Happy Spring, friends! I hope that you are enjoying the warmer weather, longer days and wonderful sunshine!🌼
We are going to pick back up where we left off in our 5 part series- drawing a children’s book illustration from beginning to end. If you haven’t read the last couple of posts yet, you can find them here and here.
The next step to creating an illustration is adding dimension. In the last post, I showed you how to create a thumbnail sketch. Now, we are going to detail our thumbnail to be a more full-proof sketch and also add shading.
Shading your sketch is a very important step that you don’t want to skip.
Look at the difference in these two circles.
One is 2d and the other is 3d. Shading is the component that separates these two rather flat circles. The 2d looks very flat. It lacks depth and detail. The 3d looks full and round like a real ball. Thats effect shading has on your drawing!
Shading brings things to life and makes them look like real objects.
Now that we know why shading is important, let’s talk about knowing where to shade. To start, you need to find a light source (The sun, fire, flashlight, lightbulb, etc.). The further away things are from the light source the darker they are going to appear. The closer things are to the light source the lighter they will appear.
Now before we shade in our sketch, I’ve touched up my thumbnail to be a more full-proof sketch. My character is no longer a stick figure but now actually looks like a girl!
I’m not worrying yet about facial features, but more of just giving my character shape and making the scene more detailed and easier to make out.
Now that my sketch is more detailed, let’s apply that shading theory.
The closer the things are to the light the brighter they are going to look. Which is shown with the red spots.
The further they are from the light the darker the will look, which is shown with the blue spots.
Using that theory I’ve shaded in my sketch. Now our sketch has some dimension and doesn’t seem flat. This also helps us to know where to shade when we start coloring our illustration.
In the next post, we will talk about finishing up our sketch and filling in all of those last details before we bring it to life with color!
Thanks for reading! I hope that you had a wonderful easter, celebrating our risen Savior with family and friends!
~Eliyah🧡
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