around. And then we can draw the other side of the light edge. Then you can see very narrow side of the light edge there. I think it actually kills up in his a bit of a square into it to something like that. Maybe even in a little bit more because you can see the dark shape 6. Blending Exercise: This point you should have a sense of three-dimensional form already starting to happen. These light paths are pushing forward, coming towards us. And then anything that is shaded feels like it's pushed back a little bit or it's a little bit deeper. And towards the center of the ice cream. In a moment we're going to build up our shading, but I think what we'll do first is just a very quick exercise. So you can see what you want to do with your blending. If you just shade a quick square or maybe even through, Let's do three squares. One, I'm just going back-and-forth once and then coming back over the opposite way to do another one here. The other way. So I'm going to be using this for some of the blending. Ideally, you're going to use your pencil most of the time. And the way you do that as you just build up your shading over top and you soften off the pressure or less than the pressure as you come towards the area you want to leave. What light? We can start again at the same dark, dark listening the pressure, letting it get lighter and lighter until it blends with the layer beneath. So that's the ideal. And depending on what kind of paper you have, you might get a really good results just with that. And you might not need to do any blending at all with these blending stumps. So to show you what it looks like when we just go over a very flat area. Let's go back and forth. Maybe once back the other way and it's a very light pressure. You don't want to be pushing in and scrubbing. You see when I do that, I start to get some some uneven marks. So it was like You're using your pencil when you're trying to use this side of it is just back-and-forth. And then we could also use it just to tidy up some of these edges here. If you wanted to blend two areas of Pencil. Ideally, doing it with your pencil first, meeting, fade-out. But you can use Blending Stump just to go over that area where they join. The other thing you can use is I can see you can use a cotton bud. So it looks very similar TO Blending Stump. It's very light pressure. You can use a tissue. Now, the problem with the tissue is just going to do one more square here. It's very hard to get into those small areas without smudging everything else. But you might be honest with folded up almost like one of these blending stumps. So fold it into a point and then use that back-and-forth. Again. If you wanted to blend dark area into a lighter area, It's moving back and forth. So I'd have a go it tasting out what EBIT blending tools you've got, whether it's just a piece of tissue or whether it's a blending stump. And actually what we're gonna be doing really is we're going to be following those curves or lines of the ice cream ripples. And that's where the, the Blending Stump is handy because if you need to get into really small tight curls like this, you can do that a lot more easily than with a tissue. So you can come in here, you can soften off edges as well. So if you want an age where you can't quite tell where it changes from light to dark. You can use the the paper that you're using is going to have a really big effect on how well these work. And also the pencils that you use. If I use a, this is a different pencil, this one here, HB. It leaves a little bit more graphite. My other one. I'm gonna get different results when I smudge that. Have little play around. And then come back to your drawing 7. Building Values Part 1: We're going to build up her values a little bit more really bringing in those dark darks and paying attention to the edges of the edges soft or hard and they light or dark. We're going to be doing a lot of shading on here and you might want to have a tissue down if you are working On top of your drawing depending on how big your drawing is. So if you're right-handed and you're coming from right to left, or even lift right to left, left to right. Either way, you might find that you're smudging it and just having that they're stops it from smudging all over the page. I'm just zooming in a little bit here so you can see the quality of my Pencil Shading. It's not perfect in any way. But now is the time where I go through and refine everything. So I'm going to start at this middle one here again. Probably go back to my original pencil. If you find that your pencil doesn't go dark enough, then you're going to switch down to a darker paints or like a to B pencil. Now I'm paying attention to what kind of max my pencil is leaving in trying to smooth them all out. And I keep flicking my IBEC to the photograph. So you do that too. I'm just kinda gauging how dark this needs to go. I'm going to need to switch Pintos was definitely not gonna get dark enough for that one. This one is a to P pencil. Whatever pencil your work in, whatever sketchbook. This is a sketchbook. The paper is going to have certain qualities to it. You can see mine picks up in some areas and doesn't and others. So she really nice paper but it's not the best based for shading. But if that's happening, don't worry about that we're creating an overall illusion. Now, when I come to this next part, above the light, each stock up here, shading small circles now, and it fades away and then everything else is very light. This edge here is actually a little bit grayer here. Then it is here. And here. It's what we're paying attention to in this might be we bring in your blending stump if you've got one, makes sure it's nice and clean. And just leaned in that area. We want it to be more gray. You can use this on everything else if you want to. But again, depending on your paper, you may get undesirable fix. See if I can clean this up a little bit because it couldn't little bit me see the very, very light perishes the K you at least to stop with. Now you could be using your cotton Burj. You could be using your tissue as well. Folding it up into a shape. Using this, I don't want to do too much more rubbing on net one there. But you can use either. Okay, so it might just switch to my TUV pencil now and just use that for everything else. I'm going to use it very lightly when I don't want much shading it all around