How to Shade Across a Drawing

Shading a face is challenging . . . the hair, the chin, the eyes. Trickier still can be shading a face across the entire page. Let me explain.

To understand how to shade a face (or any subject for that matter) across the entire page, just answer one question. In the following example, the strongest light comes from the front-top-left. How does answering this question help you understand?

Knowing that the strongest light comes from the front-top-left tells you where the lightest part of the entire drawing is—the top left! Any point closest to the strongest light source is always brightest, even if you can’t discern that with your naked eye. And since light travels in a straight line here on earth, the side opposite that brightest spot (where the light hits your subject last) will be the darkest—the bottom right! You can see what I mean in this example, where I've shaded the paper without the face.

Now I put the two examples together. The face goes from having been shaded, to having been shaded across the entire page.

Shading across an entire page can get even trickier. For instance, what if there were more than one light source? What if there were more than one subject? And what if these subjects were different distances from the viewer? I'll be writing about these later!

Pencil- Highly benefitting thing near to you. For more details at http://tinyurl.com/29tmp8q

Pencil- Highly benefitting thing near to you

"Pencil" the first ever writing instrument you held on your hand as a child. Whether it's a great educationist or scientist, everyone learned alphabets and numbers with a single pencil. What is the first thing you take in your hand when you need to describe or mark something? Obviously, it would be a pencil. A child’s educational career begins with a pencil. We generally describe pencil as an example for a simple thing. They are easy to hold and considered to be the cheapest writing material that the world had ever seen.

Have you ever imagined that without a pencil how the world would be? Art would not have emerged, without the invention of pencil. Right from Da Vinci to Picasso, they started their artistic career with a pencil. It is also estimated that with a single ordinary pencil, you could draw a line of 35 miles long and write an average of 45,000 words. It has become a dominant thing in our day to day life. It is predicted on average that each of us need the assistance of a pencil at least once in a day. They are usually used in the field of art, education, communication and design.

Pencils, being the greatest technological inventions of all time, are used by people in several fields. In addition to school and college students, pencils are commonly used by writers, news reporters, engineers, carpenters, composers, scientists, teachers, business people, parents and more. Now-a-days pencils come in different heights and styles that could get the attraction of small children. The craze and demand for colored pencils has never gone down among kids.

Pencils.com adds NEW Earth-Friendly Items

Pencils.com has expanded our range of environmentally responsible pencils and notebooks with the addition of several new products from Green Apple and Banana Paper to complement our existing “Green Product” offerings under our ForestChoice brand of FSC Certified wood pencils.

Green Apple is an Earth friendly pencil produced from Genuine Incense-Cedar wood grown in the forests of California and Oregon. Our two new Green Apple pencils include a 10-count ergonomic triangular #2 pencil pack as well as their 4-count Jumbo Highlighter hex pencils. The triangular pencils are produced from finger-jointed wood slats reclaimed from the slat manufacturing process to reduce waste. The dry text liner pencils have four attractive colors and are a safe and non-toxic means for highlighting your reading materials. Both pencils have a natural wood surface and are paint-free. Green Apple has a growing range of Earth-Friendly school supplies that Pencils.com hopes to add over time to further expand our selection of environmentally friendly products. All Green Apple packaging is made from recycled paperboard.

The Banana Paper Company produces environmentally friendly tree-free, acid-free, natural paper and paper products. These products - produced in Costa Rica - are made using tropical agricultural wastes reclaimed from traditional production of items such as: Bananas, coffee and pineapple. The paper used in these products is made from 80% post-consumer waste fiber and 20% banana leaf fibers and requires 70-80% less energy to manufacture than virgin fiber paper. The Banana Paper Company is based on the belief that human growth and the well-being of our environment can be attained in a sustainable way. Banana paper designs and manufactures all of their banana paper and banana paper products all the way from its raw materials to the shelf.

The initial Banana Paper items now available on pencils.com include:

-Banana Paper Notebook, Kraft Fauna Collection

(4 Cover options)

-Butterfly, Monkey, Dolphin & Toads

-Banana Paper Journal, Sketches Collection

(2 Cover options)

-Red Hummingbird & Green Frog

We have also added a new Maped Natural Eraser product.

We at Pencils.com are excited to expand our offerings of earth friendly pencils and writing supplies to build upon our longstanding company commitment exemplified by our ForestChoice product range. For more about our company’s dedication to produce and market environmentally responsible products, Click here.

