Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to this class on toning and shading. My name is Annika, and today, I'll teach you how to draw a bird on a branch with pencil. We'll cover everything from tools and materials to basic shading, and even how to make your own blending stump. I will show you how to transfer an image to your sketchbook and how to render you drawing realistically. Drawing with pencil and knowing where to be your light and darks are very important skills to help you with all other forms of art, especially painting realistically in the future. Whether you're a complete beginner or an established artist looking to sharpen your pencil skills, this class will benefit you. In our next lesson, we'll take a look at our class project and the steps we need to take to achieve our goals.
2. Class Project Discussion: To make a few things clear, this class will not go over the basics of drawing, that is structure and proportion. Rather, we will focus on toning and shading, working from a reference photo. We will use this stock photo as a reference, and I will show you how to trace, and transfer it to your sketchbook so we have the same basic sketch to work from. Before we do this though, I'll show you how to tone and shade basic shapes. We will use this knowledge to break the bird down into basic shapes as well, and learn how to darken and lighten them to eventually form a completed picture. For toning and shading, we'll need a blending stamp and a kneaded eraser. I will teach you how to make [inaudible] them. But before we do that, let's go take a look at all the tools and materials we'll be using.
3. Tools and Materials: Before we start, let's quickly look at the tools and materials we'll be needing. First up, a sketchbook or some pieces of paper. Then we'll be using two different pencils, the 2B and a 4B. Don't worry too much about it if you don't have any of these, just use what you have lying around. Just know that pencils in the B range are softer and therefore draw darker, and pencils in the H range are harder and draw lighter. I prefer a 4B, because it's quite dark, but you can still make it light if you just use a little bit of pressure. [inaudible] is a charcoal pencil and then I'll be using this in the end to make a few extra dark lines. If you don't have one, don't worry about it too much. Just remember it as something you can try it out in the future. Next, you'll need something to sharpen with. A pencil sharpener is just fine. I prefer to use the blade though, as you can make your pencil even sharper, and you end up losing less of it in the sharping process. Then the erasers. The green one here is just a normal, hard eraser you can use anytime. Then very importantly for this class is a kneaded eraser. They are soft like clay and you can alter their shape. We will use it quite a lot to lift out color and to create accents. If you don't have one, you can still follow along, but it will be much easier if you have one. Then lastly and just as important as the kneaded eraser is the blending stump. I will teach you how to make those in the upcoming lesson. It's basically a tightly rolled up paper that we'll be using to smudge and blend our pencil. Blending and lifting out color will be a big part of this class. If you can, try and have them ready. Apart from these tools, you also need a few additional ones to help you trace your picture to your sketchbook. For this state, you need the printed out version of the image provided, a sheet of carbon paper, and some masking tape, a pencil, and a pen. If you don't have carbon fiber, you can always just hold up your image to a window and use the light to trace the picture. Next up, I'll teach you how to make a blending stump.
4. Making a Blending Stump: To make a blending stump, you will need a rectangular piece of paper roughly this size. You'll need some scissors, a blade and some tape. If you don't have a blade, you can use your scissors and any tape will do. Start off by cutting one corner, this will make it easier to roll it up later. To make the paper a bit softer, start by folding it and rubbing the sides against each other, then try to roll it up lightly and continue rubbing for a while until the paper gets a bit softer. Now, starting on the smaller side, make a fold as close to the edge as possible. Moving your thumb towards you and your fingers away from you, feed the folded part forward until the entire length of the paper has moved through your hands. Repeat this process about three times and by the end your paper will be much softer and easier to roll up. Now, starting again at the small side, start rolling your paper up as tightly as possible. The tighter the better. You can try rolling it between your thumbs and index finger, just to get started, and then rolling it flat on the surface as tightly as possible. Once you've done that, use a few pieces of tape to keep it in place. You'll notice that the one side is more hollow and the other side is more tightly rolled. Cut a chunk of the hollow part since you won't need this and it will just end up folding in your hand when using it. I just cut off a tiny piece of the tightly rolled side because it wasn't rolled as tightly as it could have been. Now, using a razor, cut a sharp edge on the tightly rolled side so it resembles the tip of a pencil. If you don't have a blade, try using your scissors instead. If it doesn't work, your paper is probably not rolled tightly enough and I suggest you start over again. You can even use some fine sandpaper to smoothen it towards the tip, I just don't have any lying around at this moment. Once it resembles a pencil, you'll be good to go. Here, I'm just showing that instead of using a new razor, you can also sharpen your pencil using a blade to get an even finer tip and waste less of your pencil, whichever you prefer. Now, let's test our blending stump. There you go. You can also buy these things, but I find them to be too hard and they make a horrible sound on the paper. So rather just make one yourself. Okay, we're good to start. In the next lesson, I'll teach you how to use your pencil, blending stump, and [inaudible] , to create, tone and depth, and to eventually make a realistic pencil sketch.
