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Description
I was talking about lighting and shading traditional drawings with soniouncut, and it got me motivated to try some quick sketches, since I haven't thought about that in regards to traditional art for quite a while. In the process I realized I'm quite rusty.

But if I were to give any advice; it's easier to gain an understanding of shading with just a pencil. Ignoring colors means you have to focus on values alone, the lights and darks that give a drawing a 3D form. Starting with simple shapes, like cubes, spheres, pyramids, cones and cylinders, and shading them from different angles, though it may seem boring, does help. because ultimately the subjects of your drawings will be composed of those shapes.

For example, Sonic's head is just a sphere, with cones sticking out for his quills, and two pyramids for his ears. His arms and legs are just long, thin cylinders.

When shading with colored pencils, it's good to start very soft. Coloring lightly first, and then pressing harder to darken desired areas. You can always make something darker, but not lighter. And if your paper is white, white's the lightest you can make something, so you may want to not touch that area. On the drawing of Shadow, I very lightly colored, or didn't color at all, the areas I wanted to have the glow from the emerald he's holding hit. Then I added some light green shading around that side of him, to make it look like the emerald was glowing.

These sketches are very rough, and I'm quite rusty. I'm also not a Licensed teacher, but I wanted to illustrate that you don't need fancy tools to be a good artist. I only used a No. 2 Pencil, and some printer paper. I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do their art, but I wanted to share some of the things I've learned.

Also, my apologies, but the photo scan does seem to wash the drawings out a bit.

Description
I was talking about lighting and shading traditional drawings with soniouncut, and it got me motivated to try some quick sketches, since I haven't thought about that in regards to traditional art for quite a while. In the process I realized I'm quite rusty.

But if I were to give any advice; it's easier to gain an understanding of shading with just a pencil. Ignoring colors means you have to focus on values alone, the lights and darks that give a drawing a 3D form. Starting with simple shapes, like cubes, spheres, pyramids, cones and cylinders, and shading them from different angles, though it may seem boring, does help. because ultimately the subjects of your drawings will be composed of those shapes.

For example, Sonic's head is just a sphere, with cones sticking out for his quills, and two pyramids for his ears. His arms and legs are just long, thin cylinders.

When shading with colored pencils, it's good to start very soft. Coloring lightly first, and then pressing harder to darken desired areas. You can always make something darker, but not lighter. And if your paper is white, white's the lightest you can make something, so you may want to not touch that area. On the drawing of Shadow, I very lightly colored, or didn't color at all, the areas I wanted to have the glow from the emerald he's holding hit. Then I added some light green shading around that side of him, to make it look like the emerald was glowing.

These sketches are very rough, and I'm quite rusty. I'm also not a Licensed teacher, but I wanted to illustrate that you don't need fancy tools to be a good artist. I only used a No. 2 Pencil, and some printer paper. I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do their art, but I wanted to share some of the things I've learned.

Also, my apologies, but the photo scan does seem to wash the drawings out a bit.