Shading Techniques Tips Video Time-Lapse

Hi Guys!

 

In this tutorial I'll teach you the basics on how to shade with different styles using all tools provided in clip studio paint!

You're welcome to check out the YouTube video and read the tips in the description, whichever you find easier to understand!

Basics Of Shading

The first thing I'm going to teach you guys is the basic principle of shading.

For that I used Selection Area Eclipse tool to create a circle.

Then I gave that circle one base colour to work from there.

I did this because, if we assign out illustrations one base colour it's a lot easier to work on shading our illustrations from there. Because we'll know exactly how light or dark we want something from our base colour.

Once we've got our base colour down, we need to give our object a light source.

Giving your objects a light source is the most important part of shading because it tells you exactly where your shadows and highlights need to fall.

(I am using a Pencil tool for shading here.)

In this case, my light is come from the top-left so my shadows will be falling on the bottom-right. and the highlight will be cast on the top left exactly where the light is hitting the object directly.

Shading is a lot about building of colours and overlaying.

as you can see from the image above, I went back and fourth over and over again for darks and lights.

Another important step in shading is blending.

It is not compulsory to blend if the artist doest prefer too.

But for those who want to give their illustrations a smoother effect it come in handy.

For blending out the pencil in this I used Textured Blender tool in Realist Brush set.

Another Important point in Shading is giving your object a shadow to give it more depth.

Shadows make our objects look more realistic. But keep in mind that shadows go hand in hand from where your light source comes from.

In this case, since our light source in coming from the top right corner, our shadow forms on the bottom left corner.

You can see in the top image that we've build quite a bit on the shadow, giving it a rounder image. This is because even if we can only see the front of the circle, we can still tell it's a ball because of round shadow being cast on the floor.

You will also note that the shadow near the ball is much darker than the shadow further away from the ball. That is because of the light source. Because of the placement of our light the area near the end of the ball is not getting any light but as we move further away from that we get more light and the shadow gets lighter and lighter.

This is how we give our objects 3D effect with shading.

Types Of Shading

Now let's get into different techniques when it comes to shading.

There are a number of different styles and techniques to shading, but I will be sharing with you guys the three basics shading techniques that I use when it comes to shading illustrations.

The First one that I will be using is pencil shading without blending. So this style of shading just includes layering your pencil lines over and over again to go from darks to lights.

This helps us understand the gradient effects more and teaches us how to control our colour intensity.

The light source I used for this illustration is coming from the front. Thats why the highlights are hitting the petals directly in the middle.

You can also see that as we go near the cluster of the petals it gets darker. That is the same rule we applied to our ball, since the light cannot reach that area it gets darker.

 

This is how you work on shading without blending, by controlling the intensity of your colours overlapping you can still achieve realistic shading effects.

Another technique to shading is cross hatching.

There is also just hatching which is shading with multiple parallel lines, but I prefer cross hatching because it gives us a much better control with it comes to really dark shadows.

The light source I used for this form of shading is coming from the bottom.

As you can see in the illustration above this is also another form of shading for illustrations that gives us shadow and by overlapping lines in opposite directions.

 

The places that we want to be darker we layer more lines and the places we want lighter we layer less lines.

And the last technique of shading that I will teach you guys in blending.

this can be done for a much a much smoother effect to your shadows.

 

For this I uses rough wash tool for the colour and wet bleed brush for blending.

But you can use any brush for this type.

The light source I used for this is coming from the front.

You can see that this type of shading is different from the others because it blends in the different shades much better giving your illustrations a much smoother effect going from darks to lights.

As you can see above that even without outlines we can still see each individual petal forming separately. That is because of shading.

By doing this we give life life to our Illustrations.

 

Illustration

The next thing I'm going to teach you guys is how to add your shading techniques into your illustrations.

For this we will be working with colours.

I've already got a basic sketch done.

I gave my sketch basic colours that I wanted and decided to go with a top light source.

Next I used Textured Pen to give it darker shadows from its skin colour and I used Wet Bleed Blender Brush to blend out the shadows.

I gave the skin more shadows and highlights in the neck, chin and nose area since these are the places that will be highlighted.

I also did the same to the hair and the antlers.

The antlers shadow is falling on the hair and the hair's shadow is falling on the neck. This how we merge different elements together by connecting them through shades and shadows.

I finished my illustration by adding the necessary details such as eyes and hair details.

So this is how you can use shading to make your illustrations look better and more 3 dimensional.

If you got till here that means you read the tutorial, even if you skipped through I hope the images helped you guys out!

If you have any questions please feel free to leave it down in the comments! Or Check out the Youtube Video for more details!

Thank you!

 

Until next time!