5. Toning and Shading Basics I: Now that we have our tools and materials ready, let's look at the basics of toning and shading. To make an object look three-dimensional or a bit more realistic, we need to play around with the lights and the darks. If you print it out your toning and shading worksheet, now will be the time to get it out. Otherwise, just roughly copy these sketches and follow along. The first thing we're going to learn is how to shade a sphere, a cylinder, and a cone. I chose these shapes because if you look at the bird, the body is like an elongated circle, and the legs are basically cylinders, and the beak a cone. So it's a good place to start from. I'm starting with my 2B pencil. We're going to pretend there is a light source coming from the upper left. The main reflection is going to be here, and it will go darker towards the bottom. Because we are using a blending stick, it doesn't really matter how we color it in, but try to follow the contour of the sphere nonetheless. With this one, I'm starting out really light just to get the hang of it. Remember to leave a white area for the highlights. Now, take your blending stump. You can see mine is already a bit used. The reason I don't hold it like this is because it tends to bend in my hand under pressure. Go ahead and blend with small circular motions. Now, grab your kneaded eraser and play around with it's shape. Be sure to get a clean spot and use it to lift that highlight out again. Here I'm switching over to a 4B. The tip is softer and therefore the individual strokes will be less noticeable. Turn your paper if it will make it easier for you. Do some blending again. Lift the highlights out again and basically repeat the process until you're happy. With the cylinder, we'll have a whole streak of reflection near the top. Again, as you move away from the highlight, it will get darker giving the illusion that it's rounded. I'm just putting a tissue down to not smudge the sphere with my hand. This time, I'm starting out a bit darker and going lighter as I get closer to the reflective streak. As we did with the sphere, blend the area and again, take your kneaded eraser to lift out the highlights. I turned the cone to the side so it resemble the birds beak, and I'm doing exactly the same as with the other two shapes. Here, I'm lifting out a bit of color at the bottom. Three-dimensional shapes usually pick up some reflective light from the ground or other objects next to it as well. By keeping this in mind in the future, your objects will look more three-dimensional.
6. Toning and Shading Basics II: Now, if you see the bird as just one big shape, again, the light will fall at the top left. So let's make a highlight. Again, I'm making the underside quite dark and going lighter as I move closer to the highlight. Just color the legs in as the cylinders in the example with the bottom sides being dark lines. With the next exercise, I want you to notice that there are more shapes to make out in the bird, we have the wing, the head, body, and legs. The wing is going to make a cast shadow on the body beneath it. Laying out where the darkest dark will be at the lightest light, let see how what we've learned will come into good use. Notice the triangular shadow I added to separate the head from the body. Here I'm just adding a little bit of detail onto the feet, but more on that later.
7. Toning and Shading Basics III: Now if we just focus on the wing, we can apply the same effect feather by feather. Again, the slightly larger areas towards the middle top of each feather and the darker areas underneath without overlap. Doing just a small section here to get an idea of how it's going to look and then moving to the rest of the wing. Remember to make it even darker where the feathers meet. Once a bigger area is done, it will look better. Just keep going. The feathers at the bottom will be darker with less prominent highlights since it's in the shade of the rest of the wing. Now moving to the longer wing feathers. Because they're so dark in the reference photo, I am coloring it darker from the beginning. In the reference photo, you'll see some white spots. I'm just lifting that out with the kneaded eraser. That get more defined as we color in around it. I also lifted a vague highlight in each feather as we did earlier. The branch here is basically just a cylinder with some texture on it. I'm just indicating the lines here, and then I'm about to start the same process again. Remember to add a highlight close to the top so it appears to be rounded. I'm darkening areas underneath the lines I made earlier to give the impression of bulk. Just keep on blending and lifting out areas. The eye is pretty simple. Just remember to leave a white area for the highlight. You will see in the reference photo that the bottom is a bit darker and makes this line. So just go ahead and make the bottom really dark and the top a bit lighter. After blending, we'll lift out some color towards the bottom just to represent some other reflective lights. Don't worry too much about the surrounding area for now. With the beak will do the same as with a crown. Keep the top area highlighted and make the bottom dark. The leg is basically a cylinder, but you can go even further and break it up into multiple little cylinders. Each unit will cause a small shadow on the one underneath it. Again, I'm just repeating the process, darkening between the segments and lifting out where I think the light will fall. I wasn't happy with the middle digit so I erased it and did it over a few times. Lastly, I just want to show you how we'll be doing the feathers on the bird's belly. Just color in the whole underside very lightly and blend in. Then taking your kneaded eraser, make a sharp wedge and lift out what would become tufts of feathers. Because these feathers are so small and fine, we lump them together. Darken the area in-between the feathers and be aware that the feathers actually follow the shape of the bird. Be careful not to make them all straight in one line. Repeat and darken the underside of the belly until you're happy with the result. That wraps up the lesson on toning and shading. Next up, we'll go into tracer [inaudible] to our sketchbook so we're all set up for our class projects.
