Adding Shadow and Depth to Your Chalk Drawing
Hi, my name is Mary Demigo, I’m a private art instructor, and I’m here with one of my students, Summer. And we are working on chalk pastel technique using a subject of still life flowers. And so, now we are at the point where we have our preliminary drawing, we’ve gone over our chalk pastel techniques and we started layering the first layer of the color on to our drawing. Now we are ready to start talking about how to create light and shadow in a drawing so that it looks more three dimensional on our paper. First we had already started with the vase and how to make it look more like a cube shape and so since it is transparent, I want to make sure that you can see through the vase. So would you see the stems inside and then we can create the shadow on the side of the vase and inside. So if we take a grayish color since the clear, the clear vase, we can just go along the edges of the vase. And what I did was I just went on a diagonal and very lightly went over the vase on the side. And then I can take my blending stick and pull that color across to make it a little more soft, since it is glass. You wanna create the right texture for the object. And so I just slightly pull this across, I wanna make sure that it’s not too dark of an edge on the vase. And as we mentioned before, when we are adding shadows to our drawing, we want to use the complimentary color so that we can create more of a shadow and we don’t dull out the color. So, when we are using reds and pinks, the complimentary color of red would be green. And so we can see how this works and I’m starting to add shadow towards the edge of the petal, we’re going to take it, the color, very lightly over top. And then I can keep layering my reds and blending in just like we had showed earlier with our techniques. Again, if you do use a black pastel, it tends to take away the brightness of the red. So you may see more of a shadow in the bottom of the flower where you see the stem. So again, we can just go over that. Now, to add more of a shadow onto our stem, we’re gonna use red, because red again is the compliment of green. Red and green work together. And so I can take this and go on the edge where my shadow is. And I continue right down, I wanna keep it consistent as I go along. And I just keep layering over top, all the way throughout the color of the picture. I wanna make sure that I color in over all the paper for the flower. Now where I see, I see more light spots, I can go over with my yellows, pick more of a highlight, if you have a white pastel, you can use that as well. Or if you have a lighter pink, you can use that. Has a little bit of white into it, and that also gives a really nice blending of the color. And again we’re just kinda pulling the color together, overlapping. And when you have completed the flower, our end result should be close to this, this is one finish flower with the highlights and the shadows. We have warm shadows on the side, and again closer to the base of the flower. Okay, next we are ready to move on to finishing up our drawing, our still life drawing and then working to frame our drawing.