Drawing and Sketching for Beginners

Step by Step: Shading – Sphere Exercise

Making marks is a fun part of the
sketching process, it can be quite
cathartic to draw a repeating pattern
with no goal other than to enjoy the
process and the environmental
disconnect that is associated with
intense concentration.
In this exercise, you will be shading a
sphere as described in the
accompanying lecture. But this time,
instead of using a single tone of overlapping hatches, you will be using a variety of ‘patterns’
to perform the shading.
The goal of this exercise if not to test how well you can replicate a certain pattern of marks,
instead, it is to test your ability to shade an object using different pencil marks, it will test
your hand-brain co-ordination and it will test your visual ability to recognize tonal regions.
Step 1: Understand the exercise
The exercise itself is simple. First fill in each of the Four boxes on the left with a different
pattern. You could use, only straight lines, scribbles, only small circles, only dots, only wavy
lines etc.
Next, using only that pattern of marks, inside the corresponding box, shade the sphere on
the right. Remember to create tonal-differences, by varying the intensity, the amount and
the sizing to suggest each of the 5 tones.
Happy Drawing!