here. Coming over to the side. Dark parts, very soft. Then is a line, got a faint line that comes through here. In this dark part that I've just shaded, we want it to fade into the area above it. So this is where you can use, so it's really small circles just to blend it in to the rest of the shading or faded out. And then even lighter as we get close to the Light, each little bit darker here. Again, the edge of this ripple is actually gray Good. A shadow cast on it from the one above. I think it's a little white area just here. That can be gray. And then this pad underneath needs to be a darker gray to bring out the edge. In all of this. And here is a light gray. Something I've lost. That little bit of light theorem is going to use it. Eraser, bring it back. And then this H here is also gray. Can you see how you have to compare everything to what's next to it. So this edge here wouldn't be light gray, but wouldn't show up anyway until I put this docket, slightly darker gray underneath it. But then I can see that that's slightly darker gray, then changes to a lighter gray beneath that. The whole time you start looking at what's around you in the photograph, what's around, whatever you're shading, and how you going to move to that area. Do you need to change the pressure of your pencil? Do you need to change your pencil to a lighter or darker one? Do you need to layer up some Shading? I'm just looking at this era here and seeing if that's working before I move on. And what doesn't need. A little bit more definition of this front edge here. I think it's just this part, very dark pattern there. Comes down and fades out. And then underneath here definitely needs to be darker, still. Very soft edge here though. Small circles. It's actually a bit gray and near to each, it's not completely white. The Darkest area is underneath here. Now that we've built up this, this gray area, we can go in and put in this really dark area. We can see contrast. Here. Everything is going to compare to this, this dark area. Now, black point. I'm just looking at the photograph, looking for areas that I need to fix up a little bit. In terms of the tonal range. Here is quite gray. But then it has it really dark area. Create some contrast. Kidding, pretty close. I think maybe a little bit darker here. And now we can get really dark in here too. This is where the to-be Pencil. Having put that dark and you can start to see the illusion he TNI even more now and that's what we're gonna do with the rest of it. We're going to go and fill and fill in all the dark areas. Really think about the value that they need to be. Comparing them to this black area. Let's go over to the side here. This is all gray and I might just smooth it out a little bit, just use my tissue for this one. Then he's thinking about what was it the right to kind of gray the right value. I think it needs to go a little bit dark. And when I compare these two in the photograph, put down a little bit more graphite with my Tooby Pencil. Little bit more of a smudge, just a couple of times over. Then I can work on this edge, so it's quite light at the top. I can probably leave it the way to steer and then HE starts to disappear here it blends into and to the rest of the ripple. Maybe a little bit darker around the each year, very, very soft with small circles. And then it's quite a bit dark underneath two, so we can add some shading on the cone later. But for now I'm just going to put in something to define that each soft, soft edges. We can use it to define this one too. It's quite dark. The are quite sharp. They are actually. And through here, very, very soft. Is it a dark line near, but it's not sharp, like it, like this one. It's like a shaded line. What I'm doing is going back-and-forth over that area with the side of my pencil, very lightly. I can build it up, make it darker if I want to, but I want to just make sure it's not too dark too soon. Fade out down here. Probably all I'm going to do to that one at the moment, I think get rid of this lineup here. If we want to, like I said, we can put in the dark background and it's going to make very light area just TO stand out light. But then there's a bit of shading here to level one, pretty much done. Go ahead and do level two. And then I might leave Level three for you to do on your own. I'll speed up the video so you can see what I do. But hopefully by the time we eat to live with three, you've got a good feel for how to get that 3D illusion. 8. Building Values Part 2: They start on this side this time, we've got a very light, maybe a couple of lines and show the ripple marks. And then we'd go very dark on the side. Smooth, soft line. And then shading here. It's not white here, but it's very light. Maybe a couple of little highlights on there that we can bring out with L eraser and later on. So you see the shadow just here that's being cast by the rib above it. She didn't comes down to about here. Is a little shadow just here to quite dark. Comes around onto here. This shape is a dark gray. Definitely afford to go darker. Comparing it to the bottom and the photograph, dark down here, but not by much. So this should be pretty dark. And this is a really good example. This area here of a very, very soft edge. I'm going to bring it up a bit bigger so you can see it. See this Part around here. It's dark, but then it fades. It's really focused on that area there and see if we can get something that's the same. So my dark has gone up a little bit too high. I'm just going to erase some of it. And make sure I've got the right kind of shapes here. In all the way down here. Actually, you can see it's slightly gray, light gray with a bit of a highlight in it. It's going to create my shape. Down here. We've got very, very light gray fading into white just around here. I'm just using my pencil lightly. And I'm using small circles. Create a straight edge down here. And it's actually dislike a little bit darker just here. Since these are really, really tiny, tiny details that need to be in the right place. That's looking pretty good. It's some gray up here going small, small circles, darker in here, and it's going to bring out the age. Now if we sort of got nothing here no, each year because we haven't got the contrast. So I need to have slightly darker line coming down here. Lightens up. It gets darker around here. So shade right over to this dark