The Magic of Values, Shading Basics

1. Introduction to The Magic of Creating Values: Welcome and thank you for joining me for the class, the magic of values. So in this class we're going to go ahead and explore how to use graphite and graphite pencils and to use values to create objects that feel like they have form and dimension and that illusion of the 3D world in which we live. Let's get started. All right, So through our understanding of the grayscale, through our understanding of creating values, through understanding creating gradations were those values. We're going to go ahead and talk about form shadows. We're excited, discuss what they are. We're going to discuss have a look forum, some little tips and techniques. And once we understand how to do that, we're going to go ahead and we're going to draw the sphere, the cube, the pyramid, that cone the cylinder. These five fundamental shapes that are echoed all throughout nature that will help our drawings immensely. They are so important for us to understand as artists. We're going to explore those and help us to build the ideas of what we should be looking for when we're drawing these three-dimensional solids or three-dimensional shapes. 2. How to Use the Class Drawing Classes: So how are we going to use this class? So the important thing about this class is it's not just about watching the videos. You really need to sit along side the video and try to execute the assignment. That's why the videos are full length. That's why they're not spit up at all. They're real time so that you can sit down and draw with me and pause the video if you need to, even if you're just listening to the video while you're trying to draw your own thing. It really helps to get the thinking process happening and withdrawing, that is 99% of the battles understanding how do we proceed through a drawing? And so go ahead and grab your pencils, get your paper together. And like I said, go ahead and draw with me. With each one of the lessons you will learn to draw, it will be amazing what you'll be able to do. Let's get started. 3. Tips and Techniques For Create Flat Values: So let's go ahead and get started with drawing on the most basic thing. How do we hold these pencils? Where I talk a little bit about hand holds and we're ready to get started on doing some exercises to help us learn to create values. Let's get started. The pencil I've got right now is a for B pencil. And so the reason I've got the four B is it'll show up a little better I could do with any of the pencils that we can with any pencil actually. But this is just so it'll show up better on the camera and you'll be able to see it. I've also got this, this 40 pencils in an extender because if I took the pencil out, it's, it's not even as long as this one. And so you can get these little, these little extenders will, or when your pencil gets short, you put it in here. It's got a little cuff that they crank down. And you can twist it down and now you've got a low more length. So there's really going to be, again, mostly using one of two hand holds in this class, just like with any drawing. Hopefully I've mentioned this before. And it's going to be one of two hand holds now for those are the right-hand. We'll talk about the right hand for you lefties, I'm a lefty, so you'll definitely see that. But we're going to have a tripod grip. And a tripod grip is where we hold it between our thumb and our index finger. Okay. And then, uh, the the pencil sit or rest on our third finger or a middle finger right here. And so these three points make your tripod grip. You also will. There's time to let it come out of the trickier hand. But if you rest it back here in the crook, you have a lot of control. This isn't gonna go anywhere. You don't want it too. Sometimes we needed a little bit looser and we might bring it out of there just a little bit. But that is our tripod handhold. And three we hold it on the three fingers. Don't hold down on your fourth finger. Don't hold it on your pinky. Don't hold it like you're going to stab somebody with it. Try to use that tripod grip. The other type of grip we're going to use is called a baton hand hold. And a baton as it was kinda like they use to conduct music and things like that. And so what you'll do is just as if this was sitting on a table. And I picked that up and I'm going to hold it between my fingers. That's a baton handled now I'd have when I draw the usually my knuckles are up and the pencils down. And there's some times where you might flip it over and reverse it to draw some lines with it. I don't use that a lot, but it's certainly a valid way to hold it. It's still it's this baton handled. You just flip your hand over and now you're, you're drawing this way again. So again, but Bhutan handhold, few lefties, same thing, we're just holding it underneath here where we've gotta between our thumb and our fingers. Now there are certain times I'll loosen up and a whole note between my thumb and two fingers, that just gives you a little bit more movement. If I'm doing some sketching or I want to be loose as people call it. But if I want a lot of control, hold it between all my fingers and my thumb, and that really locks it in. Okay, So we're going to be using those two different hand holds to make value. Now whenever we make value, we only want one range of motion. So we're either going to be using as a risk swing or we're going to be doing an elbow swing or we're going to be using a finger swing. Okay. So we're going to show you these three different types of hand holds for creating value. Now, most of the one I'm using the baton handhold, usually I'm doing what's called a rough and I'm just trying to get some value on the paper. And that I can then come back and manipulate later so we can start putting in some value relationships. What is one value next to another value? And so for the rough and that's when we're, when we're roughing values and putting in those basic values, those basic tones. And tone and value means the same thing. Usually will be using either the risk swing or I'll be using the elbows swing. And so that's what I do first I would do this elbow swing and so I'm not going to move my wrist, I'm not moving my fingers. I'm letting the pencil just rest lightly against the paper and I'm just scooting it back and forward. I'm not trying to lift the paper. I'm not trying to lift the pencil up, nor am I trying to exhort lots of pressure. If I try to exert pressure on the end of that tip, I'm not going to have as much control. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go ahead. I was doing the risks. We actually need to do an elbow swing. And I'm just going to let the weight of the pencil. So very light pressure to create the value. Now the first time you do an elbow swaying, it's gonna be, it's gonna be really weird, but it helps us cover more area. It also helps if we do a warm up like like I'm hadn't warmed up yet with this. So it's a little bit takes some getting used to some like before you pitch again where you're gonna go and warm your arm up water before you go and do some running. You're going to do some stretching. It just is going to help. Same thing with this. Do a little, some practice runs and you'll have an easier time. But we want to overlap the previous line and move and move. Now moving this way, if I was a right-handed person, I'd probably be doing this and moving this direction, moving towards my dominant side. If I'm a lefty, I'm live moving towards my dominant side. And we're going to try to 0. We're going to overlap those previous lines. And what we're trying to do is make as even as possible. Now this right here, I I left a little space between the line. Go ahead and correct that the moment that happens before you go any further, like there's a little one here that I need to fill that in. A little one just happen there. I need to fill that in. But I can also come back and see if I can overlap the entire area a couple of times. A field as a whole, There's a whole row or, you know, a big space all the way down. And what we're going to want you to do is you're going to want to practice doing this and you want something. So this is about six inches long, maybe almost seven. Again, I can cover more area with this. Let's go ahead and fill that in. We got that little space between that line, get that filled in. I always felt that in first, the reason why is if I don't, if I leave lots of lines and I tried to come back later, it just takes more time. So it's easier and quicker to correct it when it happens. And what I want you to do is I want to practice with, want you to practice with all your pencils so that you can get used to doing this. I recommend the five different pencils. If you've got more pencils, will then try all of them, because they all will be a little different value. They all actually handle a little differently to the H pencils and the B pencils handle quite differently. And again, I'm using a for B for this. So you can see it a little easier. And I want to try and make those lines with one stroke. I was filling that in a minute. But you're going to get a little bit better coverage, little more control. Got some more patchiness I'm trying to deal with if you can do it all with one line. And so we wanna, we wanna do enough of this. So we have, again, this is about six inches wide and it's about an inch long and that's about what we want. And you wanna do, you wanna do that with each and everyone of your pencil so you're used to using it. Okay. So that's an elbow swing. Now again, I'm, I'm drawing flat. We we never draw flower. We want to draw on an angle unless we're doing some things at the end where it's really, really, you know, finite, little tiny details. Here's an old lady bugs sort of stuff. But before, for the most part we're going to be drawing on an, on an angle. So your board would be be drawing with your board on it, on an angle. It's much more, a more natural way to draw. So I'm drawing, I'm, I'm doing this on a flat surface. It's not ideal, but it's the best thing for you guys to understand what it is that I'm doing here. Okay, so the next one we're gonna do is now again, because, because I'm drawing on a flat surface sometimes I'll tuck my hand under my arm to to kind of give it up off the gives me a better angle, a little easier angle to do this with. Unless unless I just do it free hand or I don't have anything underneath it, but that's that's a little harder to do. So let's see, let's try to go ahead and use our, our, uh, risk swing now for the risks thing, swing once again, now I could use, I can use a tripod and user risk swing. So the risk swing with a tripod grip is just going to give me a little bit more control. Okay. So I can do this with a risk swing. And again, it's not it's going to be not near as why does that elbow swing? But still it's going to be much wider than the value I make with my fingers. And again, I'm going to try to overlap and it's a little easier to control than that elbow swing. We want to overlap the previous line. I'm going a little fast. I can slow it down a little bit because it is taking a lot more chances with it not being as as uniform the quicker I go. And I'm trying to move a little more quickly for the demonstration. But just understand that if I took my time little more, I'd have a little more control over this. I'm just trying to even this out right now. If I took a little more time, I'd have a much easier time controlling the value. So again, this is maybe doesn't even require three inches long. Maybe it's 2.522 and three-quarters somewhere in there. Again, I was trying to get that. And I'm trying to do this as uniform as possible. And I'm just trying to push that out, so it's a little more like a rectangle. But I wanna do this light where it's as wide as it is. You know, that this distance and this distance is about the same. So we're going to try and make a square. Okay? So again, we're just using our graphite to make us somewhat, I mean, it's, it's not that we're not all We're almost there. And actually I know I'm doing it. I'm not drawing the value. I'm still doing in a risk swing. I'm just not supporting it any longer, so it's a little looser. So we've got some of these bubbles as wide as it is tall. Now again, if I'm roughing it in, this is the more controlled one because I used I used the tripod grip tripod. I'll have a little more control if I turn it over so my knuckles are up now I've gotten that baton hand hold held between all my fingers. I was doing with that elbow swing. And again now I'm using my wrist. Once again, just a risk swing. Now I've got my my fingers turn just slightly so my nickel knuckles aren't straight up there. Rotate a little bit to the side and then it gives me so my thumb is on top down here. And so it's it's just a little, it just seems like that makes it a little bit easier, a little more natural. But again, we're still using a baton hand hold. It's just I've I've tweaked it a little bit and sometimes I'll do that with a handheld feel like What are you doing? A different handhold them like no, I just I just kinda changed it to make it suit my purposes. It just feels more comfortable. If you have to do some like then if if I had to push it this way because it felt more comfortable, well, then do it. I can't I can't move my wrist as much, but if I do this way, I've got more movement to my wrist. It's just a lot easier to do it like this. And again, I could come over here and i'm, I'm going a little fast once again, but I need to overlap the previous lines. And I want something that again is about as wide as it is tall. And this is even a little bit shorter than the other one. This is maybe, maybe two inches or something. Well, we have this chunk of value That's about as wide as it as it is tall, almost thereabouts. I mean, I could extend it a little bit more if I if I wanted to, there's no big thing. And then you would come back in and fill in any patches. So we have the this is created with the elbow swaying. These are created with just my my wrist swinging back and forth, right? And now we're gonna do a finger swing. Now with a finger swing. We're going to go ahead and we're going to be putting our palm down so the palms going to rest on the paper and I'm going to move just my fingers. Now I'm going to show you a little something on this tripod because when people grip it, though crippled with their thumb out here towards the front. And that's and that's a nice tripod grip, but I can't move my fingers very well. That thumb is blocking them. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to move my thumb out of the way now this is still being held between my thumb can see that my thumb and index finger. It's just I've moved my thumb out of the way and back. And my fingers all appoint a little bit, kind of extend them forward and said Bring it back, extend them forward a little bit. And now I can get a nice swing with my fingers and that now my thumbs not blocking it. If I put it back up here, It's kinda blocking it. So I'm going to get this with my thumb out of the way. And we're going to go ahead and do a finger swing. And we're just switching the pencil. Again. We're just scooting it back and forth. I'm not lifting it. I'm not trying to exert lots of pressure on it. If I wanted to go darker, I just stay in the same place and it will start to build on itself and get darker and darker and darker. But what I'm trying to do, and again, this is, I'm actually swing a little bit too far for that. My fingers, they're losing control in the end, so I'm going to bring it down just a little bit. But again, we want to overlap the previous line. We want to make this as, as uniform as possible. And that's what we're trying to do with our fingers swing. Ok. Now whenever we're creating value, you also have to be aware of how much you touch the paper. You don't want to you don't want to touch the paper very often. The reason why is that the, the men go back in and fill in some of these little patchy areas. But the E, the year, your skin of course has oils on your, in your fingers and stuff. And the graphite will stick to the oils of your finger differently than a well, just the normal paper. So if you actually touch this with oily fingers, you won't see it when it's, you know, when the paper is white. But once you start putting graphite on it, you can start to have a fingerprint start to appear in the middle of your drawing. And once that happens, there's no getting that out. You have to start over again. So you just want to make sure always wash your hands, make sure your fingers are good and clean. Some people actually wear a cotton glove with the fingers cut out. So that way the cotton glove doesn't, doesn't allow any of the fingers of your poem or the back of your poem, or whatever the size of your palm, whatever that right there. It makes it so you don't get any oils on at the end. You want to make sure you're not touching your paper too much. So again, I've just started another one here again, this is just the fingers swing, just scooting it back and forth. I'm just overlapping it and I'm just taking my time. And I'm trying to keep it uniform or not doing gradations here, we're just creating value. That's all we're trying to do. And so, and you'll again, you wanna do this. You want to draw with all your pencils and experiment with this because they all act a little differently. You have to control them a little differently. Now again, this is pretty dark because it's a for B pencil. And I say it's pretty dark. I could certainly go darker, but it is dark because i'm, I'm barely putting pressure on this pencil. And so that's a pretty dark mark for something where you're hardly putting any pressure on it. But again, the more I if I wanted to go darker, I just stay in the same area. See how that's going a little darker. Because now this is lighter than this over here and I wanted to more uniform. Well then I'm gonna come back, go over with another layer and second layer will be a darker layer. And that's how we're going to go ahead. And, you know, by going over certain areas and over and over and over again. And as long as I have some control, I will have a very uniform layer of value going across the paper. Okay? Usually people will call this also call this a tome adding a flat value. So if you get, say, a flat value or a tone, they mean the same thing. This again was our elbows swing, our risk swing with a tripod, our risk swing with a baton hand hold. And these are both fingers swings. Alright? So go ahead and grab a piece of paper, get your pencils, and start and fill a sheet of paper with one of your pencils doing an elbow swaying, a risk swing, and a finger swaying and burn through all five of them. If you've got a larger set of pencils, try every pencil, see, and take little notes if you like. The, the, the most important thing when you're learning to draw is being aware of what's going on on the paper. So, you know, some of the best artists will take little notes of what. Especially if they're going to try new medium or try new pencil, they'll, they'll, they'll keep little notes up for themselves and stuff like that. And people that are hyper, you know, like very organized, hyper organized and stuff like that. They, they even will keep on file where they can look up stuff so they can always refer back to it. You don't necessarily have to go to that degree, of course, but I do want you to start taking mental notes as you're drawing. Okay. So yeah, go ahead and again, create a value with the, with the, with the elbows swaying. Create a value where the risk swing, creative value with the fingers twitching. We're going to come back. We're going to talk more about value. We're going to create some value gradations. And we're going to talk some other things about some technique. And stay tuned. All right, We'll be right back. Bye-bye. 4. Creating the Value Scale Part 1: All right, so one of the most important things and learning to draw is the grayscale. How to create the values from light all the way down to dark. With our pencils, basically we have 10 steps, a value that we're going to be using in this value scale. And it's basically our notes, if you will, for the visual language of drawing. And of course it extends into painting and anything that deals with value, which is anything in the visual arts. But I use fundamental. So let's get started in creating our tensed up value scale. Let's