Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of March 15th!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action is to do work on creating a nice, smooth gradient with pencil.

Supplies

For this exercise, grab a piece of paper, or a sketchbook of any size, a ruler (or something to use as a straight edge), and different kinds of drawing pencils (recommend: a couple of pencils with “B”, a couple with “H” and one regular #2 (HB) pencil.), and a drawing stump or tortillian (these usually come with most graphite drawing pencil sets, or are available from most art stores. In a pinch, a handfull of cotton swabs will work, but not as well).

How are we creating a gradient?

When shades move smoothly from light to dark, or from dark to light, we call this a gradient. Gradients are used to smoothly shade objects that we draw, to help them look more realistic. The different kinds of shading help something drawn on a two dimensional piece of paper appear to be three dimensional.

To start off, take your ruler, and draw a long box, about an inch high, and however long your paper is. You should probably use one of the H pencils, as those have harder leads, and will not smear.

Starting on one end of your box, slowly work at shading in the box, moving from dark to light. Try to get as dark as possible with the “dark” end, and smoothly transition to perfectly white on the other end. You will likely need to try this a few times, as you get the feel for how your pencils work. The B pencils have softer leads, and so will create darker shades (and smear more). The H pencils have harder leads and will not smear as much.

Use the drawing stump (or tortillian, or cotton swabs if you’re using those) to blend the pencil in smoothly.

Draw several gradients this way, some with a mix of pencils, and others with just one kind of pencil (for example, using only a 4B pencil or only an HB pencil), to get a feel for what you can do with different kinds of pencils.

Tips to watch out for:

• try to keep your pencil sketching going in the same direction. For example, if you are drawing horizontally, don’t switch directions, and suddenly start sketching in a different direction.  When you are shading any object, you should try to move your pencil with the contour of the object. In this case, shading a rectangle, we can choose what direction we move the pencil, but whatever direction you move it, make sure you remain consistent.
• When blending with the stump, always use even strokes in the direction of the object’s contour.
• Keep in mind that the drawing stump with “pick up” some of the pencil lead, and therefore it may shade your white areas. As you get closer to the white areas, you may want to flip the stump over and use a cleaner side.
• Practice, practice, practice.

The Goal

Have you ever drawn something, especially one of your very first drawings, and though the shapes of everything were spot on, something just seemed not quite right? Most of the time, the problem is with the gradients used in shading, and most of the time the specific problem with the gradient is that the dark areas don’t get dark enough. This results in a somewhat “washed out” look in a picture, because it lacks contrast. By practicing gradients in this way, we can practice getting super dark, all the way to super light, without the added “distraction” of actually drawing something “real”.

The goal is to create a gradient that goes from very dark to very light, as smoothly as possible. It should almost look like a smooth surface.

Going Forward

After you’ve done this a few times, try to create a gradient on different kinds of paper, and notice the difference. Some paper has more “tooth” than other kinds of paper, which means it grabs and holds onto the pencil lead better. Smoother paper tends to smear more, because it has less “tooth”. Rougher paper can get darker, but the gradient won’t look as smooth.

Try to make a gradient with just one kind of pencil (for example, a #2 [HB] pencil), and see if you can get a smooth gradient that way. Get a feel for how different pencils behave when creating gradients.

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.