area as well. Once you feel like you've got everything the right place, you could use your shading, stick, you blending stick. Just to soften off those gray areas through here. It's being aware that every time you use this, you're going to be kidding graphite on the tip of it. So if I then took this and in rubbed it on this area here, which I can do because it's gray. It's going to leave a mark is going to color it and basically fix up this part. And here you can see the edges a bit thicker than I've got it. And it's all just done with very, very soft shaded line. Comes around to about beer for a week, just a little bit too sharp with my line near, but it's okay. If if you haven't got the shape quite right, see if you can get the same kind of faked. Just started raining here. Might be pretty less than sorry about that. I can use my eraser to pick out those areas that need to be light along that ridge. Maybe just a little bit coming down there. So to get this light edge to stand out, we've got to have that dark edge and behind it. Let's tidy things up a little bit. When you use these two. If you go over dark area like this area here, you lose a lot of your contrast. So it pays to then go back. Once you've got a nice smooth area, go back and add a little bit more shading. Bring the contrast back again. Blending a bit more time on this one, just to show you what you can achieve if you want to spend more time on it. Everything else are probably do a little bit more quickly, but you can see how this is starting to take shape now. Still needs a little bit more refinement. Maybe a bit of blending between the light each in the middle so I can erase a little bit and then come back. Just a little bit of shading there. Please. Blending stumps, get dirty. You can rub them off on a piece of paper. You can use sandpaper to just sharpen them, but I usually just do this. If I need to go into a light area, you say I want to come in here and I don't want to bring too much more gray into it. I just want to smooth it out a little bit. It's nice to have a pretty clean Blending Stump. Still working on net when I haven't quite got the shape right, I think it means I can't quite get the values in the right place. Just bringing it down a little bit at Light part 9. Building Values Part 3: It's been quite a bit of time on this part here just to show you what you can achieve if you do have the time to spend on it. For these other paths, I'm going to treat it a little bit more sketchy like nicer these classes. I don't want it to be days long, maybe just an hour or two. We can still get something similar to this. But I, when it's being quite so much time on it, you might want to follow through with me and they may be later on your own or in your own time. Go over some of the areas like this, maybe this front curve here, and really work on studying the photograph, studying the changes between the light and the dark and the edges and trying to get it to look exactly like the photo a little bit like is if you are doing something that was more of a hyper-realistic drawing. But let's continue along here. And then, like I said, I'll let you do the top one on your own time. So think about everything. Compete this value down here and here. It's quite dark, but it's not as dark as that. When we come around here. It's also quite dark, but still not as dark as this. It's probably about as dark is. Maybe here. I'm comparing all the time. Working on this one here, build it up quite a bit. Come around here. This is another area that you could work on in your, in time. We'll do a little bit of it. Some should using small circles to shade. Now because it's not really a wide flat area. It's suits the shape of the small circles. Make sure you leave enough white space here. Don't go too far and darker along this edge. Then it fades out. And then we can do one more layer again to, to darken this up even further. So it's getting close to down, down, three down here. It's very dark spot just in here. Now, sometimes I find with this paper, especially in some other sketchbook papers that It's like parts of the paper will just fill up and you can't add anymore graphite to them. It's not a lot you can do to this. I think this is one of those places I can't it's very hard for me to go darker. Feel it on the paper. Texture. The paper just feels a little bit different. When it happens, which it may have been a few using sketchbooks. Just move on. If you were working on something like a commission drawing, then you'd get yourself some really decent paper and you test them out and make sure you get exactly the effects that you want. I'm just going to go along this edge here with a nice clean area. If my blending stump, try and soften it off a little bit. I've got a few lines leftover and near from my planning, I'll get rid of those. When you rub this out, you can see, I'll do a little bit extra. It creates, it creates a hearty chicken, which we don't want. So if you do to do any revenue, that's where you need to come back, soften off that edge. Rubbing along it lightly. If nothing happens. And it mentioned need a bit more graphite on here. So you either rub and another area and bring it up, or you do a little bit of sketching, a little bit of shading here, and then use that to blend with. I'm pretty happy with that huge. But when I look at the photograph in squint and then look at the Syria in the photograph and squint and look at this hearing, my drawing and squint, this really stand out. It shouldn't be that light. Sometimes you see an area and it looks lives. But in comparison to other light areas is actually quite dark Moving over to finish off this second Level, going to find this little dark spot in here and it's quite a dark line just standing here to dark line, but soft lines and none of these edges are sharp that all fade into another value. Or they just at least have a very, very soft edge to take a look at this edge here, it starts off a gray and then it gets brighter as the light hits it from above. Maybe slightly grayer here in the and again, really bright white here, and then it starts to fade into a light gray. That's what we're working on with Shading, with the pressure of our Pencil, getting it to fade or can you get to dark gray and then get brighter? Those transitions from light to dark. As it comes up here, it is gray with a light age on the right-hand