Lesson video

Hi, I'm Miss Miah.

I will be guiding you through today's lesson.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Let's get started.

In this lesson, you'll be creating a tonal study of a sculpture.

Your keywords are on the screen now, and I'd like you to repeat them after me.

Sketch/sketching, shade/shading, tone, blending.

Fantastic, let's find out what these words mean.

Sketch/sketching: making quick and simple drawings to show ideas or the things we see.

Shade/shading: drawn marks to show areas of light and dark.

Tone: how light or dark something is.

Blending: mixing colours or shades together smoothly.

Now, you may have come across some of these keywords before.

If you have, fantastic.

If you haven't, that's absolutely fine.

The key point here is I would love for you to use these keywords as you're describing your work so we can talk like an artist.

Let's move on.

So this lesson is all about creating a total sketch of the sculpture that you have created.

We have two lesson cycles.

In our first lesson cycle, you'll be practising shading and sketching, and then you're going to move on to apply your shading techniques.

I'm super excited for this lesson.

I hope you are too.

So let's get started.

Now, you may remember assembling a sculpture of a creature.

Do you remember what a sculpture is? So it'll be a very good idea to have your sculpture next to you.

Now if you don't have your sculpture next to you, you could use your friend's sculpture or have an item that you would like to draw.

Today, you'll be creating tonal studies of it.

Now on the screen, you can see a sculpture of a bird and a drawing of a bird.

This drawing of the sculpture be improved.

What do you think? Adding tone makes a drawing more realistic on three dimensional.

So we're taking something that can appear like flat and making it look more realistic.

This way, it looks more visually pleasing.

Now there's no right or wrong answer, but by practising these skills, you want to make a drawing look more realistic.

Having tone is the way to go.

Now, you may remember seeing something like this.

Hmm, so tone is how light or dark something is.

In drawing, we can use tone to make a drawing look more three dimensional.

We can describe the tones by using the terms dark tone, midtone, and light tone.

So here right at the top, we can see the dark tone.

If you remember how to achieve a dark tone using your pencil, hmm, Midtone, but we can see that it's slightly more lighter than the dark tone.

Do you remember how to achieve a midtone using colouring pencils or pencils? And lastly, we can see an example of light tone right at the bottom, and it's even lighter than the midtone.

Now, to get from dark tone to midtone, you would have to apply less pressure.

And that's the same for midtone to light tone.

Applying less pressure each time.

Now artists can use a variety of lines to make their drawings more realistic.

On the screen here, we've got an example of straight lines.

We've got dots, scattered lines, curved lines, thick and thin lines, scribbled lines.

So it's up to you as an artist to choose which type of line you'll use when.

It's all about the effect that you want to achieve for your drawing.

Onto some practise.

We can use any type of mark making tool for this.

I do: shade in one direction without gaps using the side of your pencil.

And you can see some examples on the screen here.

Can you see how different amounts of pressure has been used? I wonder if you can do the same.

You do: shade in one direction without gaps using the side of your pencil.

You can pause the video here.

Once you've had a turn to experiment using different pressures as well, press play.

So how did you do? Well, shading in one direction without gaps creates a smooth and even tone.

Making the drawing look neater and more realistic.

You make it easier to blend the shading when the strokes are consistent.

That is true.

The shades aren't consistent.

Blending becomes a little bit more difficult and you may not achieve the effect that you wanted.

Let's move on.

I do: shade from light to dark and dark to light.

Here's my example.

Now remember, to achieve a dark tone, you have to apply more pressure.

And then as you go along on your shading, slowly release that pressure.

And you should end up with something like this.

This is known as a gradient.

You do: shade from light to dark and dark to light.

You can pause the video here and click play when you're ready to rejoin us.

So how did you do? Pressing harder or lighter with the pencil changes the tone gradually.

I do: shade using blending techniques to create smooth transitions.

Here's an example.

Use a light touch with your pencil or blending tool to smooth out any of the strong lines between light and dark areas.

You do: shade using blending techniques to create smooth transitions.

You can pause the video here and click play when you're ready to rejoin us.

So how did you do? You may have used a blending stump, a cotton bud or your finger to help soften any sharp lines and create a smooth transition.

I remember when I was younger, I used to find this quite difficult.

I found that using my finger was the easiest option for me, but I didn't always get it quite right.

So by experimenting using cotton bud or even a blending stump really helped me to understand that I didn't always have to use my finger to blend.

Onto the main task for your lesson cycle.

So this task, you are going to pick a simple object.

This could be a small ball or a block, and you're going to be practising your shading techniques.

I'm going show you these examples again.

So shading, creating a gradient, blending, stippling.

Sofia says, "I'll blend my shading gently to avoid harsh lines, especially where light and shadow meet." So you'll be doing this by picking a simple object and then applying the techniques you see on the screen here.

You could also experiment using colour.

You could pause the video here.

Off you go, have fun.

Click play when you're ready to rejoin us.

So how did you do? You may have drawn something like this, and you may have also used a blending stump, cotton bud, or your finger to help to blend with different tones; used your pencil on the side to avoid harsh lines; and used different shading techniques for different areas.

Well done if you managed to blend and use different shading techniques to make your drawing look more realistic.

Now I'd like you to hold onto these skills for the next part of this lesson.

We're going to be applying our shading techniques.

Let's go.

Jun and Sofia begin to create a tonal study of their sculpture, and we can see a bird sculpture on the screen there.

