Using Values and Gradients (Part 3) --- The Basics of Drawing

Welcome back!  It's time to finish this drawing.  In this post, we will be handling the textures and final touches.

Texturing…

From our last part, we continued to increase our contrast and cleared up some of the regions we had made. From here, we can create the texture of wood by laying down those really smooth bands on the wood. I did this by moving my pencil along the grain of the wood, and scribbled “up and down,” diagonally, to create bands that looked like a part of the wood. I tried to blend them into gradients as well; the image appeared to have the gradients move from darkest on top to lightest on the bottom, with a sharp cutoff starting the next band.

At this point, we can really just approximate the textures of the objects in our image. It is almost pointless to try to replicate exactly where each band in the wood is when we can achieve a nice resemblance by doing something easier.

Okay, so the bricks are probably a really freaky part of this drawing. How do we go about laying out those really uniform and small details on top of an already “flawed” and approximate base? (I was actually wondering how to do this while doing the drawing for this tutorial, heh.) Well, I came up with a decently effective solution, though I am sure it won’t work for everyone. Essentially I created a rough grid pattern on the light tone of the wall. Now, bricks aren’t usually laid in a grid pattern, but are instead staggered. So I filled in the first cell on the first row, and then filled in two cells on the one below it. I kept a bit of space between the dark regions so that the mortar between the bricks was still visible. I continued from here with this pattern to get that recognizable brick look.

That’s About It…

A bit more darkening of the darks and finishing the bricks, and we are done. Well, you could keep going on into infinity darkening darks and tweaking the minute details, but honestly there will be a point when your image is satisfactorily done.

And hey, if it doesn’t quite look like what I was able to make, don’t worry. I’ve had a lot of practice doing this very thing. Just keep at it, and draw pictures of things you find more interesting than the outside of my apartment complex (unless that is interesting to you, for some reason). And if what you made looks even better? Great job! I’m sure you’re better now than you were when you started, if you felt like you needed to read this.

What’s important is that you take away these three things:

Draw lightly, and build up to darkness.

Draw with values, not shapes.

Start with a good base.

I hope that this is of some help to you; I had to make this into something of a quick-and-dirty teardown of my drawing process. Even then, it took a long time to prepare, and I did not cover everything that went into drawing this. That was a lot to learn and, if you stuck with it, good job. In any case, I will be moving onto some more relevant topics in the next post.