go. All right, So welcome back. So we're going to be talking today about grayscales. And so the fundamental idea of drawing, giving that three-dimensional, that, that form, that we talk about, that volume of stuff. We use values. And there are lots of values in the world around us. But most people can't see beyond 17 to 20 steps of value with the human eye. They can't perceive any more than that. So what we do is we simplify that those values into his tenth step value scale. These are our notes, if you will, as artists for making a drawing. And so right here I've got a little grayscale that I have painted in oil. With a grayscale, we have 10 steps of value. They're supposed to be transitioning from light all the way to the dark is dark. And with a value scale, most commonly with a value scale, we'll start with 10, you know, up here at the top, going down 987654321, being the very darkest on the value scale. Now if you come across an older value scale, those numbers might be switched. When I was trained, they were the opposite and that's because it was based on printmaking. And so one was 10 percent black, 20 percent black all the way down to step 10, which was 100% black, as dark as you could go. But these days, it's been changed. And maybe it has to do with how much light is there. And because of the, you know, a lot of people painting digitally and dealing with pixels and light and things like that. But the most common that you'll find these days is it starting with 10 and going down all the way to one, not 0, but one on the value scale. Now this is almost straight black and the substrate right? White. Technically, some people will say, Well, there's never anything really why there's never anything really truly black and it's somewhere in between the two. But again, this is a simplification of value and this is paint. And so sometimes we have a value scale, you have a medium that can't they can't get the full range like this. Paper is fairly wide, but this is graphite. So the dark historic we're going to build to give us probably somewhere about here. But we're still going to break those down into 10 steps. So sometimes the medium that you're working with will have some limitations and how and how dark they can go. Graphite being one of them. If I was working in charcoal, charcoal can go almost. Because the fact that oil paint has a little bit of sheen to it, this seems deeper than what it is. And so charcoal is Matt. So it seems like the charcoal is, is kind of a peer when anyways, but charcoal will give you a very nice broad range. A value scale more so than graphite. And that's okay. A lot of people that work in graphite, they work in the lighter range. They like that range. That's why they work in graphite. Some people want a full range of expression or they like working in the darks. And if you're, if you're really like working with those rich darks, charcoal is the natural choice for drawing. Now, we're gonna go ahead and create one of these grayscales in graphite. It's very light. And the camera habits, I've got so much light on here. So once you'd be able to see the values really, really well. But I don't know if you can pick this up, but it's been drawn lightly. It's an inch and a half rectangle that's been divided into one inch increments. So it's basically 1.5 inches wide by 10 inches tall. And it has, you know, ten little boxes. Every inch became a box. And so I've got 10 little boxes. I'm going to turn into a grayscale using my pencils. So again, the reason the way we use the grayscale is to evaluate values. And so when people start drawing, I recommend that they either by a value scale or create a value scale or download one or print it off. Sometimes when you print off it could be off the computer can be kind of problematic because if you have a good printer, then you don't get the nice steps of value. Each one of these steps is supposed to be equally distant from the previous step. And that way when you're drawing on an object, you can say, well, let's see, I'm dealing with the lip part of this object and it might be up here and then, but the dark part of that object is down here. And so you get very, you want to be very adept. And so if I called out, hey, that's a number three on the value scale, who will go? I know what that is. I don't know where that is without having to look and that takes time, just like learn to play the piano, you know, you know, people say, well it's, it's a D flat, but if you don't know where d flat is, good luck. And so we want to go ahead and again, have kept the value scale with us for at least six months. I recommend people have the, the, the grayscale with them for at least at the first three years of learning to draw and paint. But it's really great to have, you know, have one of these available so that you can judge your values much more accurately. Okay, we're gonna get rid of that. We're gonna be using pencils now, we're only be using one to five. I could use a full range if I wanted to, if I wanted to get the full pencil kit that starts with a nine H and goes all the way down to AB. You could certainly do that. But we're just going to, we're going to start off again with a simplification. We're going to start off with five of the most common pencils that you're gonna use. And sometimes someone you'll see this. I'm like, I love all those pencils. I give you everything with my number two pencil. And and that may be true. But you're going to have to really kind of push in on the paper. You're gonna have to brutalize the paper, going to be destroying the paper essentially Detroit to make that pencil give you the full range. So again, this is our five pencils that we have. In the, in the drawing class, the H pencils are, are lighter pencils. The B pencils are our darker pencils. And we start off with a 4 H. With the H pencils. The higher the number, the light of the pencil. So our 4 H is the lightest pencil. We have a 28, which is darker than the four age, but lighter than what? We'll talk about this pencil minute, but it's called an HB. So this, we're starting from lightest to darkest. So we have a 28 which is darker than the four age, but lighter than the HB. We have the HB which is like a number two pencil and it's a pretty good workhorse. If, if you don't hear me tell you to use a certain pencil, you're going to be using an HB pencil. That's all there is to it. In terms of RB pencils, we have a to B, which again is darker than our HB pencil. With the B pencils, the higher the number, the darker the pencil. So as these go higher they go, they go lighter. So at 98 would be up here lighter than any of these. And as these numbers go down, they get darker. So they're going to be, and then we have, this is a little for B. And the reason I've gotten this thing is because he's, he's a short pencil. I've been using them. And so what you can do, you can get these little pencil extenders. And now I've, I've lengthened out my pencil. Okay, so for H2, H, H B to B, four B, alright, and these are the pencils we're going to use. And we're going to be layering these pencils back and forth depending on where we are on the value scale. Now I talked about on the value scale that we were going to have. The lightest is going to be a step ten. Going down to 987654321 will be the absolute darkest. We can. We can do. So low I'm gonna do is we're gonna start off here with the with the darkest part or the darkest one, which is going to be number one. And because it's going to be the darkest, I'm going to go ahead and use my four B pencil. Now, I'm only going to be, I'm going to be using a, a probably a risk swing just to save a little bit of time as far as that goes. And so, and we're going to be using a side-to-side motion. And I don't care so much if I if I break out the sides, I want to be very cautious of where they meet. But in terms of breaking outside this rectangle, I'm really not as worried about that. And so I get if I wanted to keep this clean, I could tape it off you to use the tape as a mask or but if I wanted to, you know, if if I try to stay inside that line, I might say, well, that's that's great for those that want to take the extra time. But understand that if I try to stay in the lines, I could do it, but it's gonna take me four times as long. So we're going to try to make this a little quicker the first time around. So again, we're just moving the side to side. I'm using a actually an elbow swaying because I'm so far off the paper. But if I was closer to it, I'd probably be using a risk swing because I don't need I don't really need that much range of motion. It's just that I'm so far away from this. I can't and I don't want to cover the camera that I'm using. Again, my my entire elbow to create this. And again we're just going side to side. Okay, I'm using this for B pencil and I'm just, I'm trying to overlap the previous lines. And I'm using light pressure. That's another important thing we were, we don't want to crank on this. In fact, I'm using about the lightest touch I can. I can. And sometimes I refer to it as is. And whenever butterfly kisses on angel wing soft but you're just trying to use as delicate and a soft of pressure as you can and sometimes feel like, well, how can I how can I get a dark then if I'm not cranking on it? And the thing is, is you're going to have to allow, first off, you're gonna, it's gonna take patients, but whenever you overlap graphite, it builds on itself. It goes darker. And so instead of cracking down on this, which by the way, and makes the graph I go shiny very quickly. It really shoves the graphite into the paper. And once you've done that, you're never gonna get that paper back down to white again. And so if I was doing something very complex, like a face or drawing an eye or something like that. I want to be able to lift stuff out with my erasers. I want to be able to manipulate it. I want to be able to create textures and things of that nature. And if I, if I crank too hard on this, I will destroy my ability to be able to work with the graphite in as an effect of a manner. But because of the fact that I destroyed the paper and I've pushed the graphite into inside the paper itself and there's no getting that out entirely. I mean, you can lighten the surface stuff, but the stuff that's gotten into the fibers of the paper is not coming out unless you go in there with like Abril iPad or something like that. Some of the old electric eraser just to have like a some of these erasers that were very gritty abrasive and they'd get it out. But that you'd actually be taking off layers of paper. Which is also again, not a good thing if you're trying to keep your paper looking like it hasn't been, destroy Haidt or are treated unfair away. So we're going to undo, I'm going over this and over this and allowing the pencil to build this up. Now with graphite, it takes the longest to make the darker passages. Whenever we're working with graphite it we need to have patients. So we've got this here and I'm just going to undo to get rid of this, I should have my brush and nobody saw well that off now usually that's a bad habit to do that. But I don't have my drafting brush. But that's, you know, and I don't want to just do that with my hand because that would smear it. But we're going to layer this because we were like, Well, wait a minute, that's not as dark as that. That's not as dark as that. And I'm like, okay, yeah, you're right. It's not as dark as that. So what we're going to do to make it darker, and again, you really have to use again that light pressure. This is a 4 H pencil, K for h. Now, these pencils that I'm using are Kimberly, but you could use any sort of pay pencil. You could use Prismacolor or what have you. There are lots of good brands of pencils out there. As far as that goes, you could use HDR went or what have you stayed lawyer, some of those other mainstream pencils. But this is a 4 H. And we're going to use layering of pencils to get this darker, but I have to use this, the foreach or harder, they're literally harder pencils. And it's really easy to carve gullies and valleys in the paper with these because they are so hard. Some of the H pencils are so hard that they're sharpened. They will cut your paper like a razor blade. We don't use the nine age because of that fact is it's just if you're not very delicate with that, it's going to destroy the vapor. And this is our 4 H same thing with a very, very, very delicate with this. But This is our lightest pencil. But when I do this, people go whole lot of money you, so that's the lightest pencil. And I say, yep, that is the lightest pencil. And they say, Well, wait a minute, why is that getting darker where you're using that pencil? If that's the lightest pencil, why is it getting darker? I don't understand how that works. And what's happening is that with the softer pencils skip over the texture more. The harder pencils without having to press harder. It's just because of the fact they are harder. They go deeper into the texture. They don't right over the top of the texture the same way. And so what's happening is with this for h, it's getting deeper into the paper and it's turning these white little dots into gray little dots. Because you're lowering those white dots to a light gray, the whole thing is getting darker. So I wanted to just show you this where I've done this half was just the four H pencil. And this half has not been done with a 4 H pencil. Haven't put a layer on top of it. And because I haven't put a layer on top of this half, it's lighter because of all that little, those little dots showing through. So that's what layering the pencils will help us do. It'll help us get a better range of value. You can also get, you know, we can control texture this way. If I'm trying to draw something that's like a, a steel ball bearing or something like that. Steel marble or something of that nature, or even a glass marble or glass or something of that nature. I usually want a surface that doesn't have texture. It's supposed to be slick. Or if I'm drawing Chrome or metal or something like that, Same thing I wanted to be slick. And so by minimizing the texture as well. So look smoother. So I've done a couple of layers with this for h. And after I've done that, I'm gonna go ahead and put that aside. And I'm going to grab myself. A to H pencil. So this two h is softer than the forage, but it's still harder than all the other pencils. So this will go a little, won't go as deep as the 4 H, but it will go deeper than any of my other pencils aside from that 4 H pencil. And so again, this is filling in or darkening some of those little bits of texture again, to make this more uniform, which in turn will make this seem more. We'll make it seem darker. While it won't seem darker, it will be darker because we are making it darker. And so again, I'm gonna go ahead and put now I'm trying to go ahead and least give a nod to the fact that this is where this n. So I don't want to ignore that, but I'm also not again, what I'm really wanting, what I really want to pay attention to is this edge right here. You want that good and clean. Okay? So I'm gonna go ahead and continue to do even the angle of the pencil will also, if I've got to pick a pencil, it's more perpendicular that we'll get deeper into the, the paper, but it will also dig more so you have to be careful. The more I'm more parallel to the paper, the moral while on top. So again, just the angle the pencil will change the look. Or how much to how much of that texture and the paper will express itself. Based on the angle of my pencil. It's pretty, pretty cool stuff. When you get used to when you've been drawing for a bit. And you understand that you can create textures and details really quickly because you understand how to control the pencil in a better way. So I've put a couple layers with that. I'm going to put the two H's side. And I'm going to now grab my HB. Now again, the HB won't go as deep as the two H. And it certainly won't go as deep as the four age. But it will also, it'll, it'll darken some of the, again the outside of those little dots. So part of those dots are going to be darkening a little bit more. There's others that aren't going to be touched because this can't go as deep. But again, just by using this. And again, I could do this over just half of this real quick to to bring this home. If that on the half that I've used this on, it looks darker. And I could do. The more I go over the moral buildup, the darker it will seem. Now there is something we have to be careful with with graphite. This is also while why we are layering. This is also why we are taking our time in darks are the hardest thing with graphite because it takes a while, as you can see, to build up to a nice rich dark, okay, that now I'm using a finger swing when I'm trying to use control. This is where I'll get in here with my fingers swing. Smaller areas, that sort of thing. That's when we would do this. Right. But if you try to go too dark too quickly or press too hard, graphite starts to get shiny, the darker gets. In fact, there's a point at which you have to leave alone because it won't, even if you put more graphite on it, it won't look darker. It will begin to be shiny, are shown here and search a little lighter and lighter so that there's, there's that sheen. And in graphite is some people don't care for that. They liked them more matte appearance and so they'll, that's why they were control circle. And even some artists that are graphite artists, we'll be careful not to go past a certain step of value because after that it's just going to go so shiny that it's hard to look at. It's hard to see the drawing because it becomes so shiny. So because of that, some people have resorted to using combinations of carbon pencils with graphite and stuff like that. And and you can certainly do it, but you do that, but you have to make sure it's well integrated or a won't look right. You'll start to look at what it will look like, patches of different material. And it's hard to describe unless you've actually seen it. But the idea is that if I was working in watercolor, and then also I put some whitewash on there. The white quash stands out because you've gone from transparent layers to suddenly opaque layers of paint and even across the room, which is jobs. So you can tell it that something has really changed. And it's the same thing with, with graphite and carbon pencils. You have to make extra, you have take extra care that they're integrated. And we're not gonna get a ton of that today, but that's so now I've got my two pencils and now we're getting the to-be is the second to the darkest pencil though I think darker than the to-be of my five would be that for B pencil. So I'm gonna put a couple of layers. And this has gone much darker by, by doing all this layering. It allows the pencils to build on themselves easier. It's gotten in there and gotten rid of a lot of that texture. And now again that it started just continues to build. And so I could put a couple of layers of this on here. And by doing that now I can grab my pencil. And we can go over this a couple more times. And now it's actually gotten pretty dark. But if this all, it'll actually go darker now than it would have before. So again, by layering, I actually am going to get a nice deeper, richer darks with my pencil. So we're constantly, unless we all need to, there's going to be some up here. We will hardly layer at all, but because they're so light. But we'll go ahead and again put a couple layers on here. And we're gonna try to get this to go as dark. As we can get it. Now if I really wanted to. Sometimes if we don't have, if we have like lines, we can see what's called the grain. Like if you're not using your pencil and overlapping and you'll start to get little lines. And you'll start to see those lines. If you're not, if you're not careful, they'll just always be there. And so if you want to, you can actually start going different directions. I can go top to bottom, top to bottom, side to side, and then diagonal one way and the diagonal the other way. And by doing that, you can actually start to get rid of any vestiges of grain from your pencils skipping where you didn't overlap of them now, so there's a little bit of a line left between the two that we'll start to leave sort of a grain or a directional line. And the way to get rid of those if you're really having an issue is to go ahead and cross hatch. And that just means