10/14-10/17 'Just Because' SALE!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month! Pencils.com is giving away a Pink Kum 2-hole pencil sharpener with the minimum purchase of two 12-packs of our Breast Cancer pencils. This offer also applies for order a minimum of 1 bulk of the Breast Cancer pencils. A portion of the proceeds will go towards Breast Cancer Research. Help the cause and purchase your Breast Cancer pencils! This offer is only good through Sunday, so buy your pencils today!

Promotional Code: FREE SHARPENER

Drawing Rocks

Here is the reference photo in color that we will be using for the rest of this tutorial. A grayscale photo can help to match the tones, but color helps in the details.

Diane Wright is a very talented artist that will be posting more of her tutorials on pencils.com over time! Visit her website for more tutorials or you can buy her book on landscaping. She has 2 blogs that she updates regularly (here and here) and allows commenting...feel free to ask her any questions that you may have.

Step 1

We are going to draw the large boulder on the left. I start with a 2B pencil and sketch in the darkest areas. The lighter areas are sketched in using an F lead weight. Using short random marks, I concentrate on the indents and shadowed areas. Be sure to draw in all of the darkest areas in this step (I will explain further in the third step)

Step 2

Once you have the preliminary details drawn, use the clutch pencil with a chisel edge to apply a smooth even layer over the surface. The lighter areas I use the 4H, and use 2H in the shadowed areas. Remember the planes and angles for lighting.

Step 3

Now the fun starts! Using a softer lead in the mechanical pencil, start creating the texture! I use random short marks to create pits and a rough surface. That's right; use a softer lead over the harder lead. We all know that using softer lead over harder lead creates a very uneven surface. But it works wonders in creating a random, uneven texture for rocks.

The chisel edge is important as it creates a flat wide mark. To create a chisel edge, use sandpaper; angle your pencil and scrub!

Using these harder leads may be new to some of you, but they create wonderful light values that otherwise would be very difficult to achieve.

Continue building and layering. Use the Blu-Tack to create subtle highlights. Press the Blu-Tack onto an area and lift the graphite off. Use the battery-operated eraser to create small strong highlights.

I mentioned in step 1 to be sure you have all your darkest areas drawn before you proceed onto step 2. The reason should be obvious. Once the harder lead is laid down, you will not be able to achieve those rich blacks!

Here is my completed rock study...

"Man It Feels Good to be a Pencil"

Sean Sanczel has created a new Pencilman video! I never realized the amount of musical talent that Pencilman had until today. Great animation by Sean! It's always fun to see a new Pencilman video. Check out more of his Sean's videos on youtube. Maybe the Pencilman will meet the Palomino Blackwing in the future! Thanks Sean...

Chris LaPorte- 2010 ArtPrize Winner!

Yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Chris LaPorte became a rich man. Chris was the winner of the 2010 ArtPrize contest. Chris' 28-foot wide drawing of a group of 1921 American officers helped him bring in a $250,000 prize. Over 450,000 people voted over the past couple of weeks to determine the winner. Chris must have an unbelievable amount of passion to draw with the amount of detail that he did. This drawing took him around 800 hours to complete! Imagine sitting down for over a month straight with a few graphite pencils and creating this amazing and historic artwork. It is breathtaking.

"Drawing is always cool--no matter what your age or background," stated Chris (www.artprize.org, 2010). That is the complete truth. Although not everyone has the talent that Chris has, it can still be extremely enjoyable to sit down and turn a plain piece of paper into a masterpiece. The time and effort that was put into this artwork is truly amazing. Our congratulations goes out to Chris for his special feat.

Pencils.com 'Featured Artist' Brian Duey also competed in ArtPrize 2010. His drawing of a broken Jack Daniels bottle looks like it could be a photo. Brian has the talent and know-how to masterfully create an object as simple as a bottle and make people turn their heads. We look forward to many more interesting drawings from Brian in the future.

I am convinced that Armin Mersmann's drawing is nothing more than a photograph of a tree. The amount of tiny branches that he drew is just crazy! He made every last portion of this drawing look as if I can actually touch the tree. Very realistic!

Here at pencils.com we would like to commend everyone that entered ArtPrize 2010. Pencil art continues to maintain its popularity even as we move into a more and more technologically driven era. Graphite pencil realism especially is acquiring more followers as time passes. We thank everyone for participating and we hope that we can continue to view these amazing pieces of art in the future.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. About 1 in 8 women in the United States (between 12% and 13%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. In 2010, an estimated 207,090 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S., along with 54,010 new cases of non-invasive breast cancer. Breast cancer also occurs in men (at a much lower rate). Less than 1% of new breast cancer cases are diagnosed in men (Statistics retrieved from www.breastcancer.org, 2010).

