presents
SHADING TECHNIQUES BEYOND CROSS– HATCHING Pencil Shading Tutorial on Modeling Gradations
SHADING TECHNIQUES
Seated Boy With Straw Hat by Georges Seurat, 1883–1884, black Conté crayon, 91⁄2 x 123⁄8. Collection Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
The Power of
Darkness LIGHT IS OFTEN MOST EFFECTIVE WHEN CONTRASTED WITH SHADOW. HERE’S A LOOK AT HOW 10 ARTISTS USED SHADOWS TO STRENGTHEN THE CONCEPTION AND COMPOSITION OF THEIR DRAWINGS. b y Ke n ne t h J. P ro cte r This content has been adapted from an original article written by Kenneth Procter. © F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved. F+W Media grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.
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SHADING TECHNIQUES
C
lassical light is often aimed from above a subject and at an angle so that it rakes across a form, with the shadows revealing and defining even the subtlest anatomical projections. Georges Seurat built up his tonal structure with Conté crayon on laid paper in Seated Boy With Straw Hat, a work that yields a grainy technique that nicely anticipates his pointillist style of painting. Pointillism condensed the broken brushwork of Impressionism into a systematized pattern of tiny marks, and transformed the colors observed on location into precise schemes based on complementary harmonies and values in opposition. Seurat’s drawings are unified in tone and atmosphere, but built on contrasts in value. Seated Boy With Straw Hat looks like an outdoor scene, but like pointillism, this isn’t conventional lighting. Reading in from the left edge, the background brightens as it moves toward the contours of the boy’s hat and arching back. Across these rounded forms, the bright background contrasts with the shadow on the boy’s face and chest, and sets off the lightless pants. Farther right, next to the light side of the figure, the background value does a dramatic reverse. Now it is a tone so dark that it seems to rest right on the surface of the paper. Despite the sunny modeling of the boy, Seurat’s light and shadow came more from composition than from nature. At each point of contact where figure meets ground, Seurat pushed light and shadow toward opposite tonal values. This clarifies every contour and locks the profile pose into an essential, timeless shape. Even his signature in black has its own little tonal glow. Rembrandt’s Minerva in Her Study illustrates the technical problem of bright exterior light flooding into a shadowy interior. The challenge is that to get the effect of bright light, the interior must be dark, but not so dark
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that detail gets lost and the scene goes flat—a tricky balance of values. Done as well as Rembrandt, interior space takes on the character of twilight and suggests the way human perception adjusts to light in a dim room. True to the period’s fondness for voluminous drapery, Rembrandt framed the central window—and much of the rest of the room—with layers of cur-
Minerva in Her Study by Rembrandt, pen and brown ink, brown and white wash, 71⁄2 x 51⁄2.
tains, masterfully grading his washes to suggest sheer passages, undulating folds, and thick, heavy cloth. Sitting in her study, Minerva (Athena to the Greeks) has hung up her weapons of war, and now assumes her role as the goddess of wisdom. Although we might expect to see her in shadowy silhouette, at this place in the drawing Rembrandt broke from strict perception. Minerva
SHADING TECHNIQUES
catches light; indeed she is as light as the window. Metaphorically, she is part of the light flooding into the room. Her brilliance will enlighten the allegorical shadows of ignorance, but her task has not yet been completed—and to make the drawing work, Rembrandt needed all of the shadows to show us her light. George Bellows’ peculiar light makes frightening shadows. During World War I, Edith Cavell superintended a Red Cross hospital for the wounded in Belgium. When the occupying Germans accused her of assisting allied prisoners to escape from the hospital, by all accounts she admitted as much. To the outrage of the world community, she was tried and executed, even though she had also saved many
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German lives. Bellows’ composition The Murder of Edith Cavell (also realized as a lithograph and an oil painting) shows Cavell on the way to the firing squad. Shadow and light set the scene and express the tragedy of her execution. Bellows lights the tableaux with a scattering of lanterns—a harsh light that hurts your eyes if you are close, but feels weirdly dismal in this cavernous place. Shadows threaten out of every corner, smear the walls with a palpable, encrusted quality, and settle on soldiers, the sick, and the injured alike. Shadows are like a soil or an evil stain that can never be washed clean, an effect Bellows achieved with an open grainy technique on wove paper. Amid the sickening smudge, Cavell descends
The Murder of Edith Cavell by George Bellows, black chalk and black crayon over charcoal on cream wove paper, 211⁄8 x 27. Collection Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.