take your lines different directions. And that's what I'm doing right now, is just to make sure this is as even and dark as I can possibly get it. I'm using a finger swing now again because I'm I'm in here trying to have more control. So I started out with a, with an elbow swaying and we talk about this in the class. Using the elbows way and using the risks were Swing, using a pencil. And with that pencil using a finger swing. I'm using a finger swing right now. And I'm not doing that. I'm not doing a feathered stroke. Or somebody will, people will call a tapered stroke. We're not, we're not doing that right now. We're just scooting this back and forth. So this is I'm using my fingers but it's not near as it's not the more complicated tapered stroke and or feathered stroke depending on who talk to. So we've got that and that's about as rich, dark as I can, as I could want. Okay, so now what we're gonna do is we're actually going to come up to the step nine because we're going to leave ten as, just as white paper. And so what we would do with this is we're gonna take our weren't, take, take our pencil. And this is a 4 H pencil. And that line is too dark, so you can't have this line the darker than the value you're going to create. And right now, this line here is too dark. So I'm going to line it up first. There is only one that's gonna be a problem because all these other ones are going to be darker. And I grabbed this for H pencil. Now this is the one of the hardest ones because of the fact that the forEach is very unforgiving if you leave spaces between your lines. Okay? So we've got to take our time. So suddenly we were like, Why am I doing grayscales? Well, the greatest skills, because they're like God so boring, I don't wanna do that. But the great thing about grayscales is it really helps you dial in to your technique. So if I'm using, again, my I'm using a risk swing. I'm using a modified tripod grip. In terms of the way I'm holding the pencil with a little bit of spacing now I'm using my, I'm trying to use a little more control. So we've got our fingers swing in here. Okay. And again, the reason that this is such a good exercises because it takes away all the detail. We're not dealing with detail, we're not dealing with complex contours. We're just focusing on value. And not only that, but worth trying to make the value, these chunks of value as uniform as we possibly can. You have to have a whole lot of control to be able to do a successful grayscale. Because if I've got too much texture, if there's too many spaces between my lines. If these values I'm creating are not uniform, the illusion will not be created. And so we want to be at, You want to be able to do practice this enough so that you can actually make a halfway decent grayscale or even successful gray scale. And usually something like this. If you've never done a grayscale to do to do one that's, you know, you take your time, a lot of times when you first sit down to drawing, we're in too much of a hurry. We want too much for too little time for me to tell it to do it. A decent grayscale will take me upwards of 45 minutes. I'll just go ahead and get into your zen state. Put on your favorite music, you know, and, and start, start drawing. Just go ahead and 0s on and get used to getting used to be in there. You're going to probably be there if you're a first-time or you're going to be having a hard time to do a decent one and an hour or two hours. Not uncommon because it's going to be a bit of a struggle. But through the struggle we learn, that's, you're going to, you're going to improve your technique. You're going to start to, because you're constantly and say, oh, let's see, I opened up those lines too quickly. Oh, I need to overlap them a little bit more ON you take my time little bit more all I need to, you know, a, B, C, or D, you know, you're just going to keep keep looking, keep trying your best, and doing what you need to do to get his uniform of value as you possibly can. So now the step 9, the other thing that people will do. And so we're trying to do something similar to this value right here. Many times they'll make it too dark, or they'll make it so light that it doesn't, it's got to be dark enough that we can tell the difference between this to this. It's got to be dark enough. But it can't be too dark. It can't be this one. That would be too dark. And so we want to go ahead and make this again as uniform as we can possibly make it. Okay. We're gonna go ahead and take our time. We're going to look down here, say, Hey, is there any patches that are uneven? Are there any patches where it's a little sketchy? Are there any places that need my attention? And again, sometimes we were like, Well, this is not, this is not super fun. And again, this is like scales doing scales on a piano or chords on no or whatever. But if I add a little stronger music background, probably some a little bit or analogies, but this is, this is like doing wind sprints for basketball and stuff like that. It's a warm up. But the better, the better you can do. The wind sprints vary. You can run, the more power you have, the quicker you are on the basketball court, the better that your advantage against your opponents, the better that you can identify your value is, the better you can recreate them, the better manage you will have with your artwork being more accurate. So again, this is pretty close in terms of those, of those two values. So what we're gonna do now is rushing out. We're going to use what we call a staggered, staggered approach to doing this. And the way we're gonna do this is when it come down here to step five. Okay? And I'm going to use my let me use my HB pencil. My HB pencil is the pencil is right in the middle of all of these other pencils. This step is right in the middle. So guess what? So I'm going to go ahead now, when I do this, I'm going to try to focus on these two values. And I'm going to try to make this right in-between the two. So instead of starting at nine and coming all the way down and hoping I get the right values we're going to use again, this staggered approach to creating this grayscale. So I'm gonna come over here. I've got this HB pencil. Now I also, I'm going to start off a little bit on the lighter side. Because again, this is a B pencil, so I'm gonna have to layer it. If I went too dark to begin with. And I start doing all that layering, which is going to make it darker. And then I could, I could get myself into some real trouble. So I'm going to start off with again, a little lighter. So patchy through there. So I'm going to fill that in. There's like two little circles here I need to fill in over here. There's a little bit of a, sort of a little rectangle right there. So I'm looking for any variation. And if there's variation, I'm going to come over here, I'm going to fill it in. Okay, So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my My for-each. And again, we're going to get rid of all those little white dots. So I'm going to start with my four h. Now again, I don't care but comes out the side, but I do have to take care of these two lines where it's going to meet the other values. So I'm now actually using, I'm using a little bit of a risk swing, but I saw I just need more control. I might, I might start using a finger swing in some areas because again, that's where you have the most control. I'm using a tripod grip. And again I'm moving just my wrist. Okay. Again, this is really about technique. How am I holding the pencil? What's the angle of the pencil? How light am I using the pencil? How much am I overlapping? Again, this is all technique. This helps you really get down the technique of how to use depends off and how to control it. So if you're drawing something that's more fun, but you don't know how to control the pencil. You're going to have, you're probably not going to end up with something that's going to be as successful. Just like if I was playing the piano and I was like I wanna do some, you know, some fun saw and that's much more advanced than Mary had a little lamb. And so you're trying to do some other song, maybe a variation on a theme by Paganini or something like that. And you're trying to, you know, play them, but you're still fumbling over the keys. And you can't hear the keys very cleanly. And your fingers are going are fumbling over the, you know, the keys and you're in, you don't really have the rhythm and you haven't learned yet how to, to deal with timing and, and all that good stuff. The tempo and everything like that. When you're playing piano, you're not, again, you're not going to have a very successful song because you don't understand really how to play the piano very well. So you're going to be much more successful with that song. If you take the time to practice, you know, if you take your time to practice some, you know, playing some simpler songs, really focusing in on playing your ear, your core words and things like that to get your fingers little more nibbles. Practicing on stretching, being able to open those fingers up and having a better stretch through your different, again your keys and being able to hit that key in a very clean, proper way. Again, if you do that, you're going to start to have much more success. And not only that, but learning how to deal with half notes and whole notes and quarter notes and eighth notes and all that good stuff. Knowing by looking very quickly that, that note, and where does it sit on the treble clef and the bass clef. Knowing that and understanding that and being able to do it on the fly instinctively because you've trained yourself so much. Well now you're talking about you're gonna start having the skills to play some really good songs if you were. You know, trying to push it to, let's say you want to go and play the piano and a professional sort of around while you're gonna be, you're gonna be dealing and practicing your scales and stuff just to warm your hands. And you might be practicing scales warming your hands up, but 30 minutes to 40 minutes long before you even touch a sheet of music. Because you need to get your, your, your, your hands and your fingers nimble and you get them warmed up. You need to be able to hit your keys very cleanly. You need to keep the tempo and the rhythm and all those many things that goes into playing a great piece of music in a professional way. It's the same. So when you're starting out, Of course, you have to develop those skills. You have to learn the bass clef and the treble clef. And you're going to want to learn it so well that you could identify a note in your sleep or being awoken from a deep sleep, you can say, oh yeah, that's, you know, that's D flat and I'll leave me alone or whatever. But, you know, you want to be able to very quickly identify and understand these different concepts. I had an acquaintance. Okay, this is my four h. We're now going to transition to a to H. And I'm going to continue with my, my analogy here, but I had a friend in It's all about mastery is what this boils down to stuff like this is really about mastering the fundamentals. But I had this friend that was a world-class juggler. He was a street performer and overall class juggler. And try to remember, I think he could juggle. I think he's trying to learn to juggle nine. I think you can juggle eight balls, which are essentially juggling four balls in each hand. It's pretty crazy stuff. Or maybe he could do 70 years to work on 80, something like that. But he would talk about how you had to be able to juggle so much of a particular set of number of these different balls or what have you or, you know, he also did the little bottles. They look like bottles. And then I'll call that. But anyway, see in the rings and all this sort of stuff. But no matter what it was, he's like You want, you have to do it well enough that it gets into your subconscious that again, you could wake you up with, someone could wake me up from asleep and he would actually have people do that. Then actually have okay. I want you to come in and we're taking a nap today and I want you to wake me up and I want you to hand me these many things. And he would check himself to see fit if he'd gotten there yet. And I mean, that's that's the kinda stuff that now that might be it BB, be beyond what most people want to do and that's fine. If I click, I'm not trying to, you know, set a world record and I'm not trying to do this for professional, that's fine. And I certainly understand that. And I'm not saying that's the that's the only thing to do what, but what I am saying is that if you want to learn to play the piano, you have to be able to know that though the notes, you have to know what notes you're looking at. You have to know where it is on the keyboard. You have to then played correctly and you have to make it a nice clean hit on that. Tap onto that key and all that good stuff. You have to know what the tempo is. You have to know all this different stuff. And the more you do it, the better you'll be. The more you draw, the better you'll be. I mean, it's, it's really, it's really that simple. It's not any more complicated than, than that. It's a very simple concept. So I've gone over this a couple times with this. With this. Now I have to be careful because again, this value here is again somewhere. It's almost here, it's between those two. So understand that this five won't be the same as this one over here. So I'm trying to look between these two values. And judge, when it's at its halfway point. I think this is at the halfway point there's a better to be lighter because you can always darken. If you have to lighten this with a an eraser, oh my goodness, it's going to be a mess because it's going to be all splotchy your aunt to get in there with your kneaded eraser and do different things and it's just going to be an absolute mess. So Vetter to be a little bit lighter and then you have the ability to go darker than to be too dark because that's where really I'd have to erase it and then it would take me probably an hour to take out the blog genus. While maybe an hour, maybe a bit much, but at least 20 minutes to get that to, you know, to where I can then start to push it down in a uniform way, making it slightly darker or patch it up so that it's uniform and that lighter value, whatever it is I'm doing. It's, it's just gonna be much, much more difficult. So I'm using this to h Now, something about the two Hs and the forage is they're really great for darkening something, you know, because we don't wanna go too. You don't want to go darker. Because again, we just talked about the eraser and having to get in there and it's gonna make it really Blache it. And then you have to fill in all the watches. So doesn't really it has polka dots and you have to fill it in so that it melts in, like it's completely uniform. That's a hard thing to do. So but I'll just sneak up on it. But because of the fact that I've got these H pencils, they don't, they darken it very slowly. And in fact, there's a point at which they want to go darker at all. But I have right now a 28. I'm using this to H to make this more uniform. And it's, it's great because if I went over with one stroke with an HB, it probably it might go too dark. Or is this to make that same darkness of stroke I'd have to go over like 16 times. So it's a little bit easier to fine tune on the, on the lighter side and sometimes even the darker side. With my H pencils, they're really great for fine tuning of value. And I think this is going to be about where we want to, I want to stop here because I think we're ready to go forward. Again. We would go ahead and either go lighter or darker, but we have 3 between year and three between here. So if we skip one, there's the one in between, There's the one in between. We're gonna get used to the staggered approach because now I'm going to try to make a value that's not this line, not this dark was somewhere in between. Now I started this one with an HB. The next one litre is the 20 age Saul's. I want to start this one with a to H. Remember this one had my four h that I started with up there. And so again, I'm going to go ahead and come over here. And I'll start with my 2 H pencil. And again, the ten is left white because that's why that's white paper. I usually withdrawing paper, they're not truly white. So I remember I was saying, well, it's not truly why nothing's really wide and and there's, there's times that's true, but most times on paper if it's not truly white anyway, so we're already at the, the, the paper value itself is a true step 10 where it's not, it's not white at all. It's an off white or a light cream or something that's around. Again, a sort of a step 10. Because it's not truly white. To get true white paper, they had to bleach in and they're usually called bright white. Well, that's a true white. This is not bright white. This is actually somewhere between bright white and ivory. So again, the paper itself is actually a step 10. So I'm using a risk swing. I've got a modified going to modified hand hold, the tripod grip. It's a modified tripod grip. If you don't know that, Go ahead and about the hand holds. Watch the video that talks about the hand holds. If you haven't taken one of my classes before, my very first class I want people to take is the foundation of the line. Or the power of a line is the actual name of it. The power of line, the foundation of all drawing. And it talks about those handhelds. Now I'm also going to have sort of a view, a review of hand holds as well in this class. But there's certain things in that class I am not going to review, I'm just going to assume you know it and go on. And so we learned about things like armature of the rectangle. We learned about things like how to break things down with the armature into halves and quarters and thirds and two-thirds and all that good stuff. We also run about measuring and proportional measuring and how to use it. We use, w 5. Creating a Grayscale Part 2 final: I'm so proud of what you guys are doing. Keep up the good work. Go ahead and you'll keep that energy level high. Keep working the steps, keep drawing. Let's keep it going. All right, welcome back. So we were filling in this step 7 value that was halfway between 5 and 9. And again, I was using a number two pencil. Pardon me Now, number two pencil, I had a 2 H pencil and or for age that I was. Those are our lightest pencils we have. And we're using those to try to keep this. We don't want to go too dark too quickly. So if I was going to go ahead and fill this in, and as far as that goes, I can use the 2 H pencil to help me so that it fills in the values generally, and it doesn't go too dark too quickly. Now the idea is we're supposed to be looking for a value that's halfway between these two. And it's just to help us to get a grant to create a greater range of value. If I just start at the top and went down to the bottom, you, usually you're not going to have full range. So we went with the darkest, lightest, then in-between the lightest to darkest, and now in between the step five and step 9. And this way, we'll be able to target at least be within range of a value step or half a step or something like that. We're still going to have to do some we're still going to have to do a little bit of changing, you know, making things a little darker and sometimes making them lighter. But of the two, as I may have mentioned before, it's easier. It's easier if you're on the light side because then you just have to get out a pencil and dark and down. If you go too dark, well then that's a little harder because you have to get an eraser and you can align them with the eraser, but it's also, you have to be careful not to erase too much and have it become too splotchy and, and, and it's gonna get splotch anyways, but I mean, you're gonna you try to control as much as possible, then you're still going to have to probably fill in lots of little splotches and take maybe as long as 20 minutes to get that all filled back in before you can actually start to modify it anymore. Yeah, you have to make it uniform. Once again because this illusion that we're going to create really depends on these values being as uniform and as just as flat as possible. In other words, we don't want a lot of variations or splotches or look like there's texture. We don't want any. We want as little texture as possible to create this illusion. If we have too much texture, you know, and we don't