side. Let's keep working across. Just give this one a little bit of a smudge here along the each. Just fill this in a bit. It doesn't need much more. It's pretty light anyway, in the photo. It's very softly along the edge. There is a slight outline down here, gets a little bit darker. And then we can really build it up over on this right-hand side. Excuse me, backup to the top here just to figure out which is a great line. And I said you might get a little bit confused with all these different ripples. And I think I had to edges there dark and soft. In defining the white edge with some shading up against it. Have a look at the age in the photo. How does it change its bright up here? And then it starts to thin out and get maybe just slightly darker as it comes around. To thin this one out. A bit darker in the scene to here and down, up against this ripple. Fade all this out. And just check the value. It's a little bit to light up here in mind. This should all be pretty much the same down here. Smooth it out a little bit, and then come back with the darker values if you need to. Now there is a little bit down here. Hard to see exactly what's happening, but make it slightly darker than this. Each. Just put something in there. Then I'm just going to darken up this age again along here. You return, you work on something, work on one part at a fixed, the other parts around it. So by adding in this dark edge, it's going to make this white part here stand out further towards us. I'm not just following the EGF Kotlin my drawing. I'm looking at the photograph again. Even though I haven't got the shape quite right, I still get the effect that it's standing up. So don't worry if you're Shapes on exactly the same as the photograph are exactly the same as mine. I probably could correct it a little bit here if I wanted to. When I come into this last part, the top 10. Assessing The Values: So just take a moment now to do a quick review of the lightest in the darkest areas before we move on to do the cone and the background. So if you have a look at the photograph and squint, you can pick out the light and the dark areas really easily. And then even do that and then shift your focus to your drawing with your eyes squinted. And don't worry about Shapes too much, but see if you can find any areas that maybe to light in new drawing and need to go darker. I can definitely see this part needs to go darker. And here, you can even do this with my drawing if you want to, just for practice, squint your eyes screen now. Squint at that photograph and inflict your item I drawing. It's bring it up a bit bigger and see if you can pick out those areas. And my drawing that a to Light. I don't think there's any that a to dark. Just checking all of the very bright areas in the photograph to hear. Maybe could be a little bit brighter, but the areas that need to go darker. Can you see any of those areas? This here when I squint is just one big flat area of the same value. So in here I need to bring some more shading. And maybe this is still a little bit too light. And maybe this one as well, pretty happy with the second level. Maybe something through here is a little bit too white. Might just need a bit of softening, are a bit of blending. It may be in here, could be a little bit darker, but I actually quite like the way it is. I didn't think it makes a big difference to HIV, it much darker. So I'm just going to work on this and this here in this and you go, he'd and squint at your own drawing in the photograph. Hopefully you've got a printed out on another screen and you can put them side-by-side and see if you can find anything that needs to be edited slightly or refined. So you have the correct relationship between the light and the dark. Be careful you don't get carried away with your blending at this point as well because he would have seen when you're blending over the dark areas, you lose the values. They tend to flatten out or become lighter than they were. Probably. If you're happy with the smoothness of things that prevent any blending at this stage. Just layering up 11. Darkest Values: I'm just coming in with a three B pencil. It's probably more like a four B for most pencils, it's a very soft one. Just the brand, which is a tombonojust darkening up some of those areas that I couldn't quite get dark enough before. The main thing to think about when you're doing this is that you don't want any values out of place in your drawing. The dark values in the photograph should be in the same place in the drawing and the light values in the photographs should be in the same place in your drawing. Okay, I'm going to stop there for now. Could I do more? Yes, I could. But I hope that that's given you enough to go on to be able to keep building yours up if you want to. In the moment, we're going to move on and we're going to look at how to create a waffle texture on the cone. And then we'll also think about what we might be able to do in the background. 12. The Cone Pattern: I'm pretty happy with where I'm at right now. There's obviously some areas that I could clean up. Maybe I'll do that after the class is finished and you could spend a bit more time on yours as well. I'll just zoom in a little bit so you can see it's quite rough in some areas like here, some of the shading marks are still showing up. And I could definitely blend those just to soften them off in its personal preference a little bit as well. If you've done my classes before, you'll know that I quite like having a little bit of life, a bit of energy or something that shows the hand of the artist or the mark of the pencil in there. Maybe it's because I'm a little bit lazy. I don't know, I just can't spend hours and hours meticulously blending and shading. But it's definitely something you could do if you want to after the class is finished, Just be aware that when you do blend these darker areas. I said it before, but I'll say it again. When you blend in these darker areas with a blending stump, you're going to lose contrast. They gray out a little bit. So you will need to come in again with some pencil over top, like a two pencil or something, to just bring that contrast back. When I zoom out, you can't really see all of those really small marks in the paper. And that's another thing that I should mention again, is the type of paper you're working on is going to determine what sort of marks