ROWE'S BASIC ASS SHADING GUIDE
Hi ya'll, i recently made a shading guide for some friends of mine who then recommended that i post it here too! This is a guide that will go over the building blocks of shading, and should help you get a good grasp of the foundational concepts so that when you begin to try other techniques and intermediate shading, you have a good base to go back to. This guide is meant for beginners, and is pulled from all the knowledge i've gained in my over 12 years of experiance as a professional and hobbyist artist. Please keep in mind that i am not a teacher, and feel free to ask any questions in the comments, or through asks! Happy Shading! ROWE'S BASIC ASS SHADING GUIDE: PART ONE
Shadow Follows Form
to begin with this concept, we will need three things
Any shape. a ball is the most basic shape to begin with, because it does not have any defined planes which can quickly become complex and confusing. (a plane is any flat surface that makes up an object)
A light source, this is the key to any type of shading, the direction of the light will show us where to place our shadows, because shadows are created through the absence of light
A value chart. The value refers to how dark or light a shade is. If it has a darker value it sits closer to pure black, and if it has a lighter value it sits closer to pure white. Grey, where black and white meet, is the middle value.
When we place these colors into a shape we use the labels of Highlight, Midtone, and Deep tone to help us figure out where our shadow is going to lie. Let’s define these terms.
Highlight: The highlight is the lightest value on the canvas overall. On a 3D object, the highlight will be placed closest to the light source, and will usually be a pale white color but this depends on a variety of variables, like the color of the light, how close the light is, what material our object is made out of and more, that are a bit too advanced for this guide.
Midtone: This is the middle tone between our shadow and light. This tone will typically be the base color of our object, or the color that it would be if it was shown in a completely neutral light with no shadow or highlight present. For example, If you have a red apple, the red color is the base, or the midtone, and the lights and shadows are built off of said red color / midtone.
Deep tone: This is the darkest tone on the object and is positioned opposite of the highlight and light source. This is the shade we use for the actual shadow that is being cast, both on the object itself and the surface of whatever it is sitting on.
Drop, or Cast Shadow: This is the dark shadow that lays underneath of our object on the surface that it is sitting on. This shadow moves in tandem with the light source, and light will always move in a straight line, never curved, so you cannot move the light source without also moving the drop shadow. To place these values down correctly we need to remember that the highlight and the deep tone will always be opposite of each other on any object you can think of. The Highlight is showing where direct light is hitting the object. The highlight will move across the object depending on the angle of the light. The midtones are showing where the light is still illuminating the object, however it is no longer direct light and would mores be considered indirect light. The deep tone can vary in darkness depending on the type of light being cast onto the object. If the light is more direct, or closer to the object, the deep tone will be dark with hard edges, clearly defining the shape of the object that the shadow belongs to. In the example below, both the sphere and the cube are being lit with direct, harsh lighting, which means that the shadows on the object itself and the shadow underneath are clean and dark, with no feathering or blurring (softness) of the shadows beneath. If the lighting were to be softer, less direct and more ambient, the shadows would not be as harsh, would be less dark, and may have more variation in the dark color, leading to gradients or softer transitions between values.
ROWE'S BASIC ASS SHADING GUIDE: PART TWO The Colors
Whilst the physical location of the light source and shadow remain in opposition to each other, the colors we use to represent light and shadow, (though a more complicated aspect of shading), act in similar ways! Categorically, the color of light and shadow typically reside within a Complimentary color palette. To explain this further, let’s define some terms!
The Color Wheel: The color wheel is a tool that artists use to help us describe the relationships between different colors and how they move from one hue to the next. The color wheel consists of the Primary Colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue, and the colors between these main three are born out a combination of two different primary colors. For example, Orange is a combination of Red and Yellow, Green a combination of Yellow and Blue, and Purple, a combination of Red and Blue.
Complimentary Colors: A Complimentary Color Palette consists of two hues, which sit on opposite sides of the color wheel. This color palette is especially suited for use within light and shadow, because complimentary colors work together to enhance each others contrast whilst simultaneously creating a harmony between two vastly contrasting values (Deep Tone and Highlight). The color of our shadow will be the opposite color of our light, so for example, A green light will cast purple shadows, a red light will cast blue shadows, and so on.
Now before we go painting a bunch of complimentary colors everywhere we also have to talk about saturation and vibrancy. When looking at light and shadow in the real world, they often look much more dull than a lot of artists represent them in their art, and this is because in reality, unless you have a strongly colored light the difference in color between light and shadow is pretty difficult to see, unless you are well trained in the art of spotting the undertones of these shades.As a basic rule of thumb its important to remember that the light will often be more vibrant then the shadows themselves, as light brings out all the colors present in an object whilst shadow dilutes them.
Vibrancy: Vibrancy refers to the brightness and liveliness of color in visual work. When colors are described as vibrant, they are perceived as bright, rich, and full of energy. Vibrancy helps create dynamic and engaging visual scenes.
Saturation: Saturation is the level of intensity a color has. high saturation refers to bright colors. In traditional painting terms, the highest saturated colors are the colors that are holding the most pure pigment. For example, a highly saturated color would be a red paint straight out of the tube before you add in other colors, or mix it with water or a painting oil / binder. Low saturation refers muted colors, or colors that have less pigment to them. These are colors that have been mixed with others to lower the amount of pure pigment to them. Muted colors and bright colors have to work together, and this is what helps us build realistic light and shadow. High saturated light helps us define the colors of the object and the less saturated colors are necessary to support and enhance the bright colors.
ROWE'S BASIC ASS SHADING GUIDE: PART THREE
Let’s Put it Together!
To review! We’ve learned about value, how the highlight, midtone, and deep tone combine to build a 3D object in 2D space. We’ve also talked about color, how bright, vibrant, and high saturated colors work with dull, muted, and low saturated colors to build up harmony and contrast. We’ve also gone over the color wheel and how complimentary color palettes work within light and shadow. So how do all of these concepts come together? Im going to use a painting of some tomatoes as a reference for these concepts because this is a fairly simple painting with little complexity to the values.
The first step we have in creating the light and shadow is to understand our form, the basic shapes we are working with here. The tomatoes are a simple sphere/circle, and due to the direct light have a very small deep tone and highlight. A majority of the color used within them is the midtone (the bright red). The midtone itself has slight variations in its red color, as the red develops into an orange tone the closer it gets to the highlight, due to the fact that the light is a yellow color. As the red midtone gets closer to the deep tone shadow, it gains a darker purply color because the color we used to shade the red is a dark blue. We don’t use a drop shadow in this painting because the tomatoes are hanging and are not resting on a surface. In the reference photo the drop / cast shadow lies behind the tomatoes on the floor, about a meter away.
I hope this guide can help some of you out, and you contunie learning and improving your art! Art keeps all of us alive, your work is more important than you know <3