Shading Tips for Drawing Faces

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm David Clemen on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to draw the face. Now to give the face a little bit more depth we're go in and add some shading to it. Now with shading you want to take, you have this long pencil, you want to actually use the side of the pencil. On the details you use your point but on your shading you can use the side of this pencil. And so if you look closely this side of her face is a lot lighter than this, there is a lot of darkness over here. So the light source on this photo, in particular, is coming from this way. So this side is going to be a lot lighter. So what I can do, I can just kind of, I'm almost just dragging the pencil across the paper and it's shading it very lightly and it's dark here and her rouge on her cheeks is a little bit darker. But the rest of her face is pretty light and then it starts to get, you can break the shading down in sections if you look at it. This is like a mid-tone, and this is all highlighted because of the lighting of the photographer and then it starts to get into mid-tones and darks. So what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to come in here and just very softly use the side of the pencil. I'm kind of just going to follow the shape that I just kind of traced on the photo and this is going to give her face even more depth than it already has. Then you can actually use your finger and blend it in and that's what this pencil is really good for is, it's really soft so you can do a lot of things with it and give it some texture. I'm going to come up here, this is still mid-tone up here. I'll just come in here and lightly just, I'm really not pressing hard on this pencil it's soft enough where all I have to do is drag it over it. Then when I get into there, I can just kind of do this and then down here it gets really dark. And then down here it gets really dark, so but I want to kind of keep it soft. I mean I don't want to be harsh, she has a beautiful face. So, just want to kind of come in here and once I get to the darker part I can get closer to the tip. I'm basically still using the side of the pencil. And this shading is actually going to give the face a lot of depth. Okay, see on the top of her eye there it has a highlight but then the rest of the eye is dark. So, I'm going to leave that light, I'm going to come in here and see I don't have to draw a line for the nose. The shading will actually give me the depth of the nose. Come in here like this. That's basically how you're going shade the face and you can get even more detailed than this. But that's really what you want to do. You want to pick out your highlighted areas and you can actually go in and soften it with an eraser to give an even sharper highlight. Then you can even go a lot darker than what I went. But I just wanted to show you the three values, you have the light, the mid, and the dark. That's the shading."