Learning The Basic Fundamentals of Sketching: Using Basic Shapes

Ever since we are little, we learn how to draw; though it may not be the best we still draw and sketch. Sketching and drawing are some of the ways we show our creativity. Using my creativity, I have decided to learn how to sketch. With sketching there are a few fundamentals that play a role in order to create various types of drawings. Most of those fundamentals have to do with shading. As Charlie Bowater in the Beginner's Guide to Sketching says " Light patterns, such as objects having light and shadowed areas, help when creating the illusion of depth on paper. Since you have your pencil in your hand, you can decide what other people see" (19).  When working with basic shapes and learning light patterns and shadowed areas have a big impact on how your sketch will turn out. With your creativity you can chose with what you would like people to see. I will take you through some of the fundamentals of shading using the basic shapes. First I drew a circle, oval, and square.

 Starting with basic shapes helps because you can make many variations and combinations. With these basic shapes you can elevate them into a sphere, cube and cone. When sketching Bowater recommends not use to much pressure (18).  Sometimes we have a tendency of putting a lot of pressure while we are trying to draw something out which can become hard to fix if you make a mistake while drawing.

Now as you can see in the pictures above I started with minimal pressure until I was done with sketching out my shapes and was pleased with my final shapes. From there start the basic fundamentals of shading. From the step above I went on to shade in my shapes. But before I shade I had to chose where I would want to highlight. Now highlighting is where the light hits your shape and those areas are the brightest. Once that decision was clear I started to shade in my shapes while making sure the areas I want the light to hit are brighter/lighter than the rest of my shape. With that came cast shadows. Because once you are done highlight/shading you want to know where the shadow of you object would lay. Cast shadows is an important feature because it can help make you object look as if it were actually placed on top of something and give it more of a 3-dimensional shape. I would recommend when you do this step to sketch out how you would like your shadow then shade it in. As Bowater states "the further a cast shadows is from the object which it casts it, the lighter and less defined the edges look" (19).  Using what Bowater said helps make that shadow of your shapes look more like a shadow than a mirror image.  The last fundamental is reflecting light. It is similar to highlighting and closely related. With reflecting light you take the the areas you would like to highlight and lighten it up making it seem more natural.

As you can see you can take an eraser and erase the small areas where the light reflects the most. You only want to erase small areas because the area around it have to gradually get darker making it so the light is focused on a specific area. Now with that said you can also erase edges as well were the light reflects as I did to the cube.

Using all those fundamentals that was my product.

 Do you agree with Bowater that you can make people see what you want them to see using shading techniques?

 Bowater, Charlie. Beginner's Guide to Sketching: Characters, Creatures & Concepts. 3DTotal Publishing, 2015.