2. Drawing tips & tricks: grey scale, light & shadow

Here are some tricks, which transform a good drawing into a great drawing! The secret is…. contrast!

Also, there is a very basic rule: if you want to create light, you need shadow!! Logic, right? This means you need to play with your grey scale. Let’s have a quick look at some great examples:

Note how each white zone is surrounded by darker areas. In these examples, the different artists play a lot with the grey scale, and there is no white area anywhere on the paper except for the chosen highlighted zones. This really brings the white areas in the foreground and adds a realistic feeling to the pictures.

Whether you want to make cool light effects or a just a portrait, try to employ different grey tones all over your drawing, leaving only particular areas white so as to accentuate the highlights. OR, you can do the opposite. Instead of drawing the viewer's attention to the highlighted areas, you can accentuate the dark areas.

In the following examples, the artists have left a white background and simply increase the dark zones by making them really black.

In any case - and you will have understood it by now - the contrast between the white and black areas is essential! Try out this very simple thing: draw as light as possible on one end of your paper and increasingly as dark as possible, with the same pencil. You will find a large variety of grey tones in between. Don’t be afraid to press hard on the pencil - this will increase the contrast on your drawing. You can also edit your artwork with your computer by playing with the contrasts. It will show you the look and feel of your artwork if you would draw your shadow zones darker.

Once you have seen the possible results on your computer, you retouch your artwork on paper and finalize it without being afraid to mess it up.

p.s. If you want to be extreme, look up the term “chiaroscuro” from Caravaggio, he was THE Master! We are basically talking about the same thing here. I hope you enjoyed this post!