8. Transferring Your Image: Now that we've learned the basics and know how to turn and shade, we're almost ready to get started. Before we get started though, we first have to transfer our image to our sketchbook or the final piece of paper that we want our drawing to be on. For this step, we'll need the printed out version of the image provided, a sheet of carbon paper, and some masking tape, a pencil, and a pen. Again, you can always draw the image without tracing. But since this class focuses on shading, rather on how to draw, I will suggest that you make it easier for yourself and just trace along. Place the image in a position that you want it and secure it with some tape so that you don't accidentally shift it later on. Now take a sheet of carbon paper with the black side facing towards the bottom and slide it underneath your image. If you don't have carbon paper, try tracing the image by taping the sheet of paper you want your final drawing to be on, on top of the printed art image and hold it up against the window. I highly recommend getting carbon paper though, since it will make your life much easier. You can either use a pencil or a pen to trace. I use a pen because it makes it easier to see which parts are already traced. Start by testing out to see how dark your carbon paper transfers. Once you get used to the amount of pressure needed, it's time to start tracing. I'd like to start with the eyes, but honestly, it doesn't matter. All we're doing now is getting the image unto the final paper. Make sure to see if you're drawing dark enough for the image to get through. I do this through the other transferring process to make sure I don't miss up somewhere. Careful to trace every line, I continue this process, continuously checking to make sure I'm not going too dark or too light tracing as accurately as possible. The more detail you transfer, the easier it will be to do your shading in the next step. I speed up the rest of the video, so go ahead and finish tracing, then I'll see you at the end of the video. If you choose to draw only the bird, that's also fine. I just added the branch for something extra. All right, I'm just adding a border to box it in nicely. I'll see you in the next lesson, where we will start the actual class project.
9. Class Project Part I: Welcome to the class project. Now we finally get to draw our picture using the skills and techniques we learned in the previous lessons. If we look at the reference photo, we see that the largest areas or the reflection in the eye, the area under the head and some filters on the wing. Now to help us with the drawing process, I'm going to change the colors of our reference photo to black and white. Now if you look at the sketch you traced and back to the reference photo, it might seem a bit overwhelming, the best thing can do is just to pick a point and start. I'd like to start with the eye and then take it from there. What I'm doing here is just outlining some of the feathers on the head to give me an idea of what goes way. As you recall, the technique is to first likely color in a section, then blend at the interleaved art color using the kneaded eraser. By making the underlying lines a bit darker, I hope that they remained visible after blending. So it will be easier for me to see weight to lift our color in the next step. Now that we have a basic understanding of how the feathers are orientated, I'm going to take my larger pencil, a 2B and very lightly colored in the area after which we will likely blend it need to using the gaming stuff. What I'm doing here is taking the kneaded eraser and making a very fine point which I'm using to lift art color in the middle of the feather. With the feathers knit on the bottom side, I'm making the lines of a darker 4B pencil. As I go along, I will repeat this process of bending, lifting out, and darkening until structures resembling feathers will appear unsatisfied with it. For the longer feathers on top of the head making the craze, I start off a bit darker since I know they're going to be really dark at the end. Again, I blamed using my blending stump and then using my kneaded eraser, I create a fine flat edge to lift outlines of color with a light will reflect on top of the feathers. Sharpening my pencil. I add some shadows in the areas between the feathers and at their bases. Here I'm outlining with cheek feathers blending them in and lifting out the surface color after which am darkening the areas with the feathers overlap. I'm speeding up the video a bit here, but I'm basically moving back and forward blending, lifting out darkening until I get the desired effects. I would just like to point out that there are many different sketching techniques out there. What I'm doing here is just something I came up with to help me achieve the effect I want. I wouldn't even call myself had been slow of these really, I'm actually guarantee focusing on water gala. The thing is, I just realized that I struggle getting finer details right with my paintings. So I figured out practice where my lights and darks go with pencil. As one as much more control with pencil and thus, this technique was born. Here I'm starting with the wing. I'm just tracing it again so I can get an idea of how the feathers are aligned and taking note off with a live spots on the feathers all. Now I'm just coloring in taking gauge to leave the white spots open, just coloring roughly. We're going to blend everything in any, guys. Next, just lift out some color to keep the white, white. Now because the feathers are so dark, you can go ahead and use a 4B and color everything in pretty dark. Going back to the other parts of the drawing, I continue making my dots darker. Notice how the larger feathers start to pop next to the darker color as the lines get more defined. I lift up more areas with my eraser that I want to appear lighter and define the edges by making dark lines around him. Here I'm taking a charcoal pencil to make an even darker area underneath the wing and