you get showing up and how your blending stump works, or how smooth you can get the graphite on top of the paper. It's worth experimenting a little bit with different papers if you're not happy with what you're getting with the paper that you're using, but if you get a general sense of three dimensional form from a distance of maybe a foot or so away, when you're lean back a little bit, then that's all you need. In my opinion, that's a sign of skill with your shading. Most people don't look at a drawing or an artwork as close as we're looking at it when we're working on it. Sometimes like 10 centimeters away or 4 " away from our drawing surface, so we can get caught up in those little details. Anyway, let's move on to the cone. Now if you have a look at the cone, it's got a waffle grid pattern on it. There's a couple of ways that we can do this, depending on what tools you have. Just do a quick demonstration here. And then you can choose, we could shade the whole cone with just back and forth, maybe going in the direction of the waffle. Fill in the whole thing. Even small circles will be fine, because what we can do with this one is we can blend it with our tissue, then come in with our eraser tool, whether it's this or a party eraser, or maybe even a normal eraser that you've cut down to have a point on it and we can look at the direction of those pattern or that waffle pattern. I'm just doing this one with quite big gaps in between so you can see how it will look. Bring out the waffle that way. And then use a pencil, an HB, or a two B, just to bring in some of those darker areas. You can see where the light is hitting the center of the cone, and not hitting so much up here, but each one of these squares technically will have a bit of shadow in it, depending on where the light is coming from. Maybe some of these lines will be lighter than others, some of these raised areas. But this would just be a really quick way to do it, is put a little bit of shading into each one of those. Think about where you assume the light is coming from. Maybe from the top, from the top and maybe the front and maybe slightly from the right hand side. The shading would be on the left of each one of these little parts here. That's one really quick way, and you can see it's quite effective. Gives us what we want, the sense of these lines of the waffle coming out and having these recessed squares in between. If you don't have something like this precision eraser, then getting those nice lines might be a little bit more difficult. In that case, what you can do is actually shade in these darker parts here, not as little squares, but as lines following the direction of the waffle pattern. But I'm leaving the white area this time, the area that I erased this time when I'm shading, I'm going to leave that white area. You could even go through and draw the sections that you're going to shade in if you want. Then we'll do the same thing, going the opposite way, leaving the white area. Now it's not going to be all white because we've got the lines going back the opposite way, maybe a little bit of a smudge. And hopefully you've got a putty eraser and then just using that to clean up some of these lines. But it means you've already got a bit of white space there. You don't have to have a precision quite as precise a tool as this one here. That's the other way to do it. Then again, you can go through and just add a little bit of shading where it's needed. I'm going to use this method. This method is just as effective. Just had a bit more shading so you can see how it would bring out that three D illusion. But this way just maybe takes a little bit more time and being careful about putting those lines in. 13. Drawing The Cone: Okay, so let's move over here. We're going to make sure we got the shape right first and we're ignoring the hand or I'm ignoring the hand. Just make sure it's coming in at the right place as it relates to the ice cream on either side. Then we can add in that rim there. Then if you are just using your pencil to shade in the lines, the darker areas and leave the white, you're going to go ahead and do that. I'm going to shade in the whole thing. This is where the HB pencil, I could use a two B pencil, but the two B pencil softer. The graphite is more likely to spread around a lot. And I want this to stay where it is. I just want to be able to smooth it out a little bit with my tissue later on getting a rhythm going and then we're going to come back over. You could go back the opposite way. I'm going to go the same way, just trying to fill in some of those white caps. Make sure you've got your pencil on its side as much as you can. You're getting as broad a mark as possible. You don't want to be holding it up like this. It will take hours for a start. But also you'll get some really strong marks in there that we don't want. This is not going to take very long, this step. It's not the main part of our drawing for a start. And we can also quite quickly create that illusion. It's nice and smooth. Now, I haven't got a hard edge around it. I have shaded to about the same level as I drew the edge in terms of value, apart from maybe here. But I don't mind that that's actually a shadow side. It's a little bit darker on the side too, in the photograph. Just make sure you don't have it, like a really hard outline all the way around the cone. You could just race that lightly. If you do, then we're going to take this here and I'm going to start at the top. And just looking at the direction that those go in, thinking about where they join up with the rim there. Then the other one comes right out here, and then we start to come down the gaps get a little bit smaller as they go on. Pretty small enough, but the gap between the white lines gets a little bit smaller as it goes around to, especially to the left hand side so we can start bigger and then wrap it around and bring it closer to the other one. When I come up against something like this, I'm really just concerned about creating an illusion of a pattern, not about doing every single square that I can see. Some people will do that for me. I don't have the patience. Sometimes I have done work like that, especially if it's like a commission for someone and I want to make sure that I've got everything in there and it's what they want. But if it's just a sketch for myself for practice, then I