My knowledge of light and shadow is admittedly limited and I feel this negatively impacts any art I try to create as it prevents me from developing depth and realism. I was therefore excited to study this area further as I felt it would really help to develop my other skills.

I began by watching tutorials on shading via traditional means (pencil and paper) in order to better understand colour values and how pressure can affect the darkness of the pencil stroke. The reason I began with traditional methods is that Procreate allows for accurate shading techniques using the pressure applied from the apple pencil as well as broadening the strokes of the pencil when turned on a side just like a traditional pencil.

I followed this by moving on to tutorials regarding Procreate and found a tool particularly interesting when wanting to apply shading. The Clipping Mask function allows you to clip the visible area of a layer to another meaning you can shade freely within a shape.

With this knowledge I created a new canvas and drew 6 circles to shade, each using a different Procreate Brush in order to build my technique and find which brush suited my need best. I found that the use of clipping masks enabled a quick and easy way to darken areas without creating any messy lines and also meant I could blend off into the canvas without it showing on the artwork. I utilised the blend tool to merge darker and lighter colour values in order to reduce any harsh lines between shading.

I also wanted to develop my use of colour and particularly liked using the stipple style brush from Procreate’s default brush pack so following another tutorial I created the following pieces to push my skills further.

Overall I found this exercise extremely useful and it really helped to affirm my understanding of how light and shadow can be used to add depth and realism to my work.

References

The City Workshop Edinburgh (2019) How to Shade a Sphere – Pencil Shading Tutorial. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO0r70jhbvs [Accessed: 27/10/2021].

The City Workshop Edinburgh (2019) How to Shade an Apple – Pencil Shading Tutorial. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjxaQ1XUSss&t=31s [Accessed 27/10/2021].