in-between some feathers. If you don't have a chocolate pencil till now, don't worry about it. It's just something you can try out in the future. Maybe of an extra dot mechanical pencil lying around that you can try out in state. Now I'm going to do the exact same with the darker feathers on the breast. For the breast feathers, I'm just coloring in very likely. The feathers here are much less defined, so I didn't even bother with tracing them over again. Basically just using my eraser to lift out areas to insinuate tufts of feathers. After lifting out, I'm defining some areas with my pencil again. Just blending again here, after which I'm lifting out. Speeding up here again I'm just continuing, moving down to fill the entire bird going back and forward, fixing mistakes as I go along, keeping the reference photo in mind. Go ahead and coloring the legs. Paint and lift out with a different segments meet. Darken the underside with the least amount of light falls and the bottom of each segment individually, as we learned in the tutorial. Here, I'm just using a thin edge of my kneaded eraser to lift out an entire line to give the legs a cylindrical three-dimensional appearance. Almost done with a bit, this is a good time to stay back and evaluate what you have done so far. At this point, I took a photo of my drawing as compared to the reference photo. It helped me to see that some of the areas, especially around the head, breast and feet, could be darker. Using the charcoal pencil I darken these areas even more. Another way to evaluate your picture is to look at it in a mirror. Changing your perspective, you will immediately see areas that look strange and need more attention. The head can also be a little bit brighter. So I decided to lift out a little more color one last time. Now that the bird is coming to a finish, I'd like to add that you are more than welcome to stop the tutorial here, if you're only interested in drawing the bird. The rest of the tutorial will focus on the branch and leaves. The reason I decided to add them was to create a more complete picture. Regardless of what you decide, please still upload your projects so everyone can see what you've learned from this class.
10. Class Project Part II: Starting with a branch, I'm just making the outlines and adding some major lines. Here, I'm taking a piece of tracing paper lying around to make sure I don't smash the bird with my hand. Although I quickly realized the charcoal I use transferred to easily to the tracing paper, and switch over to the tissue which I usually use shortly afterwards. Here I'm just outlining the leaves that we traced. Usually, because I'm left-handed, I would've started the entire drawing in the bottom right corner and move leftwards and upwards. But with this tutorial I decided to start with a bird for demonstration purposes. After coloring and blending in the branch left out areas to create variation in color. As I didn't use one specific reference photo for the rest of the drawing, I'm using past experience to draw this bird. Just follow along and you'll get the hang of this as well. I'm basically just adding darker and lighter areas at random places keeping in mind that the branch is a cylinder and eventually the bottom will have to be darker. Their will have to be a lighter line along the side to give it a rounded illusion. Speeding up and just continuing making my darks darker and lifting out the lights, manifested distinct lines forming with a dark darks meet the light lights. Using the charcoal pencil I'm defining even darker areas to make the branch black. Step-by-step we're getting there, we only have the foliage left. Just choose a section and start going over your trace line. After a small section I stopped to darken the lines on the underside of the leaves. Without even coloring them I use about banning stamp to fill in the leaves. Finding a clean area on my kneaded eraser I left out some areas. Because the leaves aren't really the focus area in this drawing I don't really care about them individually. I just lighten some spots, and then I'll go over some areas in between and darken then again. The idea is just to create lighter and darker areas along the foliage to create some texture. You can't really see what I'm doing because my hand is in the way, but just trust the process and keep on going. I'm just tracing, and blending, and adding, darker lines on one side of the leaf and lifting some areas where the sun might catch the leaves. As you saw with the bird it will come together eventually. Here I'm just blocking in the picture because I started drawing outside of their lives. Again, the main focus of this drawing is the bird, don't worry too much about the flowers and leaves as it's just a little something extra and you can really do whatever you want. Next, I'm just darkening all the leaves in the areas facing away from the imaginary sun or light source. That is the undersides of the leaves face into the ground and those areas facing inwards towards the leaf stalk. I'm doing the exact same with the foliage at the top right. You're always done, and yet this one sets of leaves and then you'll be done with your entire drawing. I'll see you in the final lesson where we'll go over what we've learned and discuss where to go from here.
11. Conclusion: If you've made it this far, well done. If there's something I'm sure you've learned from this lesson is that completing a pencil sketch, Derrick Stein, whenever I'm busy with a tedious task, I always tell myself to have patience, perseverance, and positivity, and imagine how good I'll feel when I finish the task. Today, we learned how to make a blending stump, how to tone and shade, how to transfer picture, draw sketch books, and how to go about drawing a bird from a reference photo in pencil. In my next class, I'll teach you how to paint a similar picture in watercolor. Until then, don't forget to upload your final project and I'll see you again soon.
Annika, Illustration | Painting | Digital Art