Obviously, breast cancer is a problem that plagues people all over the world. The death rate has decreased every year since 1991. We have been making strides for nearly 2 decades and hopefully, with enough hard work and determination, we can completely cure breast cancer.

Here at pencils.com, we are dedicated to helping breast cancer research. We now have two models of breast cancer pencils available. "Fight Like a Girl, Knock out Breast Cancer" and "Erase Breast Cancer" are the two slogans on our pencils. A percentage of the proceeds made from the sales of these pencils will go towards Breast Cancer Research. These pencils are being offered in 12-packs or in bulk (144 pencils).

Please do your part and help the cause, purchase your breast cancer pencils today.

Blackwing Project: Take 1

Here at Pencils.com we are pleased to introduce Take 1 of our newly established Blackwing Project. The Blackwing Project is a new collaboration with artists, writers, musicians and fans of the Blackwing pencil to share creative inspiration enabled by or associated with our new Palomino Blackwing pencil. The goal is to produce a series of fun visuals and videos demonstrating art, music, photography, video content, prose and/or poetry associated with the Blackwing pencil.

Take 1 is more properly titled "The Blackwing is Back" and is just an initial effort I put together with my own limited skills in PowerPoint and Movie Maker with some of artistic contributions we have available today from several of our devoted fans (see credits & links below). I hope you enjoy this first effort which is more of a Palomino Blackwing advertisement focused on promoting the fact that we've now launched sales, some of the most popular uses of the pencils, a few of the famous Blackwing users throughout time and that the product is available for purchase at the Pencils.com store. Future editions will be much more completely devoted to artistic creativity of our Palomino Blackwing fans. Special thanks to the following artistic and photographic contributors:

Diane Wright, Pencils.com Featured Artist

Lisa Laughy, Ninth Wave Designs

John Celestri, Grace Animation Studios

Sean Malone, The Blackwing Pages

Joey Gilbreath, art student

And particularly to my friend and talented musician Christian Tamburr and the CT Trio for sharing his original composition "Blues for Chu" and his great talent on the vibes. I'm just sorry we didn't have enough content to support playing the whole number in this video.

The Blackwing Project videos will be broadcast through our new Pencilscom YouTube Channel as well as our Pencils.com 'What's New' blog, The Pencil Page on Facebook, our Twitter feed, etc. Full creative credit for contributions of each individual will be acknowledged with appropriate links to artist websites where appropriate. If you are interested in participating in the Blackwing Project and gaining a broader audience for your work please contact us by e-mail at blackwingproject@pencils.com to share your interest, ideas and creative contributions.

Reviving the Blackwing: First Day Sales Update

First of all I want to express my personal appreciation to all of you who have shown interest in the new Palomino Blackwing thus far and are now supporting us with your orders on our first day of this new product sales on Pencils.com. We also received a nice bit of publicity today from the Boston Globe, in the multiple forms of an article as well as a video post from Globe Columnist Alex Beam.

The sweet music to our ears is that we are well ahead of the inital projections I had made for the opening 24-48 hours. At this point we essentially met my initial forecast for that period within the first 12 hours of sales. Our small Pencils.com team in our home office is busy focusing on completing and shipping as many of these orders as we can accomplish today since we want to do our best to maintain our normally high standard of prompt shipments. I appreciate the patience of some of you who will have to wait until Monday or Tuesday for our shipments to go out as we just won't be able to get all the orders out today.

I need to especially thank our core Pencils.com team Paula, Dave, Joey and Philip for all thier hard work in preparing for the Palomino Blackwing launch. As well as Vincent for his assistance on the supply side with both our Japanese producer and our sales agent team in Tokyo. Without this groups dedicated and collective commitment we would never have been able to experience such a strong initial launch today.

I fully expect the initial rush of orders to taper off after a day or so. However, it's clear we'll be needing to make an additional expedited airshipment from the balance of our intial production run presently being completed in Japan. Otherwise we will not make it through the approximate 45-60 days from now we'll have to wait for the main portion of the shipment to come over the water as we're probably 2-3 weeks away from a ship date from Japan on the balance of the production. Should we end up short of product for a few days to a week we will be notifying any of those with backorders of a projected ship date. Note that we have limited order sizes through the initial lauch period to try to spread around what we have to as many new customers as possible.

Thanks again for everyone's support. I very much hope you enjoy your new Palomino Blackwings and this day will become a bellwether of good things to come for the future of the the Blackwing.