have a uniform value. It just won't work. And so I think we're about in the ballpark as they say. It's a little lighter towards the middle, a little darker towards it's a little darker down here and a little lighter here and more lighter and lighter in the middle. So I'm going to try to, try to get this to be a little more uniform. So I'm gonna come over here to the middle. We're going to try to spend a little bit time in the middle of this block trying to make the values much more uniform. And we're pretty close. So I mean, we're not way off, but we still need to do a little bit more. But again, that when we're doing, when we're drawing a gray scale, when we're creating these values. The whole point is to not worry about detail. We're trying to just focus in on how light or how dark is it, and how uniform can I make it? That's the only two things that we are worried about now I grabbed a for age. And again, the time, the reason I'll use a for-each, it's the lightest pencil. The 4 H pencil is the lightest pencil. And again, the reason I use it is because I can use it very, I can use it to very slowly make something darker and darker and darker until I have it at exactly the right value. Because the fact it's so light, it takes like four times as long as the two H to get to the same sort of point of darkness. And so because of that, I have a little more control over it. And we want that we want to be able to control the values that we are creating with our pencils. Kay, so now this is almost perhaps a little, a little dark, but we're going to have, we're going to see how that goes. I'm not going to worry about it yet, but luckily this might be a little light. So again, we'll see in just a moment where it come down here to step three and we're given, we're going to try to get a value that's in between those two, between this step and that step. And I'm going to start off with a, with a to B pencil. And the two b is the second of the darkest. So the beast. We think of it as black. The higher the number, the darker the pencil or the black or the pencil. So the B pencils are when we want something a little darker. And, but remember that the v pencils also, because of the fact they are, they are software, that's why they are darker is because the graphite is is a little softer. To harden graphite, they started mixing with clay. The B pencils have less and less clay. They are far soft, softer than the H pencils. And because of that, they ride over the texture of the paper. So that's another thing to keep in mind now in terms of I'm using a risk swing and I'm using a modified baton handhold. So actually, no, actually, I'm partner may not have Bhutan. Bhutan would be like this. Between my fingers like this with the tripod is like this. And so what I'm doing is actually as it's sort of a modified tripod work. I've brought this out of the crook of, I've brought this out of the crook of my hand and hopefully you just hit the end of my fingers. And again, i'm I'm I'm using a risk swing to and I'm just trying to move this back and forth gently and try to be very careful and building this up. Try to be very careful to make it as uniform as I possibly can. I'm also taking my eyes out of focus. Now the first time I do this, I'm not trying to make it as dark as it can go. The first layer that would be unwise. So I'm going to very gently fill this in with value now. It's to live, but I'm going to go over this a couple more times. Remember the more times we go over graphite, the darker that graph I will get. Unless, you know there's a pencil, there's a range that every pencil has. And so sometimes you'll be like, well the pencils not getting any darker wall, then you have to grab a darker pencil. So if I had an HB pencil and I was looking at I'm like, man, it's just not going any darker. We'll then I would grab a to b if the to-be wasn't doing what I needed to make it darker, I would then grab a for b. Alright? And if I had a full range of pencil, you say, well the 4 reason not dark enough, or that I could grab a 6 B now, or an AB. The steps of darkness between a four to six to eight. Our slight. And so like I said, we can use just the five pencils to create values. But, and those five pencils, even most professional artists will use those 50 pencil. Some of them use only those pencils. And then others will use those 598 to 99% of the time. And so all those other pencils that you get in the kit, because there's no 20 pencils or 21 pencil or something like that. If you get all the h's and the HB and the, you know, all the, all the B pencils, you're going to have quite a collection. But because of the fact that most people only use the rest of those pencils. You know, less than a 1% of the time. So people don't, don't, they don't buy all of these like okay, I don't need them. I can make this work. And you can. But also if you just need a pencil that's darker while you get a darker pencil. Same thing about a pencil being needing to be lighter if you're like, man, this is going too dark too quickly. Grab a lighter pencil. So if I had the the to-be pencil with me and I was like, man, this is getting too dark too quickly. Well then I will get the next lighter pencil, an HB. At the HP was working well in gray, but let's say the HP was also going too dark, too quickly. And I'd say, well, okay, I'm gonna go to the next lighter pencil, which will be a to H. And so you want to get used to layering and, and working up and down the value scale. Now, I put about three layers of 2D pencil on hair. And then I grabbed my four H pencil again, a 4 H pencil is to get deeper into the texture of this paper. It's to help us to, again make it look more uniform. And also because of the fact that it darkens this now this is actually a finger swing I'm using now because I'm trying to keep this nice, crisp line. So I wanted to be as clean or razor sharp or I want it to be a nice, good, clean line, both above and below. So again, I'm going to grab my pencil using that finger swing. Now this isn't the tapered stroke or the feathered stroke or anything like this. This is just where I'm moving it back and forth with my fingers. It's the easier type of fingers swing. Remember the tapered strokes a little bit more advanced, but we don't need something super sophisticated for what I'm doing right now. I just need to work the pencil back and forth. And so it's just using a regular finger swing. If you don't understand the difference between just a normal fingers swing and that tapered stroke and or feathered stroke will then go. I would encourage you to go back and watch the video that talks about how they create different values with different hand holds. Is it a risk swaying, is it an elbow swing, his or her fingers swing. And then and with the finger swing, there was either just a regular finger swing or the tapered stroke or feathered stroke are the same thing. They just go by different names. And it's just, it's, it's a lot more sophisticated. There's there's not really, I mean, we could use it at this point. But for right now there's not a big need for it. So I just talked about that tapered stroke and all of a sudden I sort of change gears into doing and doing that tapered stroke a little bit. But unless I ignore what I'm doing, you're not gonna find a big difference. Yeah, you're not gonna, you're not gonna see a huge difference. So I've gone over this a couple times with this for each pencil. Now I've gone back to a non using an elbow swing and I'm just holding onto it with my with my fingers locking my risks, locking my fingers. And I'm just moving my elbow. Okay. So now we've got that where it's fairly uniform. So I'm going to go ahead and grab another pencil. So that was why for h. So we went from a to b up to a 4 H. I'm now going to two H. So the two H's the second lightest pencil. And I'm going to use a couple layers of that to h. And again is going to fill in some of those little. Little light dots that are from the texture of the paper. Because this is a harder pencil and it gets deeper into the texture. And because those little dots become gray dots instead of white dots, it makes the whole thing appear darker, so it's getting dark or not because this pencil is a dark pencil, but because we're getting rid of the, the textures in that paper. And that's a good thing to keep in mind. Now there's times where you'll, you'll use the paper to help you if I'm trying to create like let's say I was I was, you know, again, this is a medium service paper. It's got a nice texture to it. Let's say I was doing it felt hat. And so I want the texture of the felt or something that approximates the texture in that half. Well then I might grab a for B pencil because I wanted to skip over the paper to reveal more of the texture. K. And I could certainly do that. There's, you know, and I can just go ahead and again do that. So that the value I was creating was actually revealing more of the paper texture. Therefore, the surface that I'm describing with feel more rough against smoother areas like this. And so there's times where we will use the pencil differently to reveal texture. There's times we will. If I was working on Chrome or something with very little texture, I want to try to minimize the texture as much as possible when he was a lot of those H pencils to get in there and take out the texture so that it looks more uniform or smooth because I'm minimizing the favor sector at that point. And so we can use again that the texture of the paper and to help us start to help us create the illusion of textures, different types of textures, which is really great when you're trying to draw, create that. So again, this is the two H0 gone over this a couple of times as a couple of layers on there with my 2 H pencil. And then I'm going to grab my pencil again. And we're going to go back and forth and back and forth. And I'm trying to see we're probably almost there. I think I'm probably about a half a step of value away. But now that we've done all that layering, this tubule pencil will look much darker. When I layer it over all those other lighter, lighter pencils that I was using. So I start with my with my Tooby and then I grabbed a 4 H couple layers that I grabbed a 28 percent, a couple layers, and HB put on a couple of layers with that. And then I returned back to my to be at least I think I was supposed to grab the HB. I just realized I don't think I did, but if I had it would just minimum, minimize just a little bit more what was going on with those textures? So I think you can see now that we've done this, we're going to have every other step is going to be. Addressed or fill down so I can start to try to associate the values. My drawing now I'm using a finger swing again because I'm being a little bit more. I want a little bit more control as I put in my, in my values. Again, I'm going to go ahead and, and I should probably say that because all we're gonna do is I'm going to finish this and then I'm gonna go ahead and turn this off. So XML think you need to sit here and you can imagine that, that this is going to be more of the same because I want to fill this all n because that's not the stopping point, That's about the halfway point. So I think it's important to do that. I'm going a little bit some different directions Detroit to get minimize some of that paper that the grain created by if we leave spaces between our lines. So that's important to make sure that we can really help unify, make the value look more uniform. Which is what we want. Again, not, not bad. I think I want to grab the HB pencil. Thanks, I camera, if I use this one, I think I might have actually skipped it, but the reason why is that too busy to go darker and much more quickly. So if I grab a slightly lighter pencil like this, H B, well then I have a little more control, so it's going to be able to darken it in a much, you know, with a lot more care because I have to have what's the term I'm looking for? Basically because of the fact that it takes longer to darken it. I don't have to worry about one little misstep would like to be I could put just one stroke and go all know, too dark, I ruined it. So this one, I'd have to go over three or four or five times to make it too dark. And so again, I'm going to use it to just very gently darken things very softly. And because I'm going to have to work at it a little bit longer. I've got time, no big deal. I'm going to have more control over this. So again, I'm again, I'm going some different directions trying to get rid of the grain. I'm taking my, I had a focus to see if this is what the value is. Because again, So when we first do this, sometimes we get so distracted by the textures that we can't see the value that we've created because we're just so focused on the texture. And so again, I'm going to take my opposite of focus and try to again perceive what this isn't relation to, ship to this and this. Now, for the most part I'm going to write this down. So for this one we used mostly a 4 H. I might have used a little bit of a to H. Maybe I'll actually use a pencil where we can see what I'm writing. So for this one we use the foreach. And then maybe the two H for this one. I could use just the 4 H. Sometimes they'll use a for-each and a to H for the number nine. But again, the two lightest pencils for something like this, it's going to again be the four h. And maybe the two H. That little symbol means. And so that's a to H. For this one. Again, I might use the two H and an HB. I also might use a 4 H If I figure I need to. If there was an area as trying to very gently make darker, I could certainly do that. But I'm saying, say most of it's going to be 2 H pencil with a little bit of HB. This would be the same, this would be a and H b, and then a to H and maybe a 4 H layering. So again, because as that HB is going to start to allow and you're going to see more of that texture showing through. And we use these two H pencils to basically get rid of some of that texture. Again, for this one would be mostly the HB with and HB and then maybe the 4 H and then the two H. With this one. For number 4, we be using the Tooby. And then we would also, we would then jump up to the 4 H, then a to H, then an HB. And then we return to the to be once again, there might be a point where I go, okay, now I need to darken it too or the right darkness. And so I would ditch that, the Tooby and use either an HB or two H to dark and then very slowly get it to where I want. For this one here again, where we would use a to B. And then we jump up to the 4 H and then a to H and then an HB, right? And there might be a point where I might even use a little bit of the for being here just depends on whether it's dark enough. So again, I went to use my eyes on this one again, we'd start off with probably a for B. Then we would jump up to a 4 H. Then we'd put a couple layers of the 28, couple layers of the HB, the Tooby. And then we might return to the four B if it's if it's getting too dark, too quickly, I'd stay with the to-be. Or if I was really needing to sort of push it down just a little bit in terms of its darkness, I'm, I jump up to an HB or even a to H. And then this one again, we start off with a for B. For the number one. Then we jumped up to the 4 H to get rid of that, those little specks. And then we also used a to H together with some of the specs and then an HB and then a to B. And then we return back with a for B to push this down, this as far as we could go in terms of the value. So the number step 9 was for h into h. Step a was four h into h, step 7. Now I could use a 4 H for that, but again, it's gonna, it's gonna probably needs to go a little darker. So I'm going to need a two H and I'll probably be a little bit of an HB. I'd probably start this in with a to H and then maybe throw a goal or with an HB and then return to using it to age. Well, this one I'd probably start again with a to H or the HB depending on the manufacturer, somebody degrees or slightly darker. Some two H's are slightly lighter. But I would start with either the HQ of the two h, put a layer. If I start with the HB, well then I jump up there with a 4 H, get rid of the little specks, then I'd use a to H and i'm I use that tuition to push it down as far as I need to go. So again, this is what we're going to use. So again, I'm going to go ahead and stop the video. I'm just gonna go ahead and fill these in using these ideas. I'm going to come back with this thing filled in and then we're going to actually, that's where the fun begins because we're only, we're not even halfway there yet. We're going to go ahead and fill these in and then we'll be halfway there. And again, I didn't think that you would want to sit here and watch me do this for 30 minutes because it's going to be basically the exact same thing that I was doing with these guys, except this is going to be a step, a value between those two, this will be a step, a value between those two. That's the step value between those though. You see where we go on. So I'm gonna go ahead and fill these in Virginia and I'm going to make sure that when it hits the line, I have to make sure I'm in fact, this one's a little, a little a it's it's not very crisp and clean. So when you come in and clean that up, and I would do whenever I do cleaning up unless it's really dark down here. The ones up here, I'd use two H's and four H's. If they're down here, I'd be using to bees are four b's, maybe an HB, but again, lighter pencil is up here, darker pencils down here. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and fill this in and we're gonna come back. And then we're going to finish this up. All right. 