Skull Part II

Today I worked on adding shading to my skull image.  Pencil is a lovely medium for adding shading.  With all the different hardnesses, it's fun to move from a harder pencil to a softer one and vice versa.  That's really the secret to creating depth in a pencil drawing.  No amount of pressing down with one pencil will create the same amount of rich darks as using even a few different pencils.  Darrel Tank uses 5 pencils (5 Pencil Method) to create depth and realism in his portraits.  Lee Hammond uses up to 12.  So far I manage to work through with as few as possible.

For this image today I only used 2 pencils (2B and 4B).  I tend to start with the softer pencils first (4B) to get a good idea of where I ultimately want the darks and lights to be.  Unfortunately you can't stay with just the one pencil without pressing really hard on the paper.  Because 4B is so soft, it tends to stay on the top of the "bumps" of the texture of the paper, leaving all the "valleys" white.  This makes an overall "grey" value.  If you press on the paper, some of the valleys will get darker, but you have now made it impossible to completely remove any of the graphite for highlights or gradation, and it creates a mark that you will see in the finished piece as "wrong".  By switching to a harder pencil (2B) you are better able to fill in the valleys without damaging the paper.

Another important tip is the "tip".  Keep the pencils as sharp as you can.  The sharper the pencil the better it can fill in the valleys.  Gradation is key to making things look 3D in any image and any medium.  To help show the roundness of a shape, it's important to have a gradual tonal shift from dark to purest white.  It's also very important to keep a light touch with the pencil.  Not so light as to leave no mark, but not so heavy as to damage the paper.  You will of course want to "lift" the pencil when grading to white and "drop" the pencil when grading to dark, but if you find you really want to press hard it's probably time to switch to a softer pencil.

You can see that I have a lot of gradation going on in my skull image.  There's also a lot of shading - even in the areas most exposed to direct light.  I find that I need this shading to help show character in the object (small bumps or grooves in the shape), so shading the entire object and then "lifting" tone with a kneaded eraser to create highlights works best for me.

I apologize for the darkened bottom right of the picture - my shadow got in the way of the shading :P, but I think you can see what's happened so far.  I'm going to move down even further in hardness of pencil next time - probably a 2H to further define and sharpen the dark areas.  I haven't decided if I want to add highlights to the eyeballs just yet.  I'm kinda liking how he's looking so far.