don't usually worry too much about these really small details. I just get an illusion happening. The way you do that is you take something of the pattern that you can see and you multiply it. They're a little bit smaller up here, and then they get bigger down there. That's an example of taking something that I've noticed from the pattern and then applying it, making sure that they're narrower at the top than they are down the bottom here. These ones are almost vertical. Even that we could leave the drawing at that stage pretty much if we put a bit of shading on each side. But I am going to go through with my to be pencil and again just look at the illusion that I can see or look at the pattern that I can see there. And try to create a similar illusion, especially up close to the ice cream down here. We could maybe fade it out a little bit. I'm looking at where the shadow parts are. They seem to all be just to the underside of the white raised areas. That's something you could start with maybe the underside and the left side. It's not the same on all of them, but I'm picking out some where I can see quite clearly what's happening and then using that for all of them, then I can blend that a little bit. Then we're also going to add a bit of general shading over top. You can see on the right hand side and the left hand side of the cone. The raised areas are not actually white, they're like a light gray. We can just put some general shading over top. But then also maybe when I put these ones in, I can make the inside the squares just a little bit darker. I'm trying to stick to the pattern. I've lost a little bit of my definition here. I usually like to choose one area to focus on. Maybe this area here, that's the area that seems to be most in contrast, you look at the photograph and then everything else, you can fade it out. And you've created enough illusion here for the eye to make up the rest, These ones here, I'm just putting a little bit of scribble in, but making it a little bit darker at the top still, maybe a little bit darker on the left. Still making it quite pronounced in here. Still flicking my eye back to the photograph, especially when I moved to a new section, like over here, I think I've lost the rim of my cat there. I'll tidy that up soon. I'm going to rush through the rest of them. Just get a little bit of contrast in each one of these to show up those white lines. It'd also be nice to just pay attention to the edges. Actually, there's a little bit that wraps around here. If you want to include that, you can. It's like a light edge there we're wrapping around, I just drew a line and then put a little bit more shading in there to show the waffle on that side of that edge. And then paying attention to where we might have an outline here and just making sure that we're shading in the square areas there to match up with the outline. Maybe even slightly inside the outline. And then that will make the white lines appear like they are projecting out a little bit. That makes sense. They're coming out around a little bit here. We can do that when we put the background and turf if you want to spend that much time on it. Okay, I'm pretty happy with that. And then I can go ahead and put in some shading over top. Let's shade in this room first. Now, when we put in the shading over top, we might lose a little bit of contrast and just have to do a bit more work again to bring out these squares. It's more shadow on this side, There's the shadow there I've already put in. Then right underneath the room, there's like a soft line, so dark line. Let's give that a little bit of a smudgy smudge and bring in this area, shaded area in here just to separate the ice cream from the rim of the cone. So we're going to bring in some shading over top of all of this. I'm using my two B pencil, but very lightly, if you're worried about how dark it's going to go, then use a lighter pencil. Use an H B. Really the only areas where it's bright white or it has some bright white or in here. And I could afford to do a little bit more work on those. I'm shading everywhere else, even just under the rim here. It's a bit of shadow definitely down the side here. And probably down the bottom, Miss well would have a bit of shadow and then might just darken up some of these if you wanted to take this further, then you could choose a couple of these to really study. And you'll notice that, say the ones about here, they are lighter along the bottom than the one above them. They're quite dark in the middle. We're looking for where the highlights are here and here, and maybe through here is shaded a little bit on the raised ridges. When you're working in these, just try to keep that same pattern or same line of the white. I can see mine, it's getting a little bit crooked just because I'm shading over it in some parts by accident, just going to give that a little smudge. Then I can use my eraser just to bring out a few of these little highlights here. This one, you know, I think this age needs to go even darker at this point. I'm not worried about it being exactly the same as the photograph in the cone, but I want to make sure that it looks natural. If you look at your cone, then there's any parts that feel like they're not finished. Then I'd bring just a little bit more contrast to them as I come down here. Fades out, but it's quite abrupt. Maybe over here, it's quite abrupt as well. I just want to integrate any of those areas that a little bit unfinished. It might just be as little as a little bit of slightly darker shading. Not finishing all of them. I'm just putting a touch here and there, especially down the center. That's just made a big difference. That tiny amount of shading or contrast that I've added in there. I think I'm going to stop there, Have a look at yours, See if there's anywhere you want to add a little bit more form, maybe a bit more shading down the side. I'll probably do that as I work on the background as well. I might see some areas that need to go a little bit darker, but now we're going to move onto the background. 