6. Creating the Grayscale Part 3: All right, just keep working those steps. Keep drawing, keep it up. You're doing great. Let's go ahead and progress to the last step. All right, so we're back. So I went ahead and I filled in all the different boxes. So now that we have everything filled in. However, like I said, this about the halfway point, because we have some issues here. The value of this box here, the step eight is the same as the step seven, almost for the most part. And 65 are the same. And 43 are pretty close to the same as well. Then I'll exactly but they don't have we need that each step to be kinda the same distance from each other and they're just not. And so what we're gonna do from here is we have to darken seven, or probably better than dark and five. And it's just going to have a cascading effect. So I'm first going to come up here with my, with my four h. And I think this step a can maybe be just a tiny bit deeper in terms of its value. So I've got a 4 H pencil, that's the lightest pencil. And I'm just gonna go over this a couple times. And I just I just want to make sure that we can get a nice step from 79 to step eight. Now I'm not darkening and much because I don't want to go. You know, it's it's not too far off. I don't wanna go too far too quickly. So again, using sort of a Earth's swing at this point. If I had a piece of paper, I cover this area in, place my hand on it and do a much more controlled finger swaying or something. But we're just gonna go ahead and darken this just a little bit more. So again, that this and this is very clear that they are different values. And then it's a definitely a step darker. It's, you know, it's not maybe it's not kinda isn't. It's just good. It's going to be very clear. Step darker. And that's Step 9. And remember this is a simplification of values. So I believe I mentioned that The most people can pick up on about 18 steps of value. Some can't see past 15, but a lot of people can see as many as 18. And then if you have artists that we train our eyes to see much, to see values even better. And so, but most artists can't see beyond 24 steps of value in terms of being able to perceive a difference. Once you hit 30 steps of value. Almost no one that I have that I know of, that I've known personally can perceive that people have to pull out like little light, very light meters to start to try to. Read the differences between the value steps at that point. But again, so this is what I'm going, where I'm going with this is that this is again, as I said, a simplification of how many values there are in the world. If we have 10 steps of value, however, in a drawing or even in our painting, it will look like it has a full range. So if we put ten steps of value in a painting, it will appear that it has a full range of values, which is good news for us. Now sometimes there are things that are quite this slide and not quite this dark. And so there's going to be many times when you're drawing that there'll be half-steps. Okay, and can half-steps would turn this into 20 value steps, right? If we had a half-step between H. So again, sometimes we'll talk about a half-step. Once you get to something like a quarter step or something like that, that is so soft and subtle. Most people are not going to be able to perceive that. So again, this is a simplification of what we can see. And yet, if we can create drawings that have arranged from this light all the way to this dark. And the steps in between. It will feel like it has depth and dimension. And if you know how to do doing really well, then you'll have maybe able to make drawings or paintings. It'll feel like you get someone could step into and walk around. There's that amazing. Okay, So I, that's all I'm gonna do with this one. Now, this one again now I have a 4 H, but I think I'm going to go to a to H because we're down to step 7. And this step 7 is lighter than the step eight. And so I'm going to grab this, step 2 and step two, I'm going to grab this to H. And the reason we're gonna use this is because again, it's going to take much more time to build up the value. Then if I grabbed an HB or something. And plus this will also make it more smooth because there's still a bit of texture in here. That's that's not, it's not what I want. Again, I may have mentioned that all artists are. We like to control our values, we want to control our drawings. We want to be able to. It's all about control, control, control. Yeah, I joke in my class is that ROS are control freaks. And the many ways we are we want to be able to create an illusion that's very sophisticated so that we can create and draw people's eyes and the direction and have the eye move around the image the way we want them to go. There's a, there's a, there's a place to enter paintings. People will say, there's a place to leave a painting. There's a place to sit and sit and say awhile. Before you. Then go on to the next the next painting on the wall to look at that one. But there's definitely things that we want to be able to perceive. And then we want others to perceive. And so we want to be able to control that stuff. And that's a good thing. We want that really. Is it helps our drawing. It's a good thing. So I have a to H that I was using that for. Then I bring my four h back in hair. Again, this will get a little deeper into the texture I'll be able to control this is again, I want this go too dark. I needed to be there not as dark as ABA darker than this. And I may have to go this dark. I don't know if my baby that this will be as dark as this thing is going to have to go. But I won't know that until I have this number 7 at the value that I want. Now there's a particular range for these values. However, depends on what medium we're working in. At the very beginning, I had an oil painted gray scale and the grayscale, it has a much wider range, then even a charcoal gray scale, and that charcoal gray scale has a much, much wider range then a graphite gray scale. But instead of trying to confuse you by saying, well, this actually isn't a step one, it actually step three, and this is all this sort of stuff. We're just gonna go ahead and still make it ten step grayscale. And it's just going to have, it's going to be a little bit instance. I'm going to go near as dark as some of the others. But we can certainly create a nice transition of ten equal steps. And once I've created these, I can then use this with my graphite. Because again, I can say, Hey, these are the limitations. It goes from here and goes that dark. And that's, that's the range period between those, those values. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, there's, there's something really good about that because it will help you to understand what your medium can do and what it cannot go to help anchor you and go okay, I can't keep going darker than that, you know? And so grayscales are a good thing in a particular medium you're working in because it gives you, it gives you the range of what can be done in that medium. So again, we're just gonna go ahead and continue to dark. In this case, I'm using this stuff for and it's nice because I can get this to be There's some patchiness, it's a little bit lighter here then some other places. So I can get that to start with dark and slowly, which is again, what I want. I think that this needs to go a little darker still. And so I want to grab a little bit, I'm going to grab an HB pencil. And we're gonna go ahead and using this HB. Now the HB is darker than the two h. It's a pencil that's right in the middle. And again, I can use this to really see how much more quickly it's getting a little darker. And so I can use that as I'm drawing two to darken this a little more quickly now I still want to be, I'm still using a very gentle light touch because I don't want this to go just too dark, too quickly. I don't want to go, you know, kinda get out of my control. So. So again, I want to go ahead and come over here and I'm going to continue to darken this using a to H, because again, I use the HB to darken a little bit. But then now it's kind of close to where I want it. And then I will use this to H to get it exactly where I want it. And it's darker now, but it still has to be darker by about the same amount that this is darker and it's not quite dark enough just yet. So we want equal steps in terms of how you're stepping down to each value. It's kind of like stair-step. She don't want one stair-step that's two inches down, and the next stair step is six inches down, and the next stair step is 4.5. That's just not what you want. That's a terrible type of and so we try it. The other part of this is trying to keep the relationships that changes the steps. This contrast should be the same as that contrast. And again, we're pretty close. We're not exact, just you have a We're really close. We're in the ballpark now. We're we're we're we're within a half a step a value of where I need this to be in order for this to work. Okay? So We're going to continue just to, again, to darken this down just a bit. We're now about the same value as the step six, which isn't entirely surprising because I I felt that was well, I thought, you know, until I started darkening the 7, I didn't know whether it would be happy to darken the 62, but the seven is barely getting to the point where it needs to be in terms of how dark it is. And so that just means we better start at the top because we're going to try to go darker and darker and darker. And again, as long as when we first started, we were we weren't wafer off on this stuff. I mean, this step 7, I'm only dark and by maybe a half a step a value, but maybe three-quarters of a step more than what it was, and that's all it needed. So that's the reason we start off with what we call a staggered approach where you put it in this value and that value than this value. And then you try to put that on there and that one there. And it just helps you keep it within a range. You you're always usually going to be off by a little bit. But the more you do it, the closer you'll be. So you might be like I'm only off by half a step a value. Even if you're off by a full step of value. Again, that's unless it's really, really off in terms of where this starts and without starts at this got too dark and that this was too light and there could be a way where this just would not, you know, you wouldn't be able to pull it off without starting over again. But the whole reason we do what's called a staggered approach, and so you're close enough that you have to modify it like what I'm doing. But you're going to still be pretty close. So I think this step 7 is about where we needed to be. Easy to clean up that edge where. This value meets that value. Like so. It's also a darkening right in this bottom corner of the step number eight. So we're going to take a little bit of that out now I've got some little, little delight dots are I accidentally was pulled too much out. And there's still a mole mark, a little dot and get out. That's a little better. You can come over here to this corner. Here we go. Okay. Okay, So anyways, these really are not bad at all. They're they're they're doing good on this one right here maybe. Again, right in the middle, there's still it's a little bit lighter like right through here. And so I have to I just give it a pencil and spend some time right in that little area where it's just a little bit lives a little bit lighter than it should be. Okay. But this is, so this is going darker and darker. And that's what I want for this, for this grayscale. Now, 65 and all these others are now out of whack. Well, we've got the top part of this is starting to work the way we want it to. And so that's, that's good news. That's what we want it to be able to do is have, is have these, these values very clear. All that's lighter and darker, that's darker still. And the steps are fairly even. I'm I'm up here just trying to get again where it's a little bit lighter through here. Trying to make that more uniform. I think it's, it's doing a much better job. So now for step 6, I'm going to grab the HB to start this off with. Let's go ahead and make sure that my, my edge right through here is what I'll start with is the edge, make the edge dark enough. And then we'll just bring that value down. So that right there is about what I want for that step 6. We'll just bring this value down. Now by doing this step 5 was going to start over. Again. It's going to be too light, so we're going to have to continue doing this with our other values. Here I'm using my fingers pointing at this point, I really need much more control. I mean, I might jump in to do a swing or an elbow swing if I needed to cover an entire area. But usually, at this point we are actually trying to be much more controlled. We're going to be using their fingers swaying because it's got, it has the most control. It's still not a tapered stroke or a feathered stroke. But it is. That's a risk stroke right there. Sometimes I'll do strokes. I want you to think about it. So I'm just going on and you do this and, and so I don't even think about anymore, but I think now I'm doing the figures for you now look, guys that DO NOT. I'm doing a risk swaying. Okay. My my wrist is moving and it's actually rocking a bit, which is usually not a good idea. So I'm putting my hand underneath my risks. So now my risk and can move back and forth and much more with a lot more ease. And so and it's also going to have less stress on my wrist as I do it this way. So that's good news as well. All right. So again, we're gonna go ahead and keep darkening down on this value. For step 6 on the value scale, I'm still using an HB pencil. Now I'm back to the fingers swing. And again, I have a little more control by doing this. And I can go ahead and I can also, again start going different directions diagonally. You know, I was also going from transition from side to side and then going up and down. And then we can go from corner to corner. And this is a diagonal that leans the top, leans to the left. And I could do that and I could do another own work. The top leans to the right. As I'm as I'm doing that. And so I can continue to darken those down and all this and that good stuff. Again, we want to be able to now I think at this point, we're like half a step a value of where I want. And using that a and H b also will start to show more of the texture of the paper. So now kinda push it back down to where I wanted to finally be at. Only use this for age. Because again, the for-each pencil will, well, it's a little easier to control. Very subtle changes the value of this. And so again, it's a really nice pencil when I really want to control very soft transitions, a value. And I don't want big jumps and I actually want to keep it within quarter steps and third steps and, you know, stuff like that. To try to get this to be as uniform as I can give it k. So now that's looking better. It's still a little of a letter in the middle. So I'm gonna go ahead and spend using a risk swing on this. Finally, spend a minute or two. Keeping this or darkening it gently as I work. So again, that's about where I want that. And so see how we really have to, you know, we really have to. It's really changing it up. While all these just these little changes, we now see that this step 5 is actually the same as the step seven. Because of all the changes that have been made. I'm gonna go ahead and this is probably this was a to B. I think I had a I had a four B pencil. That's a bit much. And I thought at the time, but I was like I'm going to save time, I'm gonna do it what I would normally do anyways. And I just put one stroke. I said Nope, too dark. And so I got this to be, I'll be 0, I'll use the Tooby. And the to-be would only do is I'm gonna come over to this step 6. I'm going to darken along the edge with step five until it's the value that I want right through there and such. Okay? And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and bring that value down. Now if I wasn't going to actually turn this on the side, so I can really play with that, with that edge. But we're gonna go ahead and again try to fill in the rest of this box that same value. And this is probably going to turn out to be about the same value as the step for you. Just by doing this, I'm almost to the step six. So this is dark and a little, no, not quite actually, it needs to go darker still. So we're gonna go ahead and keep working on this. And I'm darkening this down. Now because of the reflection coming off of this. I can't quite see that edge too well, but I think that that edge is a little rough on there and I really wish that that edge was not quite so rough. And so I'm going to go ahead and try to clean this, this edge up a little bit. I'm going to use a sort of a mask. As far as that goes. I'm going to use this little bit here. And I'm going to go ahead and just blot this a little bit. And so that's taken where it was kind of above their little too dark. And so I went ahead and took that out. And let's see, we're gonna go ahead and again try to get this step 5. Now this is almost going to be the value of a step file with charcoal. So that makes me a little nervous stuff I'm in charcoal mean that's very close to one step. Phi should be with graphite because I don't have as much range to the darks. Will find out. We'll find out if I. If this started out a little bit too dark up there a little too quickly. But we'll find out in just a moment. So we'll keep darkening this step 5. I'm still using the tube events all. Taken my eyes out of focus because you can see value better that way. And this way you can see what's going on with the step five Vs that step six. I think if I use my H pencils, I can get an antique a little bit more of that texture out. I think it'll darken this just a little bit more. Let's try with an HB for just a minute. So let's get this HB pencil now this is harder than a tube. The tube is darker than HB and HB is the next step lighter than a to b. And so I can use this and because it's a slightly harder pencil, it'll get a little bit deeper into that texture. Again, I can't. Sometimes it's the first time when, when we're, when we're, when you're drawing. And I tell my students this all the time, the first three months of drawing is really a chore to be able to see the value, see what values and an understand and identify what values we are looking at, what values we're dealing with. So I tell and I encourage students to either buy or create a gray scale that they can use to start to identify the values that they are looking at when they're drawing objects. No matter what the object is, it's always nice to have a grayscale with you. So you can double-check what the values are. And I do a lot of what's called plenary painting. That means you're painting outdoors. And when you're painting outdoors, you just have to know the values or it's just not going to work. You don't have enough time to play with detail. So artists create great plein air paintings by painting things with very definite the definite value relationships that those are right? You'll have a great painting. And if they're not well then it's much harder to have a great painting because painting Andrew and, or drawing is all about the values. And so, so again, they have all kinds of little contraptions to check value what are called color isolators and value isolators. And it's essentially just a gray card with a hole punch 10. So I know some people that have used like old, you know, credit cards in that they're no longer using or whatever and they'll paint the back with a neutral gray and then they punch a hole on it. Of course, scrape off the numbers and make sure that no one can take this strip off the back. And so that way you don't have in your information getting out there, the gentleman out there. But it's a really great way of having a, a value isolator and or color isolator. Because every color has a value, so you could use one of those. The other thing that nothing you can do is you just take a A, you know, like a card, like a memo card or a flash card or something like that. Whereas white and take and take a hole puncher and punch a hole out of that or cut a hole with an exacto knife, produce something where, but again, that's a really quick makeshift thing that you can use. And then you take the object the, with the, with the holes in it. And you can again start checking values much more easily if you get lost. And in the beginning, in the first, first 3 to six months, and if you haven't done it, you could draw for 10, you know, 10 years and not be well enough aware of the value relationship changes. So it's just, it's a really great way if you train yourself early, you'll have to worry about it. I have people that I know that again, I've painted for a decade or more and they just never have felt the need and the things that they create suffer because of it. So, I mean, there's, there's, there's real importance and value. And it goes beyond style. I mean, Matisse was using value in Matisse of course was not painting realism, but his different shapes. I'm talking about, you know, his later stuff with it became, you know, very two-dimensional, smooth, didn't call it flat. Some people will call it post or space or, or flat space thinking or collage space thinking, that's another way of talking about it. But if you're doing a decent collage, you have to be aware of the values. It's always about values. Whether you're dealing an abstraction, whether you're dealing in representational painting, whether you're dealing and non-objective painting, no matter what the style is, impressionism and post-impressionism or classicism or you know, post-modernism or modernism or Cubism, or no matter what you're working on, It's all about what's the value. So this, this exercise does have value because it is just trying to teach you about how to use and identify the different values that you are looking at in the world around us. So again, this has to go a little darker. Now I'm using a for B because this has just a substantial change that I'm making. I think that's almost dark enough, so I'm going to hold off on using the four b anymore. I'm going to jump up here and use an HB. And that's no lighten though than the four B For B2B and then HB. So this is two steps, lighter. And what this will do is because it's a little lighter, I can use it to as I'm trying to just very gently push this a little darker, a little darker and darker. So it's much easier to control. I have more control with this. Now. I need to even a little more control song we're going to, and I want to get rid of some more of the texture. And so I have a 2 H pencil. Remember the two a2 is the second lightest pencil, the 4 H is the lightest. And this is the, and the reason I'm using this is because this will take out some of the texture. Turn those white little dots in the gray little dots and it will look darker. Then we'll also, it's easier and make it look more uniform. Again, if we have too much texture, we will destroy the illusion. And the illusion is that we're looking for, is that if we do this right, and we, we, we, we set this away from us by about 15 feet. And look at it. It starts to look like a gradation. Even though there is no gradation, there are