SHADING TECHNIQUES
By rendering both light and shadow, artists made magical illusions rich in detail, almost alive in expression, an effect that is skillfully realized in Suvée’s rendering of Dibutade and her lover. to the firing squad, a dark file of soldiers lined up in the black tunnel. She is delicate, graceful, and beautiful, like Rembrandt’s Minerva, a spirit of light in the midnight of man’s inhumanity to man. According to art historian Robert Rosenblum, more than one ancient legend attributes the origin of drawing to the act of tracing a shadow. JosephBenoît Suvée’s The Invention of Drawing depicts the most common story. Saddened that her lover must leave her for a time, Dibutade, a young woman of Corinth, traces his shadow on the wall of her father’s pottery studio (her father later filled the outline with clay for a more permanent memento). The tracing setup was tricky. To get the shadow profile just right, the lover’s neck had to be strained to an odd angle. While he holds the awkward pose, Dibutade must trace his outline without blocking the light, and so she leans into him to brace herself—with the happy outcome of a farewell embrace. The torchlight and nighttime setting evoke the hurry and tension of a forbidden tryst or elopement, but nighttime also creates the air of another kind of mystery. Like Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods, the invention of drawing is a moment of enlightenment and empowerment for mankind. The first silhouette was a flat profile, without form or detail, little more than a flickering shadow. But out of that first line, the art of drawing made forms solid, full, and round. By rendering both light and shadow, artists made magical illusions rich in detail, almost alive in expression, an effect that is skillfully realized in Suvée’s rendering of Dibutade and her lover. n
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The Invention of Drawing by Joseph-Benoît Suvée, ca. 1791, black and white chalk on brown paper, 211⁄2 x 14. Collection J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California.
SHADING TECHNIQUES
Modeling Gradations
BY MODELING GRADATED VALUES ON SHAPES SUCH AS CYLINDERS, ARTISTS CAN DRAW REALISTIC FORMS THAT TURN IN SPACE.
by Jo n d e Mar ti n
I
n order to draw convincing forms, an artist must become a master at modeling gradations. To acquire this skill, it is helpful to practice modeling value gradations on a curvilinear solid—a form with round surfaces that curve in one direction no matter what its orientation. (See Illustration 1.) The most basic of this type of form is a cylinder, and this lesson discusses how to model the cylinder when gradations run straight along its axis.
Illustration 2
Illustration 3
Illustration 1 Illustration 4
Making Gradations Before modeling forms, it’s important to understand the concept of gradations. Illustration 2 shows a swatch of gradated values running from black to the white of the paper and then to black again. To create gradated values, draw parallel
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strokes next to one another and increase or decrease pressure with each succeeding stroke. Practice making smooth gradations running in a sequence from dark to light, then try reversing it and go from light to dark. This will help you when modeling the cylinder or any form
with rounded surfaces. As Illustration 2 shows, when you make a gradation going from dark to light to dark, you create the illusion of a cylinder. Illustration 3 shows a value scale with the values “chopped” into clear units, enabling the artist to make better value
SHADING TECHNIQUES
Illustration 5 by Jon deMartin, 2009, graphite, 18 x 14. Collection the artist. Drawing after the sculpture The Continuous Plane Man by Eliot Goldfinger.
comparisons. Illustration 4 demonstrates a sliding value scale, in which the values are continually changing, running from dark to light. These changes are observed in the drawing of the Continuous Plane Man sculpture in Illustration 5, which achieves an illusion of three dimensions. Again the gradations continually change, as they do with the sliding
value scale, but in this case they change according to how the surfaces relate to the light source. Surfaces that run toward the light get lighter, and the surfaces that turn away get darker. The surfaces on this sculpture run for the most part in one direction—from top to bottom—similar to a cylinder turned on its side.
This content has been adapted from an original article written by Jon deMartin. © F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved. F+W Media grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.
