How to Shade & Shadow With Charcoal
Charcoal remains one of the most basic and important tools in the artist's toolbox. Darker and richer in texture than graphite, artists use it to create drawings that stand alone, as one component of a mixed media piece or as a tool to create base sketches for paintings. Part of what makes charcoal so attractive as a medium is its ability to create shadowing and shading within a piece of artwork.
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Instructions
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Create the basic outline of your drawing. Most successful artists build a drawing in stages. The first part of this is to lay down the basic shapes and make what amounts to a basic outline of the object you're drawing. As you draw, pay particular attention to the areas where you'll need to add shading and shadowing later; you won't fill them in yet, but knowing where they'll go will help you better recreate what it is you're drawing.
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Observe the object you're drawing and notice where the shadows fall on the surface in relation to the object you're drawing. You'll know that you're looking in the right place if the place where the shadow falls on the surface is opposite of the light source creating the shadow. For example, if you're drawing a still life of a ball, and you've placed the light source to the right of the ball, the shadow should fall somewhere on the table to the left.
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Fill in the shadow. You'll notice that the darkest part of the shadow on the table is the area closest to the object, and that the shadow gets lighter the farther away you go. Lay your pencil so that the side of the tip is fully exposed to the paper. Move your charcoal pencil back and forth, making sure to cover the paper so that no parts of the paper show through. You'll have to rub your charcoal pencil over those areas a couple of times for the darkest parts of the shadow; as you work to create the lighter areas of the shadow, you won't need to repeat the strokes in the same place quite as often.
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Start the shading. Shading works in a similar fashion as shadowing does. Position your pencil on its side and move in forward and backward motions. As with shadowing, there will be parts that are darker and parts that are lighter; lightly fill in the darker parts first, using the side of your pencil.
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Fill in the shading, noticing where the light falls and its intensity. The more contrast between the light and dark parts of the drawing, the more dramatic the drawing will be. The most important concept you can employ to successfully add shading and shadowing to a drawing is to draw exactly what you see. The concept sounds easy, but executing it can be difficult. The tendency for new artists is to fill in their idea of what an object looks like based on experience as opposed to filling in the visual data that their eyes are giving them.
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Spray your drawing with fixative when you're done.
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