just flat values. But from a distance, they start to look like there's a gradation. You know, almost like a subtle gradation. Obviously there is a gradation in terms of very definite steps. When, when you look at this from a distance, it melts in and suddenly starts to look like perhaps is just this, this, this, this value radiation or what's something we call shading, going from dark to light as opposed to chunks of value jumping from dark to light. So it's a really, that's the illusion we're after. And if we have too much texture or destroys that if we don't have these edges touching correctly. In other words, if they're not clean, if they're not, Chris was as crisp as we can get them, then then that's gonna be that's gonna be an issue. So so now this I think is where we want it to be. And again, now this is what's going on. What's going on is a little concerning because this is now almost as dark as the step 2, which makes me wonder, am I going to, if I've run out of room, we'll find out in just a minute, but and that just means that it's not a big deal. This happens, can happen to everybody. But we're going to see what we can do with them. So and what I'll do usually for step one is I'll leave it a rule on the lighter side. And wait till I darkened all these down before I start to really push that one. That one can probably go darker by maybe a half a step of value. But before I worry about that too much, we're going to go ahead and try to darken this step right here. And in fact, now this is a for B pencil. I'm going to go ahead and go over both of these at the same time. Now remember, graphite darkens on itself. So this was, this was darker and as I go over the both of them, this will darken and this will darken. And if I if I don't darken this one, these were both still be this will be darker, this will be lighter. So I could certainly do that to see if I've got, you know, how much room do I have the darken this out. All right. Well, we can go darker. So the 3 is now about us because it's Step 4 and I'm using a pencil. Now remember when I'm using the four view pencil and I want to darken it. To get it really dark, I have to layer it. Okay. So. I'm gonna go ahead and do some little more layering. I'm going to take a 4 H pencil. And I'm going to go over this step three with a four h. And I'm going to go over the step 2 with a for age. So I'm trying to make them both get darker. As I go over them. I then we're going to use a to H pencil. And again, I went to go over the step 3, but the 2 H pencil. And then I'm gonna go over the step number two with a to H pencil. Because that way again, I'm trying to keep them both going darker. And I'll go ahead and see if I could do this at an angle. I hope that out. Maybe do a little bit of an angle on this. See if I can push this down. Just a little darker still. K. Once I've done that. Now again, this in this seemed to be the same. I'm going to go ahead and use an HB. On to step three. I'm using a finger sewing. Because I do this. And now go down to step two and use the HB on that as well. And that's because I'm trying to get them to both go darker as I darken this up. Now. And this is starting to get darker than that. It's Tibet. And so now we're going to use the to be. And so I'm gonna use this to B pencil over the step 3. Like so. And again, this is getting darker now again, I can come over here and I can double-check that, that this is again darker along this edge. Now it is K. And now let me go ahead and darken a little bit more. That's step 3, which is I think doing a good job. Okay, that's now darker than the step four. And if I needed to now again, the step 4 has a cold patches. There's a patch here and a patch here that a little bit just a little bit lighter. And I can, I could go in with a 4 H and very softly get those to darken up if the pH is too light where it's not working. I could grab a to H, I could grab an HB, you know, whichever. But anyways, I can get that to even out a little bit. Now for this step. Number 2 to 3 is about close enough. I'm gonna go ahead and try to go darker still. Then this one. And I'm using a for b again to darken this. Alright? Now it started again, it's turned to be darker than the and the three. This number 2, step number 2. So I think I'm barely going to be able to do it. Which is great because again, the, the graphite has a little bit shallower range. But it's still going to look like we've got a nice even step of the different values. Again, this I could go ahead and make sure that this line along there, that border is as clean as I can make it. As far as that goes. Again, make sure that this border is nice and clean. There's a little bit of gray, you know, a little bit of a variation at the top. Now some of those there's an illusion to, so I got to be careful that because here's what happens if you do this just right. There will be a natural illusion that this is darker and this gets lighter. But the thing is that's, it's being pushed a little bit more because there is a slight a slight gradation going on here. But anyways, I'm just saying that that will naturally happen. But some of that is because there is an actual gradation. I'm not going to take the extra I could go over this for an extra hour or where the 4 H pencil and take out all of that. But I'm not going to I'm not going to waste your guys time, but that's how you do it. You just keep on working on it. So at this last part, again, you try and keep a little bit in what's called reserve. So for this last part, with this last value, I'm using just my four B now. And I've got a little room to go just, just a bit darker before it starts to get. Because there's a part where if we're not careful, this will start doing shinier and all look darker. Actually started looking lighter. But there's just a little bit more darkness I can add to this. And that will pretty much round this out to give me a full 10 step value scale. With for this, again, for my value scale that I'm creating here. Alright. Now because of the way I've got the lights again, graphite takes and can be hard to photograph. We can have a sheen to it. And there may not be your xin that I'm looking at, but the camera might be picking it up. So some of this I'm going to have to, when I pull up the video, take a look at that. But the idea and this is already starting to shine a little bit. So I have to be careful because again, if you're at the figure at the right angle, this is going to be lighter. And you have to avoid some of that with, with graphite. You want to avoid some of that with graphite. This is a to B. I'm gonna see if I can maybe knock some machine off by using the pencil a little bit. Still get in there and get some of those those crevices out. Now again, if I know that this is not going to be lightened, I can use a little bit more pressure and darken this down. You don't want to prion, want to crank on it though. Because again, if you do that, then it will go really shiny, really fast. And it just won't look darker. It'll actually look lighter. And it will be really hard to look at it because it'll be just so shiny no matter how you look at it. And so you don't wanna, you don't want that when you're, when you're drawing. So again, you want to take it easy on that. So I'm still I'm not going to try to get any darker than that if I did, it's just gonna be self-defeating. And again, hopefully from the camera angle because I can't tell this until I actually, just because of the way graphite is in terms of how, how much sheen there is to it. But this is, this has turned out really quite well. These are actually pretty close to being even steps now. Not all in all, not all of these are equal. Equal meaning that not all flat, there's some that you can have sort, sorts of little patches. I'd have to get in here with a little eraser like this little dark haired or I'll just tap that little bit, fill this in where it's a little bit lighter. Tap this a little bit, a little bit there. Fill this in words a little bit lighter to make it more uniform, but it would take me about an hour to do that. And I'm not gonna make you sit here and watch me do this for another hour. But that's the idea is that if this was like when I was going to keep and I was really one to make sure it was just as nice as I possibly could get it. Well, then I would go ahead and I take the extra time. And I would go ahead and cross hatch everything. In other words, go diagonal this way, diagonal this way. Go this way. And I go top to bottom, make sure every direction is covered so it's a uniform. Each bit was as uniform in its value as I could possibly stand to make it. That's where the real, you know, that's what, that's the real time burner. When I was in our college, they'd make us do like a 20 step value scale. And not only was it ours, I mean, it would take you days to do it because, you know, there was a cascading effect when you start darkening something over another. And it was almost like a dog chasing its own tail in some ways. And I know they were doing, they just don't really get us disciplined and really help us and, and it was helpful. But it was also it haunted your nightmares. You'd be up all night with bloodshot eyes and all this stuff. I'll try and to get your project done for class. And also you keep your scholarship and all that sort of stuff. But it was, it's really good, it's really good for. So again, everyone should do a grayscale or pretty much finished for this for now again, I could come over here and again, there's parts that are a little bit too light or dark that's too dark. That's strange little darkness there. This is kinda blown out that edge. So again, I could take another hour just cleaning it up and make it really super clean. But since this isn't getting published in a book, I'm not going to care that it's, you know, or it's not my own that I'm going to put on the wall or it's not my own that I'm going to use as a I'm not going to worry that much about it, but I'm just saying these take time. If you've never done a grayscale before, good rate is set, it's set aside at least two hours worth of time. We've been recording this for quite some, for quite a bit. And so, and I've been talking courses I'm working at, which slows me down a little bit. But for me to even do a halfway decent value scale, I guess takes me about an hour and a half, sometimes an hour and 40 minutes to push it to the next level like what I was talking about, can take another two hours to get it to where it's really nice. And again, if I was going to clean these up, I would have normally just take these off so I don't have to worry about it. And then peel it off at the end, you get this beautiful clean edges. But if I was going to do it all by hand, well then again, that could take another hour to two hours just to clean the edges all of the way. One of them too. I was trying to try to create a grayscale. And now again, we've got the grayscale going from 10 all the way down to one, and we've got everything in between. So if I'm drawing something, I can start looking at this and go, where is it on this value scale? And i'm, I go All this one is a step five and this one is the step six. And what is this step 5 or what is it, Step 6. And I need to know that if I'm going to be able to, again, start to play with values. And so that with this class, everything we're going to be doing is with value. So we're going to play the game, and so we need to know it and this will help your drawing more than anything else with value. And I tell my students if you're really serious about learning to draw, if you're really serious while learning to use value, do 10 of these in the next six months. Just value scales. It will level you up no matter where you're at if you because again, you're stripping everything away and all you're dealing with a value and craftsmanship and making sure these values are as you know, as uniform as possible. And the better you can do that, the better you can do the advanced stuff. Or, you know, the better you can do like photo realism or hyperreal ASM or even you if you'd meet night and that can be a nice, beautiful tone and some sort of non-objective drawing. You need to be able to control value. You need to be able to control your, your graphite. And that's what this helps us to do. Okay, so go ahead and give this a shot. We went ahead. We laid this out with a with a ruler. It's 1.5 inches wide, it's 10 inches tall. Each of these is one inch high. You know, go ahead and make your own at home. Again, if you take the time this are really revolutionize your drawing. It'll push it to the next level. You'll have much more control than you thought possible the first time you do this. It can be pretty tough experience because you're, you're dealing with how do I get this smoother and how do not use your finger. Don't be using brushes or something like that. Try to deal with just the pencil. Now if it's really, really rough, you may have to create the new, do what we call the nuclear option. Nuclear. And I could get some tissue or a Q-tip or something. But understand the moment that you do that and you're going to have to first off, you're going to go back into it. So you might have to be really aggressive with it or erase it off, patch it up, and then go back in and meticulously with just the pencil. You can't just smear it and leave it that always looks dirty. Never do that. It's terrible for graphite. If you're working with charcoal, that's no problem. Charcoal doesn't care. You could charcoal with a sander, go over a throw some Jessica want to go over that, throw down some oil paint, go over that. It'll look great because charcoal doesn't care. Charcoal looks great no matter what surface you work on, you can work on brick and charcoal look wonderful. Graphite is not that way. It's the high maintenance medium of the art world. And so you have to make sure your papers all nice, that you have a nice point on your pencil. You know that you're not touching it with oily fingers and all. You just have to make sure that you're really taking care of that drawing surface. But anyways, go ahead and do the grayscale. I've really enjoyed our time together. Go ahead and get out there, get more creative. You guys take care now, bye bye. 7. Techniques For Creating Value Gradations: Right, so we're gonna go ahead and explore the next step, which is learning how to create value gradations or what some people might refer to a shading. So we're going to talk about the tips and techniques for creating value gradations. Let's get started. So we're going to get really in close on this one because we're going to go ahead and do what we call a, a figure swing with what's called either a feathered stroke or a tapered stroke. Gradient stroke. There's different names for different terms for it. Essentially it's where you make a stroke, where you place the pencil and then you bring the pencil off and there's a trailing. If you do a write, there's a trailing when you come in as a trailing when you go out and gets lighter. And the way you want to do this, and this is why we're in so close. So we can see this is that we want to, you're going to do a swing to the pencil. And so I still have this Bhutan, Bhutan hand old. This is, This is the tripod grip. So we have this tripod grip. We're going to be using our fingers into a finger swing. But we're in here close swings to the tip. The tip of the pencil is going to come down and touch the paper, and then it's going to come back off the paper. It's kinda like a little airplane coming down, making contact with the paper and then coming back off, taking off again sort of thing. And whenever we make this stroke, you're only doing it on the downstroke. Upstroke is just to place the pencil to go through the motions again. So I like the first fingers framework is leave the pencil there and we scoot back and forth. With this one. We're going to be lifting the pencil each time. And it takes a little getting used to this as well. I had someone that had told me this after I'd been in the industry for a few years who had commented out on how horrible my technique was and then showed me this and he really helped her abilities are really helps. Your, your drawings go to that next level. And so we really want to learn this. It does take, even when I do this every time we do this to all five minutes, just a warm up and I'm know what it was. Was we doing? So it's not it's the first time we do it. It can be kinda strange. But again, we're looking at, I'll move down here a little further. But we're looking for when we do this to get that tapering. Okay? And by doing that, if we do it right, we'll get a taper on the end, on both ends. This is tapering here, not doing such a good job up here. But again, it's going to, we're going to warm up. So I'm gonna go ahead and again, I'm coming down, placing it, making the stroke and then coming back off the paper. So again, we're trying to make an even tone here. We're not trying to do gradations were just trying to make even steps of value where we get again a little bit of that. And maybe I can, I've got I've got a it's worn a little bit of a tip on this side. So let's see if we can be a little bit clearer about what's happening here. If I, if I push too hard though again, it kind of destroys this this mark. We have to, we have to use a light touch once again to do this tapered stroke. It's a little bit tapering here, a little bit here. And so it's going to take practice. And I can feel when I finally want my hand warms up to it because again, I can see a tapering here and see a tapering there. We've warmed up. And again, this is something that I have to warm up every day when I, when I, when I start do this because it's really, it's really about control. And when we're, when we're using this tapered stroke, it's again where we want more control over our values. We only create this on the down-stroke. I'm bringing the stroke down, touching it, bringing it back off. We instruct down touching it coming off. And that's how we're creating this tapered stroke. And again, only on the downstroke, I only make this on the downstroke. And this is, again, other, other people are teaching this. This isn't something that, you know, I don't claim to be some genius. This is just something that was passed down. Like so many traditions in art. It was passed down. It's not because I have any great, vast knowledge or some super humanly talented kind of thing. It's none of that, It's just being taught by people who know and they show you and you show others. And I, tradition is born sort of thing. So again, we have this, again, we have this tapered stroke that's happening is a little darker here in the middle, a little lighter on the ends. And that's what we're looking for, is just a tapered stroke. We can also do gradations. And with gradations, I could do it with either a risk swing or a elbows swing or what have you. I could do it with a regular fingers wing and I can do with a tapered strains, a tapered stroke or a feathered stroke, or a great aided stroke, whichever one you're using. But to do the, the value gradations, what we're gonna do for this is we're gonna go ahead and we're going to start by leaving our pencil. We're not making it darker. By pressing harder, it's getting darker because I'm going back over the same place over and over again and I'm not using very much pressure. Especially not in the beginning because the more pressure you use, the more you can destroy your paper. And we don't want that. So I'm using very little pressure on this. And this also helps. I've got this tape now you can't see this because the paper goes outside, but this is taped on a board. That harder surface underneath allows the user to get that dark line. So now it's as dark as it can go. It's not getting any darker without me making the pressure harder and I don't want to do that. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to come away from that edge. And we're going to bring this out as far as I want. I'm gonna try to bring this out enough and I'm trying to make it as light as I can. This again is a for B pencil. I'm using the four B pencil so you can count it so you can see what's happening. So you actually see the value. Got a little space between the lines right there. Get that corrected. Okay. So I'm just going to come on here trying to make it as light as I can possibly go with this dark console. Okay. So I try I made this dark and I wanted just to kinda of a straight tone. There's a little bit of a kind of a darker line right here that's actually a flaw in the paper. And then if I have some like that, I just get my little eraser with a little, you know, little tip on your race, your kneaded eraser and just pick that up. And it's not a big deal. So we started here, built it up for the week, came out this far. Okay, well, we're going to do next is I'm going to start at the darkest part, which is here again, and we're going to come out half as far halfway. Okay? So I want to start with the darkest part. And I will come out only about halfway. Now when I do this, this is going to look like doesn't really upgradation. Yeah, it almost looks like Neapolitan Ice Cream, three different colors, and I'll chocolate, strawberry vanilla or something. It's not quite upgradation yet. That's fine. We're going to start again, darkest part and I'm going to come in, come out half as far again or in other words, one-quarter of the way thereabouts. This isn't like, you know, where I'm measuring it. It's just guessing. That's about a quarter of the way. No big thing. I'm going to come out a quarter of the ways. Okay? And I can do this with any pencil again, I can do this with any type of swaying, whether it be a finger swing or a risk swing or an elbow swing, any of them. You can create gradations this way. I'm going to go ahead and start again at the darkest part, normally come in just a little bit, or in other words, about an eighth of the way. So when I start the darkest part and I'm going to come out just a little bit. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this and I'm going to go over it, over the whole area one last time. Very soft, very, you know, the lightest value I can. And by doing this, I've also got a gradation starting now I do have a word, it's kinda lighter here. Is more of a variation coming up this way, more immigration coming up that way. But that happens, you just come back into this area. This area right here was this little sort of circle. And you're going to go ahead and work that area for just a minute. Okay. You're going to stay there. You're gonna go ahead and come out. You know, about looks like this is about a third of the way started the darkest part come out and again, just about a quarter, sorry, the darkest part come out just about an eighth. And we can go ahead and get these areas. Same thing here. There's an area right there. So when I started overhearing, come out again about how maybe it's closer to a fourth of the way. So at the darkest part, come out just a little bit, come out just a little bit less. And again, now we've got a gradation. And it's again, we've got some some patches here. Again, there's sometimes you'll get this where you've got these opening. It looks like a little circle there or sometimes it's a square or sometimes it's some sort of alpha numeric shape, but letter or a number. And we can just go in there and fill those in so that we can make the gradation look better and better, better. No one says you can't do that. But we haven't altered the way we're doing this. We're just now we're kind of doing almost call this tree arch like the patching someone up and, uh. The first aid station or something. But now we've got a nice gradation. Now sometimes I'll have people that will be like, Well, why can't I just do a gradation where I start and I press hard and then I press a little sit and then I press a little and I press a little less and less and less and less and less and less and less and less and less. Why KID gradations that way? Well, you can degradations that way. However, if you look at this one versus this one, this one looks better. All those layers are going to make the gradation look better. So this will always look better than this. Now I could certainly go over that, you know, several times and get it to look better by layering. I'm I still we go into the whole concept. Halfway quarter of the way a to the way, bring a value over the whole thing to tie it all together. There will still be the same the same process that I went through here. But the reason we don't do this as the second reason we don't do this. This one that will give us a better result. But also I was pushing harder and I was actually carving into the paper. I was pushing too hard. Here at the end. The moment I press too hard there, there's no getting that out. I can't erase that. And whereas this because of the way I did it, because the pressure was very light. I can erase even in the darkest parts all the way back to white paper. If I decided that I didn't need the white paper will then later on you could go ahead and press a little harder and really get some, some Richard arcs out of it. But you still have to be careful because if you, if you start abusing your paper and carving lines, you're able to see those engraved lines and they are not pleasant and they will destroy your drawing, especially if you're trying to do something like realism or photo realism or hyperreal ism, you really have to respect your paper. Now there's another way of doing it with this type of a value gradation. We're starting at a certain place and stopping in a certain place. And again, we started this by the dark line first and then coming out as far as we wanted to go in and stopping. There's another way of doing this where we flip it, we invert it, we do the inverse. And so what we would do is we wanna do it this way and just keep pushing out. And I know I've got all these little bits of value here, so they're kind of in the way, but I could keep pushing this all the way across a piece of paper if I wanted to. And with this, you just start the darkest part. Come out a little ways. Start with the darkest part. This be running to catch on to this real quick, because it's the same thing, it's just the reverse. Come out a little further and start the darkest part. Come out a little further. I got a little bit of a line there. I need to go ahead and fill that in. It happens to everybody. It's just that the professional job no. Fill that in and then they move on. Start the darkest part, come out Livermore, start the darkest part, come out a little further. Started the darkest part come out a little further. Star, the darkest part come out a little further. Are you seeing perhaps a pattern emerging? This is what this looks like. So this was out of my, my drawing pad and it looks like I've got insights to line there. It wasn't super D, but those are really bad because they will. Won't take value unless you actually push value until I'm alright, so I want to start off here and come out again. A little further. Start here again, I'm go out and push it out a little further. So again with this, we can just keep pushing out further and further and further. However, something that happens with this is usually you'll get out to a point where there's very little gradation through here. There's more gradation back here. When that happens, what we're gonna do is we're gonna, we're gonna stick around from here, push out a little bit, a little bit here, a little bit more, a little bit more to they're a little bit more to, you know, I mean, we're going to kind of fill this in with an in-between value step that we're kinda missing. So we've come out a little ways, come out a little ways. And my lowest further. Come out a little ways further. Come out a little ways further. Okay. So this has a gradation, but this back here again doesn't have much of gradations from I start at the darkest part, hands very thin through, down through here. So when I start the darkest part and come out just a little bit started a little darkest part can watch little more. Started the darkest part come out just a little bit more. All right. We're going to come out a little bit, just a little bit again because that area hasn't filled in quite yet. So come out just a little bit, come out just a little bit, come up just a little bit more, commodities, little more. So you're just going to keep doing this until again you get a gradation. Now, I actually, I don't know if you noticed when I went from doing it back and forth and now I'm only doing it on the down-stroke. That means I'm doing a feathered stroke. By stroke is the most control you have when you're making gradations. And what will you be using a feather stroke when we are making or creating value on the sphere. Creating value on the cylinder, doing our best to make something fill 3D. So again, I'd been working in this area and now there's a little bit. This is actually a quicker gradation. This is a slower one minutes. The darks are kind of blending out a little, they're creeping out a little slower. They're not getting as light as quickly. And there's times we want that. And so again now we can come over here and I can keep pushing, keep pushing forward. So now I've hit that other value. Course. I guess I could just, I could seem it in here. And we'd never know that that was its own little thing. But the idea is this again, I'm just going to start the darkest bar, come out further, still start at the darkest part. Come out for their stills to start with the darkest part, come out further still, you know, that's, that's the name of the game. And that's how we go. Once again, we have this area doesn't have much creation to it. So now I'm going to come from here to there and just kinda stick around in this area. Dark and a low, uh, give it a little bit more of a gradation. Make it so it works. I'm also using a tapered stroke. We'll know more control. And I'm layering, I'm layering, I'm layering. There's another little hole in the paper right there. Okay, Now it's gone. Now. And in this particular class, we want to learn how to do most of our values with our pencil. Again, there's a little bit, I want this as all the same. Now I want this to be a little darker so. Come from the darkest part and come halfway through this area. So that's the darkest part. Come out halfway through that area. So again, now we're extending that gradation out. Now again, there's little bit of an art to migration, so it's just naturally some that's happening in the paper. Let's hope it's not a fingerprint. That would not be a good thing. But I'm not too much on this, but if this was a drawing, it would that would not be, you know, I'd have to start from scratch is they'd say with a clean piece of paper. But again, I'm just making this gradation coming out, making this creation coming out. And now I'm starting to stick around a low areas that are a little refer to try to try to blend that are not blend them but well, to fill them in so that they blend in. Now sometimes people will have been who have taken classes where they use lots of stamps with their graphite or our blending tools in the beginning, I don't want you to use any blending tools. As you get more to be a more competent, experienced, beginner, intermediate, and advanced artist. With graphite, we will only introduce induce using brushes. And only at certain times most of the time is going to be done with the actual pencil. And the reason why is that the moment you start smearing this around, it shoves that graphite deep into the paper and it goes flat. It looks like it's looking fillings dirty and smudgy. And and so and that's also why we only use stamps. They give that big, they grind the graphite and once the graphite goes into the paper, it loses its luster, it loses its silvery quality, and it just starts to look like dirt. And so instead we'll try to use the pencil. And even if I blend with a, with a, with a brush or something, I will always go back over it with a pencil because again, we've kinda shoved some of that graphite down into the surface of the paper. So now we have this gradation. We have a gradation in this way, integration this way, this is a quicker gradation going from darker, lighter, much quicker. This is a slower gradation and it's just by getting used to Larry and going over different areas. And that's how we're gonna make our value in this class. And again, I could do this with, again, I was using a finger swing. We could do the same thing over here again using a Eris swing. Just wait till I build that up and then I'm gonna come out a little bit. And I'm going to build that up and that'll come out a little bit further. And I'm going to build that up and then I'm gonna come down a little bit further still. And whoops, I got kind of a line there, but so that's what we were doing just a moment ago. This type of gradation. I'm moving a little fast on this, but I think you get the idea of how we're doing this and that, and you know, it's what we want. It's, it's how, again, I'm used to doing that with a risk swaying. I could deal with a normal finger swaying like I started. I could deal with a tapered stroke. And I could also do it with an elbow swing a much larger area. Again, you would just stay there till you built up. The words. By staying there longer gets darker. And then you're gonna come out a little bit. And then you start over here, works darker. And then you're gonna come out a little bit more. And you start here where it's darker and then you come out a little bit more and you start again where it's darker. And you're gonna come out a little bit further. And now this is again the one we did here where where you're kind of creeping further and further and further out each time. Usually if I'm doing a rough N, If only do a gradation, that's the easier one to control when you're a little looser. If you're more controlled, sometimes I'll pick this one over that one just because, again, if I've got an area where this value has to stop abruptly, I'll do the one where I come all the way out to here and then I'll start over here halfway, quarter of the way, eighth of a way. Whereas this one I get I can just keep pushing it out. So it just depends on what, you know, what I'm actually putting value on. Talk more about that later, but these are value gradations. And so what I want you to do is I want you to try value gradations with. I want you to use your, your fingers swing, your elbow, swing, risk swing. And your, your, your tapered a great aided stroke or feathered stroke, whichever there's, there's different names that you'll hear. Hear people kinda call it. But go ahead and use those and do gradations with each pencil you've got. And again, you'll start because every pencil controls differently. And again, I did, I used a for B, so you could see it much more easily. If I used a for H, it would be so light that the camera wouldn't even hardly pick it up. But this is great for you to, to learn to control. Because the better you can control your values, the better your finished drawings will be. All right. So we're going to come back. We're talking, of course more about value and, but go ahead and practice this. Keep at it, keep it up. The more you do it, the better you'll be. All right, Take care. 8. What Are Form Shadows Anyways?: So the great part about this class is once we've talked about the techniques, once we've talked about the value scale, what those 10 value steps and all that good stuff. We're going to go ahead and explore form shadows. We're going to go over what form shadows are and how to look for them, and what techniques do we use and how that will then be able to help us create drawings that feel once again like they have volume, like they have formed structure and have that three-dimensional quality that we want in our drawings. Let's get started and we are studying about light on basic core shapes are formed shadows as we call them. And so we've got the, we've got here is you've got a pyramid. We've got the cylinder, the sphere, the cube, and we have the cone. And these are the common shapes that are, you know, many things are built from, whether it be a, a pair. And this pair is basically just a spherical shape with a cone that's had the, the end chopped off. Or whether it be something like this, a little bit more fanciful. But again, we still have, this is more of an egg shape, but again it's round. And then we have this turned and twisted, a cylinder on there. And then of course we have the little fins on here that are really like triangles with little bit of dimension on service account like wedges. And of course we've got the warts, but these are still these basic shapes these warts are again, they're a little bit like in some places, other ones are spherical, things like that. If we have, we have cars that are basic, very much conform to the, the box. As cityscapes houses, bicycles, anything that has a definite right side, left side, top and bottom. You're going to develop that from the box. So or a box and, or the, the cube. But of course we take cubes and stack them side-by-side. We've got a box. So if we know how to create form shadows on the simple objects will be more apt to create things with dimension no matter what we're drawing. So if I don't understand form showers and I'm trying to draw a tree. Trees are just trunking cylinder systems. And again, cars are just boxes. And we just talked about the fruit where we have cones and again, cylinders and all kinds of good stuff. I have certain objects like this tequila bottle. And again, this is basically a box that's a rounded box, but it's a box on the less, on top of that box sits a rounded pyramid. And then up here we have a cylinder and a cylinder and a sphere. And again, that little part here is essentially again another cylinder. So if we know how to create the values on area will help us to draw this this glass bottle. Now, with glass, we have other things going on with this stuff. It's opaque, so we only have to deal with the form shadows. With this, we have formed taus plus we have to deal with translucency, plus we have to deal with. Reflectiveness and those three properties make it far more challenging. But it's still the idea that the form shadows are still wrapping that glass. So again, form shadows are very, very important. You got this little chunk out here. Maybe we can turn this a little bit so it doesn't look quite so bad. But so with our, we're gonna talk about these different, again, these different forms and the shadows that are, that are landing on them and so forth and so on. So I've got basically a light. The light's coming in from this direction. As far as that goes, this as my little pointer. But the light's coming in slightly at this direction. And I've got one light source. Now we have what are called direct light. This would be the direct light source and then I also have went light coming through the windows. There might be lights on in the other parts of the room, you know, coming into the shades. And there's light reflecting around the room. There's what's called an indirect light sources. So the direct light source would be something that's shining right on the object. And the indirect light is all the other light in the room. You only want, you only want one light source. If you're, especially if you're a beginning artists, if you have two direct light sources, it's pretty tough to deal with because your object loses form. And then if you have multiple direct light sources, it's going to flatten out like a pancake. So the more that you can have 1 of view or this one light source, the more clear the objects will be. If you muddle it up with a bunch of light sources, again, everything will go flat. So let's go ahead and talk about the form shadows. Now, with, with flat objects like the, like the pyramid or this Q, we have five different types of form shadows and for objects that are round or Vicks. But Let's talk about the form shows. And we're going to have basically light side versus shadow side. We're going to tell you about the sphere first. And for those of you that are in the drawing class will have you draw the sphere and the, and the cube. And I'm going, I'm sending you a picture so that you can try to sit down and draw that as, as well as you possibly can. But we have a base of the light side and dark side and everything here is a light sand dark side lights I Dark Side, light side, dark side. And so everything has a light side or a dark side. After that, we then have formed cells that breakdown to either five or six. Now if it's round, it has six. So this is round, this round, this is around these mounded little folds. So if I have a fold over here, this little fold will have six types of form shadows. If we have this one back here again, there's six different types of form shadows because again it's, it's mounted or in other words, it's rounded than that to be perfectly round, it just has to be round, round alike. So you know, whether it's, you know, like these mountain little folds again, that you'll get here. This would have six warm shadows on this little mound right through there. Anything that's round, it's going to have six warm shadows or round or round like, and then if it's flat planes like the cube, it's only going to have one of five. So again on this, on our little sphere here, we have again where the light is hitting it directly over here. We're going to take, if you take your eyes to look for values, and I should talk about that right now. To look for values, you take your eyes out of focus. It's called squinting. And people always talking about, hey, squint, squint, squint whenever you're in an art class. And so and it's, it's, it's good idea and really helps. So over here is going to be where the light hits this directly and it's going to be the lightest part of our sphere. Now it's actually kind of right about here, because here it starts to get darker as it wraps around the corner. But right around here is the lightest or the direct light that's hitting it. You might say, well that's a little lighter over here. Well, that's something else entirely. