Like tissues at the microscope: shading exercise

In order to comprehend the shading effects in a drawing, it’s very useful working on the perception of the depth. Adding shadows on a flat drawing helps our perception in seeing the three-dimensional effects of the depth. It’s a sort of “magic”: we can understand the different layers just if the shadows are in the right spots.

I’m glad to show here below a great video tutorial from  theartproject chad brown. Chad Brown is an art teacher who created this tutorial for his students, to explain this project in his class. He has  made the video of the process and his students use it to make their pieces. This is a great idea and I look forward to watching other Chad’s video. Have a look at he video and enjoy!

I created this drawing with students of grade 7th. We started drawing the first layer with a pencil. We drew some kind of perforated membrane, like a ribbon with rounded corners. We have sketched few layers of these membrane and we have shaded them with colored pencils. The trick is to create a shadow every time that a ribbon goes under another one. The ribbon above creates a cast shadow on the ribbon below, so we can see the depth of the layers.

We used a different color for every layer: after we have drawn 3-4 layers we have colored the background with a black marker, to emphasize the depth.