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SHADING TECHNIQUES
Illustration 6
Planes and the Cylinder A rectilinear solid, such as a cube, has planes that are easy to identify because of their sharp edges. Although the cylinder is round, it’s useful to break it down into its most basic planes if we want to effectively model it. The top drawing in Illustration 6 diagrams the most basic plane changes, which are the “side left,” “front,” and “side right” planes. The octagonal shape below in Illustration 6 has four visible plane changes—“side left,” “front side left,” “front side right,” and “side right.” The artist has the capability to “smooth out” the planes by using gradations, but as you can see in these examples, gradations are not enough to create the true curvature of the cylinder.
Facet A
Illustration 7 shows a truer example of a cylinder because the planes relate to the angle of the light source. We can understand this concept better when we visualize the subject from a bird’seye view. In a nutshell, the plane that faces the light most directly is always the brightest and most often the broadest. Facet A is lightest and widest because it’s the plane nearest to the light. As the subsequent planes turn away from the light, the gradations darken and narrow. The light struggles to reach the parts of the form that turn away. Generally, the planes that turn toward the light expand, and the planes that recede from the light contract. The cylinder on the left in Illustration
7 demonstrates the correct “hard lay-in” of the modeling factors. Even though the planes are correctly juxtaposed, the cylinder still doesn’t look exactly round. It’s only when we gradate the values that the cylinder looks round, as in the right cylinder. It’s important that the artist doesn’t just smooth away edges without considering the form’s surfaces in relation to the light source or the modeling will look uninformed and amateurish. 19th-century academic painting practices emphasized the importance of laying in the planes like a mosaic before smoothing or blending them, forcing artists to be very thoughtful about where they juxtaposed planes and values.
Shadow Line
Light Source Illustration 7
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SHADING TECHNIQUES
Illustration 9
Illustration 8
Modeling the Cylinder Illustration 8 demonstrates the three basic stages of modeling form. At left is the first stage, the “poster” of the light and shadow, with intentionally lighter values. The term “poster” means a simple graphic representation of the light-andshadow pattern without gradations, creating one flat value for the lights and one flat value for the shadows. Starting a drawing in this way enables an artist to make revisions early before advancing too far in the modeling. The second stage begins with making the shadows a little darker than before but still not at full strength. The objective is not to finish but only to estimate the proper rate of curvature by using very light gradations to round the form, starting from the shadow and working out into the light. At this stage, we intentionally “bleach out” the gradations that face the light and leave the white of the paper. For the last phase, we use the same procedure to continually build the gradations in degrees, push the shadows
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to their true darkness, and intensify the illusion of form. Illustration 9 demonstrates that surfaces that run toward the top get lighter, as we noted before with the Continuous Plane Man. As you can see, the top cylinder that tips backward is receiving more light, so it’s lighter than the cylinder that’s upright. And as the bottom cylinder tips under, it gets darker. Notice how the size of the shadows increases as they turn under. Take a toilet paper roll and hold it in these different positions under a light to see this concept in real life. All of these basic geometric shapes and principles are applicable to the figure—an arm that’s bent and facing directly at you resembles a cylinder. Illustration 10 shows a series of drawings of the Cylinder Man in which cylindrical masses are tipping, turning, and tilting in space, thus receiving varying intensities of light. The illusion of form relies not only on an artist’s ability to make gradations but also on being cognizant of the form’s
SHADING TECHNIQUES Illustration 10a
Illustration 10b
Illustration 10c
Illustration 10a, b, c by Jon deMartin, 2009, graphite, 18 x 14. Collection the artist. Drawings after the sculpture The Cylinder Man by Eliot Goldfinger.
physical surface in relation to the light source. No matter what the object, if the proper amount of gradation is not understood, the illusion of form will suffer. The Cylinder Man in Illustration 10a is without gradations and has sharp edges that resemble boxes. The second phase of the same drawing (Illustration 10b) has gradations that reveal the true cylindrical character of the forms. This progress from 10a to 10b clearly shows the power and importance of proper gradations. Let’s end with a drawing that exemplifies modeled gradations. The drawing for the painting Epiphany, by artist Michael Aviano, shows his exquisite skill in modeling gradations in all of their variety. As a result, its three-dimensional illusion is completely realized. n
Drawing for Epiphany by Michael Aviano, 2009, charcoal, 39 x 32. Collection the artist.
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