14. Adding A Background: So you can spend as little or as much time on the background as you like. It might be as simple as creating just a little bit of value. You don't have to add in any background if you don't want to, but just a little bit of value that you can smudge. Maybe even a softer pencil, like a six B. This is a 3D. That's something that's quite soft. 3456b, then you got more graphite on there that you can move around. Or if you want to, you can go as dark as the background and they're in, I don't think it'll be able to get quite so dark on this paper. But I do want to get some contrast between the background and the sides and maybe bring out those light edges around here. So that's something to keep in mind. We want to make sure we have a very thin light each along this side and along this side and around each of these curves as well. So the background is optional if you don't want to do it. Lean, no problem. So this is gonna be a fairly long process. And I'll speed up a lot a bit. But I'm just going to go through and start shading layer through there as even as I can get and then I've got something to build on. So as I come around here making sure I've got there light each snow bit hard to see, but I don't want to have an outline around it. I don't want to leave just a little bit of white. See that there? I'm using kind of like small circles really, but they're just very long circle. So I'm making this kind of movement. It's up to you what kind of shading you do. Sometimes you get these areas where your circles double-up that are going to be a little bit darker and you might have some marks, it'll lift over there, but you get the same thing if you're going back-and-forth where you overlap, you have some dark max. To keep the light around here if you need to just very lightly draw an outline. But make sure you're shading that you put into the background is as dark as your outline. I'm not going to fill up the whole page, I'm just going to fade it out. So I'm gonna go ahead and do the wrist in and I'll speed up the video until I get to the next layer. I'm just going to very lightly this much that the layer where you don't smudge your ice cream. So pressing lightly is actually better than pushing hard. If you push hard, you're going to squish the graphite into the fibers of the paper. I just want to smear it out a little bit across the paper. I'm going to come in with a dark pencil. So this is my 3D, probably more like a for B pencil. And I want it to be quite blunt using on-site and I want a sharp point on it. And I'm just going to do exactly the same thing. I'm going to go around, but I'm going to really build up the contrast around these edges here. Do a little bit of the edge and then small circles. To fade it out with. You can draw an outline, just make sure that outline is gonna be the same value that you shade. A little bit of light. Just among those EG So this is the long and boring part of doing a drawing like this. And that's why I say it's completely optional. Prefer to just leave the background, but it is going to give us, I guess I'm more striking drawing because there's an enhancing all those light areas. It's gonna make them really stand out in pop forward. I'm gonna do this all the way around. And then I'll show you, I'll just do a little bit here and I'll show you what I'll do next and then I'll speed up the video. Make sure you keep the light edge. So it disappears up here. And there's a bit of a, a Light Flares here that if you want a you could to keep that in. I'm just going to make it a lighter value. Looking at that dark shape, lighter here as well. Maybe some more round Flares around it. We don't want this to be too distracting. This flare here. So I'm probably not going to give it as much contrast is it has in the photograph created one in the, in another one that's sort of comes around behind it, leave me a slightly lighter each. And then another one, again leaving a slightly lighter edge. And then this area down here, it was all quite light. Just fade that out. Filling in that dark shape. Then I'm just going to fade things out. I could put in this lighter shape in here as well. Shading it in the value that I want it first, maybe giving you a little bit of a smudge and then filling in the dark area around it. So that's the second layer. We can play around a little bit with L Blending Stump on these Flares. If you want to blend them into the background area a little bit more. And you couldn't use this Blending Stump all over that dark area or your tissue that the very aware that the more you rub, the more you're squishing the Pencil into the fibers of the paper. I've just done a little bit in. The last thing I'm going to do is really push down hard with a darker pencil. And making sure I keep my shading tight, close together. To create the contrast that is going to make the ice cream stand out. I'm pretty much doing what I did on that last layer. I'm coming around the age, putting in the value that I want in the, fading it out. But because I've put that layer underneath, I get a nice soft fade out so I don't get like a very stark edge to it. Just what I want as easy to build it up the layers rather than just go dark straight away or it's not easy, but you get a better result. Takes a bit more time. You can see now that I'm getting a really dark value. Probably could get even darker. This was a six B. What I'm afraid off with this one is that I might just be two to soft. So it's not, it's not going much dark. And then my 3D really, and it feels just a little bit gummy in soft. So I'm going to go back to the three-beat. Really depends on the type of paper you've got. Tidy up these edges as you go. And maybe even edge a little bit of irregularity there if you can see anything. Maybe with a white ridges are coming out a little bit. I'll just exaggerate their a bit for you to do it quite so obvious as this, but just to show that that Cone isn't completely smooth as it wraps around. Okay, So you're gonna do your Light layer first thing, a layer with a 34 or five B pencil. Just gently give each one of those layers. I blend in the income in with this dark layer. And I'm not going to blend this layer if I can help it because I don't want to lose the contrast. Remember, if you are getting smudges, you can put down a tissue. So when I come to do this side, if I need to, I can put a tissue over the whole thing, try not to move it around too much. But just I can raise my hand on there and not worry about getting smudges on my hand and then moving my hand around and getting smudges all over my drawing as well. So I could just work like this. But you can also turn your page around. I'm not going to turn mine