I spent a college semester once on drawing figures and at the end of that time I still wasn’t satisfied that I got the shading of the human face right. Shading a single subject like a sphere or a face is challenging. Trickier still can be shading a subject across the entire page. Let me explain.

To shade across an entire drawing, it helps to answer two questions. First, where is the strongest light source? Second, where does that strongest light hit the subject first? In this example (fig 1), the strongest light comes from the front-top-left and it hits the subject on the top-left of her head first. How does asking these questions help?

Your answers about lighting will tell you how to shade across the drawing. Knowing that the strongest light hits the head first tells you the head, or in our case the top-left of the paper, will be the lightest part of the drawing. And knowing the strongest light comes from the top-left tells you the darkest area will be in the opposite direction, or in the bottom right. You can see what I mean in this example (fig 2), where I’ve shaded the paper without the subject.

Now I put the two examples together (fig 3). The subject goes from having been shaded, to having been shaded across the entire drawing.

Shading gets even trickier than the situation I have described here. For instance, what if there is more than one light source? What if there is more than one subject? And what if these multiple subjects were different distances from the viewer? I’ll be writing about these later!. mike theuer