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But over here is what we call our light values, okay? Or light tones. And we can actually see this thing wrap around there because it's round, right? And the shadow, we look at that shadow, it's not the same value all the way around because light effects, and that's what form shadows are. It's that light reveals the form of the object. If I turned out the light, everything goes a whole lot more flat. There's still some value on them, but it's much more flat. So we use light to create the illusion of depth. So again, we have our light values is this wraps around and turns away from the light, it goes darker into what are called our middle value. So we have light values here, sometimes called the light tones. And then we have our middle values over here, or sometimes called the mid-tones. Now with the art unfortunate, there's no standard. So you could be in a place where they're using the proper Italian. You can, there's places where they'll break it down, not into six form shadows, but 12 others will break it down into nine. If you get all of the six of these and we'll tell you about though the others will take care of themselves. So we're gonna go over here when Sarah, we have our light values and it comes over here and our middle values, and then we have a darker side of the middle values. Midwives have two sides. They have a light side and a darker side. So we have light values, middle values, we're looking for three. What's the third? By the way, middle values are also sometimes called mid-tones. Middle values are also sometimes referred to as half-tones. Halfway in the middle tone means value. So middle values, mid-tones, halftones, it's all the same place. But this right here where it's even lighter, That's our highlight. Now our highlight is very diffused because this is paper, it's fuzzy. It's made out of little, little fibers. If something is really slick like this porcelain glass, it's going to have really bright, very defined highlights or as something that's not really shiny like the cloth. Now this is probably polyester or something that's plus year some because it has a sheen to it. But so if it was cotton cloth, that would be even flatter. What happens is when it's, when it's fuzzy, the highlight melts into the light values. So this looks like the lightest. So when I'm saying like vise, we might be like, Hey, wait a minute, That right there is lighter, I can say it. Whoops, right about here. That's the highlight and really diffuse and melting into the. The light values and enter the middle values. So we have light values, middle values and highlight those are three. And then once we hit the shadow where the shadow and the lightened shadow meet, this is the darkest place where the shadow is. And it's called a core shadow. It's only on things that around. And so if I look over here, there's like this line going down here on that fold. That's the core shadow. If we look on this right hip is a line that seems to be going down there. That's a core shadow. There's a line that seems to be appearing right there. That's a core shadow. Okay. So and it's very clear in her because I'm bouncing light into it. So we have more reflected light to really indicate that core shadow on that cone. And core shadows and make something feel around. If you don't have a core shadow on around object, it will feel flat. Okay, so we're always look for the core shadow and the core shadow is the darkest part of the form shadow family. So we have the darkest which is the core shadows. As we move away from the core shadows, we get into what are called the dark tones or the dark values. And the dark values are lighter than the core shadow. Okay? Then we have, we're gets lighter still is reflected light. We have little bit of reflected light up here, which is the lightest and the shadows. We have a little bit of reflected light down here. Again, reflected light is the lightest part of the shadows over here we have reflected light on the cone. Again, very, very, it looks very, very light. But always remember that the, that the reflected light as part of the shadow family, they are darker than anything and the lights. So everything the lights are lighter than anything in the shadows. Everything and the shadows are darker than anything and the lights. Now sometimes this reflected light can be very bright and be deceiving. And we'll make it to light. This looks really light, but if I actually pulled this little chunk like in Photoshop over here into the light, it would immediately look like a blemish, like a dark spot. And that's because this looks so light because it's next to the cache shadow. It's next to the core shadow. It's next to the dark tones. It looks lighter than what it actually is. It's an illusion. And we, as artists use illusions all the time. So again, we have light values, we have highlight, we have middle values, light but minimize and darker middle values. We then hit the core shadow, we then have our dark values. Now dark values are important because they are kind of like the middle values of the shadow family. So they have a darker side and a lighter side. These dark values are or darker here, getting lighter as they come over there. So again, look for those nuances. Take your eyes out of focus to look for form shadows. When you take your eyes out of focus, you can see value very, very clearly. If you put your eyes in-focus, you get distracted by details and you see the form shadows less clearly. So that's all six. Now there's one thing I haven't talked about because we're only talking about form shadows. We haven't talked about cache shadow and we're going to, we're still not going to talk about that just yet because we want to talk about flat objects. So flat objects like this, q have only five form shadows. They have a light value is here, the middle value is here, the dark value is here, that's three. Then it gets a little bit lighter. This gets, goes from darker, getting lighter. If you squint, you can see that getting lighter as it moves away from this corner and then it starts to get darker again. That getting lighter is, is the reflected light, so that's four. And then a highlight would be anything along this edge where the light value meets the middle value along this edge, that's where you'd see a highlight. So again, we have light values, highlight middle values, dark values, reflected light. And that's our five form shadows on a flat plane object. Now, this pyramid, we can't see anything but two planes. We'd see a light side, we can see a shadow side. So we're not going to be able to see if we saw three sides. We might be able to sit, you know, we'd see the middle values. But right now all I can see what looks to be the light. Actually this over here is on light, nice, so we can't see the light values, we can see the middle values. But if I align my, I've just right, I could actually see three sides and I could see, all right, yeah, The light value, the middle value, the dark value. But we can't see that from our view. We can only see two sides. So we have the middle value which is still on the lights or stoma light, and then we have our shadow side. So we have middle value, we have dark value, we have reflected light, that's three. And then if we look here, there's going to be again, a little bit of a highlight along this edge before it turns the corner. Middle value highlights dark value reflected light. So again, I still have the light side by, just can't see it. It's over here around the corner. So anything that's there might be there's no never more than five form shadows. So if I doesn't matter if it has six sides like a queue or whether it has five sides. I can't see of course the underside, but this has 54 round here and then it sits on the fifth. Or whether it's a 52 faceted ring where it's got 52 different flat planes. You never have more than five form shadows. Now if you had something that's 52 facets, you might start including, well, we got the light dark values and the darker dark values, and we have the light middle values and the dark middle values. But the idea is, is that we can go ahead and simplify them into one of five. So no matter what fast that you're looking at, it's going to be one of those five. If we wanted to include the light middle values and the, and the dark middle virus and the dark middle, the dark dark values and the light bar guys. Well, you might say seven, but the idea is, again, you can go ahead and simplify it into one of five. And it's really the way those, those 50 planes abut one another, that makes them look lighter or darker. So that's the biggest thing and you'd get technical one technically. Yeah, there's 40 thousand different values out there that we've been able to detect with cameras. But our eyes for the most part can't see more than most people can't see beyond 15 steps of value from light all the way to black. And so we're talking about simplifications. And if you simplify something, it's actually more clear. And so that's why we use the 10 step value scale. But so we again have our light values, middle values, dark values highlight here, reflected light down here. And that's our form shadows. Now we haven't talked about cache shadow. And the reason why is we taught, we talked about cash-out as differently, the form shadows if all things are equal. So if this value here and it's close, It's not the exact same. This box a little darker, but this value and this value of the cube is almost the same. And so if we look at the cache shadow, and then if we look at the core shadow, which is supposed to be the darkest part, will say, Hey, the cache shadows are always darker than form shadows. And it may not pick it up in the camera too well, because again, cameras, they, they will push things darker or lighter. They, they, they tried to equal the values that a little bit. They tried. There's a term for it but escapes me right now. But anyways, and we'll see what happens. This will darken them what it is with your eyes. Your eyes can see more value than the camera. So this looks darker and this looks almost the same value. But looking at this in my, with my eyes here, this is actually lighter and this actually hears darker. So the cool part is when we're looking at stuff, we learned a look to see. And we can actually think it's even, make things even more accurate than a camera. Because cameras are more limited, more limited than our own eyes. But something about cash as the arc darker than form shots. So if we look at the cast shadow right here, you only see a little bit of it right here, but that cache shadow right there is darker than the form shadow over here. If we look at this cast shadow on the, over here on the cylinder again, this cast shadow here is darker than the form shadow over here. And it's a little dark in the form shadow here again in the camera. These are probably the exact same, but they are not. There's a difference between the two. So again, these are formed shadows. We're going to go ahead and look for form shadows. Either light values, middle values highlight core shadow, dark tones, reflected light if it's round. So again, if this was here would be like light tones, middle value, the highlights kind of again dissolving into the light values. And it's, so it's right here as the highlights. So you have light values, highlight middle value, dark middle value, a core shadow, dark tones, lighter dark tones, and then reflected light. And of course, don't forget the cache shadow. So whenever we're looking at an object again, I'm going to take my eyes and a focus and we see light values, highlight light middle values, dark middle values, core shadow, dark, dark, dark tones or the darker dark tones, the lighter dark tones, and then the reflected light right on the edge. You're always trying to identify all the different types of form shadows. One last thing we'll talk about is people will talk about it because it's usually in the cache shadow. And that is what I call occlusion shadows when something touches something else, There's little line here. It's a very dark sort of lining that's basically a shadow where this is touching the wood, touches the cloth. It's called an occlusion shadow. Right here. Again, we're the or it's where the cube touches the cloth that again, that's an occlusion shadow. Occlusion. Shadow. Occlusion, shadow. Occlusion shadow. If you're looking at my fingers and you can see those, you know, the folds or the, you know, the, the little lines, you know, where they touch. Those are occlusion shadows. So that's again which just shows that something is touching. If if I took something off of here and like this has an occlusion shadow right down here. If I took this off, no longer has an occlusion shadow and it seems to float. So if I don't have an occlusion shadow, it won't feel like it's touching something that's free, won't feel like it's, it's anchored or touching the cube. So occlusion shadows look for those as well. They're really, really important. So this has been about form shadows and I appreciate your watching and you guys have a great day in and be more creative. Bye bye. Now. 9. Let's Start With Shading The Sphere: All right, So today we're gonna go ahead and learn about putting value on a sphere. We're going to talk about all the different form shadows. And we're going to create a sphere that has volume and depth. Let's get started. All right, welcome back. So we're going to go ahead and we're gonna deal with form shadows. We're gonna do a little drawing of a sphere using those form shadows. If you, if the word form shadows does not make a lot of sense to you, go ahead and go back, take a look at the video, watch it, try to internalize those concepts, then come on back and we'll work on the drawing in terms of we're going to be using graphite. So like I've talked about in the past, we're going to be using one of five pencils. We have a 4 H pencil, a to H pencil, an HB pencil, a to B pencil, and a for B pencil. And there's nothing special about this pencil. It's just that it's getting a little short. So I've got it in an extender. So I just want to make sure when understands that there's nothing special about that that's extended to make keep the pencil longer. So again, for H2, H, H B to B, for B, that's all the graphite pencils we're gonna be using for this class. And so we're going to be using those five. I'm going to show you how to use them to create form shadows. Again that we've talked about, the form shadows. And we're going to go ahead and put these aside. Now I've also got a kneaded eraser. Again, the kneaded eraser is a great race are and that you can pull apart, put it back together and needed like bread dough. And we can use it to lighten stuff or tap on stuff, pull stuff out. So we're going to have a kneaded eraser within reaching distance. Why we work on this. And what we're going to do is we're going to create a drawing With form shadows. So I wanted to talk about this real quick. This looks a little bit like a beach ball. And I want it to look that way in case he was like, wait a minute. The idea is that when we start our drawing of a sphere, we're going to keep everything separated into their particular families. This almost looks like it could be cut out of paper. These are very fairly sharp edges in most places, not all places, but it's a little softer hair, a little sharper down air. But we should be able to look at this. Amelie go okay, that's light value. This is middle value, both label value and darker middle value. This is highlight. This is core shadow. This is dark tone. This is reflected light. And then this over here again, this is supposed to be the object picking up its own cache shadow. And this is the cash out of this casting on the surface. And again, the cache shadow is not going to have reflected light. It's going to get darker as it gets closer to the object, it gets lighter as it goes away. So sometimes people put cash-out and they just make them nice flat shadows and they're not, they have some They, they have reflected light, they do get lighter, they get darker. There's, there's these variations. Now where this object touches. There is what we call a an occlusion shadow. Occlusion shadow. And again, the occlusion shadows were things touch so and they are dark because they touch. So if you look at these lines, you can see through my fingers or even the wrinkles of the fingers and in my in my skin and you know, these lines in your hand and all that good stuff. Those are those are occlusion shadows. Okay. And so it's where an object touches on other objects. So with this it's a skin is touching the other scan and where it comes together, there's very little light down there. And so that's your occlusion shadow. This touches the table and so we're touches there be an occlusion shadow. So we want these very, very clean, very crisp, very, very clear. And once we get to this point, all we'd have to do is make these into slight gradations. And then it's going to feel like it has form. It's going to have volume, right? It's going to be 3D is somebody would say. Because what creates the illusion of 3D is the shadows. The light values, the middle values the highlight, the core shadow, the dark tones reflected light. And because this is completely round, it picks up its own cache shadow. So we're going to, we're going to create these little wedges of form shadow families. And we're gonna do the same thing on our sphere over here. Now the sphere that we have here is, I've drawn a fairly light. Probably just going to barely be able to see it on the camera. But even still, this can't be darker, the outside contour. Other words, outside line can be any darker than my, my light tones. My light tones are going to probably be this dark. So if this edge is darker than that, it's too dark. Because if you see a dark line and then a value next to it, it looks like a cartoon or it looks like something like a graphic poster look. And we don't want that. So I'm taking my kneaded eraser and I'll go ahead and I'm making it lighter on the edge where it's going to be those, those light tones. And I have this, what we call mapped out. So I've got a little sliver crescent for the light tones. So again, this is mounted on both sides, so a crescent for the middle values. I've got a crest over here for reflected light, across over here for reflected light. Crescent here for where it's picking up its own on core shadow, not core channel apartment, where it's picking up its own cast shadow. And then this right here will be this little ribbon would then be the core shadow. Okay? So we've got this all mapped out. And so what we're gonna do is we're going to want to go ahead and we're gonna come back in just a minute. And we're going to start working on this. And we're going to take this to, you know, as as nice officials we can within a reasonable amount of time, usually on a sphere like this, if you haven't done this before, expect to spend a good 40 minutes to an hour on this thing. That's if you haven't done it. And If I'm gonna do a really nice like this one, even though I haven't got the gradations, it would take me about 30 minutes