Shading Circles for Beginning Drawing: Part 2

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Peggy Robertson and, I am going to show you how to shade a circle. You see how that softens it up? Now if I look at it and say well, it’s not quite right, I want the little white spot to be right there to show the light. I just take it off and if that is not bright enough, then I will darken the sides so that it shows up a little more, but is not really super bright. Okay, so this is a circle. Now we are going to go really fast and do the shadow on the paper that is sitting on. Okay first you will notice that it is really dark right there, where it is sitting, which is right here, like a mini-shadow within a shadow and that the shadow comes out away from it; it doesn’t just go straight back because it is a round object, follows the curve and comes out and actually draws an oval itself. So that would be our shadow line which we don’t really light because you don’t want it to be dark. Now we have to draw the dark line here of our circle, because actually right here it is darker than its shadow. You want to give an edge to our circle, and then we will start following out with the shadow. The shadows are usually not a definite line unless it is a very strong, strong light, so we will stay darker near the ball and fade out as we get farther out. Then really quickly we will take and smear it all in, and soften the lines a little bit on the edges and that very quickly is how you shade the circle to get the idea that it is round instead of flat."