I wonder what Jun has to say about this.

Jun says, "I'm going to place the sculpture in front of me, make sure I have a clear view from different angles." Sofia replies, "Good idea, I'm going to look closely in light and dark areas of the sculpture." That's super important.

When we're drawing from observation, we want to be able to observe where the light is hitting the object and where the darker parts are.

By identifying this, we then as an artist know where to apply more pressure using our mark making tools to achieve a more realistic drawing.

Now, an artist might start sketching the basic shapes of the sculpture.

We can see here that geometric shapes like circles or rectangles can be used for the main parts.

And we can see here that a circle has been used for the bird's head and a triangle has been used for the bird's beak.

Non-geometric shapes can also be used for details.

Now, you may remember that long geometric shapes are shapes that are not uniform and can be found in nature.

Now, in order to draw your sculpture, you're going to begin by lightly sketching the basic shapes and outline.

Try and focus on the proportions and main details such as the contours of the body, wings, or legs.

Over to you.

Choose a sculpture below and discuss with a partner which organic and geometric shapes you would use to sketch it.

Your options are either using a circle, a rectangle, oval, lines, but I think you might need to use a combination of quite a few of them.

So you can pause the video here, and once you're ready to rejoin us, click play.

What did you discuss? Well, we can see that there are three sculptures, different creatures here.

Here we've got a spider, a snake, and a bird.

And I would argue that you would have to combine quite a few geometric and non-geometric shapes to sketch it.

For the spider, an oval could be used for the body and organic curving lines for the legs.

For the snake, wavy lines and organic shapes could be used.

Lastly, for the bird, a circle could be used for the head and an oval for the main body.

If you manage to identify other shapes to use for these animals, as long as they loosely match the body of the sculpture.

Let's move on.

Now once the sketches are complete, you can add tone using the shading techniques we practised earlier.

Jun asks, "Should we start with the light areas or the dark ones first?" Hmm, that's actually a really good question, Jun.

Sofia replies, "It's best to start with the light areas first, then gradually build up the darker tones." Why do you think that's the case? Well, say if we did start with the darker tones and we worked our way to the lighter parts, we made a mistake.

It might be a little bit tricky to rub it all out, which means our drawings may not look as realistic as intended.

So it's best to start with the lighter areas and then gradually build the darker tones.

Let's move on.

Some drawing exercises.

I do: select one part of your sculpture and shade it.

You could: blend, shade using midtones; use a gradient.

Now when you're selecting one part of your sculpture, pretend you have telescope and you're zooming into one area.

You could use a viewfinder for this view.

You find it easier.

Focus on the head of your sculpture.

You do: you can pause the video here and click play once you've shaded one part of your sculpture.

So how did you do? Well, you may have drawn something like this.

Jun says, "I have added shading to the eye area using circular lines.

I tried to use a gradient with dark tone at the centre." And we can see that the eye looks far more realistic than the rest of the body because of this technique.

Andeep and Sofia look over their sketch.

What could they improve? Jun says, "Adding colour will make it look livelier and show more detail." Uh-oh, Sofia says, "I tried matching the colours I saw on my sculpture to my drawing and added in extra details like buttons." Over to you.

True or false? Blending is only useful when shading with pencil and does not work well with coloured pencils.

Hmm, what do you think? You can pause the video here and click play when you've got the answer.

So how did you do? If you got false, well done.

Blending works really well with coloured pencils too.

You can use a blending tool or even your finger to smooth out colours, creating soft transitions and a more realistic look.

Onto the main task for this lesson cycle.

I'd like you to create a tonal study of your sculpture.

To do this, you're going to sketch the basic outline, focusing on key features like the head, body, and limbs, or wings, legs, and head.

It really depends on your sculpture and what features it has.

Then, you're going to shade in one direction, keeping the lines smooth.

And you can do this by using the side of the pencil for softer tones and blend from light to dark for smooth transitions.

Try and focus on the light areas, midtones, and shadow areas to create depth.

And you could use colour.

After you've created your tonal study of your sculpture, I'd like you to discuss with a partner what you may have found challenging and why.

You can pause the video here and click play when you're ready to rejoin us.

So how did you do? I really hope you enjoyed creating your tonal study of your sculpture using some of the techniques that we explored in this lesson.

You may have drawn something like this.

Now with your partner, you may have discussed something along the lines of this.

Andeep says, "It was hard to avoid harsh lines, especially when I was blending the darker areas.

I think I need to practise more." And actually Andeep, with more practise, you are right.

It'll become easier to avoid those harsh lines if we keep practising and try to start with the lighter areas first.

Sofia says, "I found blending tricky because I wasn't sure how hard to press with my pencil to get a smooth look." Hmm, what advice might you give to Sofia for that? Again, it really helps practise with these techniques.

And over time, you'll find that you'll become more confident with shading, especially if you use the side of your pencil.

First it may feel a little awkward, but with more practise, you'll get there.

Fantastic, we've made it to the end of the lesson.

Let's summarise our learning.

In this lesson, you made a tonal study for your sculpture.

You now understand that tone refers to the light and dark areas of an object or artwork.

You also understand that using the side of a pencil helps create smoother, softer shading.

Shading in one direction ensures that there are no gaps or harsh edges.

Lastly, you understand that blending from light to dark creates smooth transitions and realistic tones.

Thank you so much for joining me in this unit of lessons.

I really hope you enjoyed creating your sculpture and also creating a tonal study of it, bye.