Shading with Graphite Pencil

Sometimes artists use a combination of techniques in a single picture - including line, tone, expressive mark-making - to create certain effects in their drawing . With practice, different techniques become tools that you can use almost without thinking, switching from one to the other, depending on what the subject and the drawing call for. When you're starting out, or working on developing a particular technique, it is important to identify what you are trying to achieve, and know what you need to do to get that result.

Very often I see drawings where the artist is trying to create a very photo-realist effect, but they've fallen into the trap of using heavy outlines. Take a look at an object around you - say, your computer monitor. Notice how the light is brighter on one side than the other, and where they meet, at the corner, there is a line. But is that line a dark black? No, it is an illusion! You only see that line because the light changes suddenly along that edge.

Tonal drawing requires a very different approach to sketching with line. Instead of looking at the edges, we have to observe the areas of tone across an object and draw these with shading, allowing the changes of tone to show the edges. This illustrated article on shading with graphite pencil explains in more detail how to switch from line-drawing to value-drawing.

More on Value Drawing:
Shading with Graphite Pencil - value vs line
Bettter Graphite Pencil Drawing - tips
Graded and Continuous Shading - value exercise
Newspaper Shading - fun value drawing activity
Soft Shading - working from middle values