How To Shade

Page 3

Understanding the concept of shading is easy... but the tricky part comes in it's application. Shading is completely dependant on how well you fade the colors or darken them. You shouldn't be too harsh on your color blending.....to understand what I'm saying....just look at the candles below.

More than obviously, the candle on the right looks more realistic....why? I do agree I was very partial to the candle on the right :)) but even then, there is a point that I want to drive home here...and I will illustrate it with an example...

Example

Assume you are in a situation in which you badly want to get a secret out of a certain person. What should you do to get it out if you are not his close friend and you don't want to threaten him in any way? You won't directly go and ask him the secret cuz that would blow it all out....if you are a person of reasonable logic, you will try to make friends with him, get to know him step by step, slowly build up trust and then reach the point where you get the secret!

Compare this example with the two candles above.... here we know that the left side of the candle is dark and the right side if bright... directly jumping from black to a light grey color is a big mistake. You should go step by step, gradient by gradient, shade by shade until you reach the color that you desire!

So this entire procedure of color blending should be such that you shouldn't be able to make out the transition from one color to another. The smoothness of this transition reflects the quality of your art.