around. I don't think because it's on video and I want to keep everything so you can see it nice and clear 15. Working On The Light Flares: I'm just working on some of these Flares. And at the moment they're a little bit bright. So I'm going to push them back a bit just by shading over them, but you definitely don't have to add in any of the Flares or if you've tried to do it and just feel like it looks a little bit strange or it's gonna take too long, then you can just shade over top of them. Do something just like this, all the way around, the outline and faded out. But what I'm really focused on now is getting in that really dark, dark background or dark areas of the background here. So this is still just like a light to dark gray. And I really want to push that. Make it as black as I can. Just buy layering it up. And I'm doing that, not with them. A huge amount of pressure, STD pressure, and small circles. Taking my time. This one here is kind of disrupting the background a little bit. I might get rid of it or just make it smaller. This fleeing. The way I'm shading in these Flares or around them is I just keep flicking my IBEC to the photograph. I do a little part like this one. Flip my backup. See we're to shading nixed, keep flicking my eye. I'm never just steering it. My drawing, I'm always referring back to the photograph. Just see what I should be doing. It's getting a bit better now I think that this one's still needs to be pushed back a lot. I think. You can see when I outlined my cone, I think it's a little bit crooked on this side. You gotta be careful that you don't just keep shaving, shaving away more and more. I'm going to shave off a little bit on this side here to try and make it more even. But if you do end up with a crooked cone, it's probably better to leave it if it means you're going to have to take away too much to get it to look, even looking a little bit better and you can see what it looks like when it's got this dark outline around it. Really flattens it out. And that's why our outline needs to be the same value as the shading that we're putting in that disappears into the shading is a flare down here as well that, that I've left. But again, I'm going to push that write back and just fade things out. And when you are ready to finish off your edges, I'm not quite ready yet. We'll finish off around here. You might just use your tissue a little bit just to blend so I'm rubbing and pulling out just a little bit. You could do it with a blending stump as well, but this is easier. It's important area. You're covering that tissue 16. Final Thoughts: Okay, I'm getting there. I still got a little bit more work to do on this, and you'll see that in the final version, I might just bring my dark out just a little bit around here and down here. But the surface up at the moment. And so I think I'm going to go for a surf shortly and then come back to this afterwards. Just a couple of things I was thinking about when I was shading that you might have encountered. You may find that when you're doing these really dark parts, your paper just gets so loaded that you can't really add anymore and you look on the side and see that it's very, very shiny. And sometimes that's just to do with your paper, and there's not a lot you can do about it. It's also a little bit to do with pressure. You don't want to be scribbling and pushing too hard, but just layering gently one layer on top of another. But if that has happened, maybe just experiment with some other types of paper, seeing how dark you can go by layering up your pencils. Sometimes it depends on the type of pencil as well so these tombo mono pencils are really soft, and that's why I didn't want to use that six B because I put a little bit on there and it just felt like it was just leaving way too much and it was getting way too gummy. And filling up the tooth of the paper. So it's a bit of experimentation if you're not quite getting what you want. Just keep in mind that, you know, this is a sketch. Most of us are probably using sketchbook paper, and we might not get a perfect finish or exactly what we want. Now that I've got the stark background in here, the other thing I want to mention is just bringing a final review to your drawing and thinking about balancing. Now, if I squint at my drawing, you do this too, squint at mine on the screen, and then squint at that photograph up there. You can really see that the cone stands out way too much. It's very, very light. And that's just because I put the contrast of the background in. This whole cone needs to be pushed back. Probably quite a bit, but let's just do a little bit here. And that might mean that you lose some of your pattern in there. So that's getting better to what it should be on that side anyway. Again, that's going to enhance these areas that we want to really stand out by pushing these areas back. So it could just do like a blanket cover over the whole thing. Very, very light layer, but with a darkish pencil. Now, I don't want to smudge too much on there because I'll lose all of that pattern. So that's why you're using just a very, very light touch. If you do get a few marks, then maybe just something like that, with your smudging, and that's it. And then that's made a big difference to how light it is pret a little bit too light, and it needs a little bit more form. So make sure your cone feels like it's rounded and we do that by making sure we've got these darker sides and this side and this side need to be darker than the center. And then if you do do what I'm doing and darken up your cone, then you're probably going to need to go in and darken up all of these again. Just do a little bit there. Hey, thanks for joining me in this lesson. I know it's a reasonably challenging one, so well done if you've got this far, whether you've done the background or just the ice cream. And the cone. I hope you've learned something and maybe gotten a little bit more comfortable with controlling your pencil and using a blending stump as well to get those light and dark values to blend over those folds, so you don't have any sharp edges. I hope that's a skill that you can now bring to your other drawings using the blending stump sparingly, only in situations where you need it and just paying really close attention to those soft edges, whatever it is that you're drawing. Happy practicing, and I'll see you next time.