How Does The Shading Lesson That Made My Art Career Possible Work?

This shading lesson helps you go from drawing flat shapes to making pictures look real, like they’re right in front of you.

Imagine you're coloring a picture of an apple with crayons. If you color the whole apple red, it looks flat, like it's made of paper. But if you shade one side darker and leave the other lighter, it starts to look like a real apple, round, bumpy, and sitting on a table.

That’s what this lesson teaches: how to use shading to make things look three-dimensional, just like when light hits an object in real life. One part gets more light, so it's brighter; the other part is in shadow, so it's darker.

Think of a toy car rolling across the floor. When the light shines on it from above, one side is bright and shiny, while the bottom is dark because it’s touching the floor. That’s how shading works, you’re pretending the light is shining on your drawing just like it does in real life.

You can use pencils, crayons, or even markers to make these changes in brightness. The more pressure you put on the pencil, the darker the shade gets. It’s like pressing harder on a crayon to color a bigger part of the picture, except now you're making things look real.