Stop Using Black to Shade Your Art!

Hello there! It’s time for some more cold hard concrete heckin drawing tips. Motivational mental musings are great for any kind of occasion when you’re stuck, but today I wanna address something that you can very possibly try right away. This video is about a mistake that I think everyone has made when learning aspects of art, shading in particular. What can vary is how long you commit to making this mistake. But there’s always room to change. And I’m just going to be blunt.

Do. Not. Shade. With. Black!

Wha? This seems out of the blue… right? Out of the blue indeed… blue would be a much better color for shading than black! OK, fine, what the heck am I talking about? If you’re learning to start shading your drawings, you’re probably going to begin learning a lot of things that’ll quickly overwhelm you. Different types of light! Reflections! Ambient occlusion! Shadows! It’s totally natural to start trying things out and just reach for a dark pencil or color to get started. And if you’re sketching with a gray graphite pencil, pressing harder with that pencil to make darker shades seems like the right thing to do. And it is! But only for that pencil sketch.

Also, hi! My name’s Kanjon and I’m a wiggly creature that likes to talk about art. If you’ve come here from my shorts or a fresh recommendation, I encourage you to browse around and see if you’d be interested in learning to draw! Absolutely anyone can begin, it truly is just a skill that you build and practice. Boop that subscribe button and share with your friends; it really helps a ton!

Where’s the trouble? Color. Once you start to add color to a piece, you’ve begun the first steps of bringing it to life! That’s awesome. So when you start to shade things, whether this is a full render, cel-shaded, or just a few shadow markings, as soon as you reach for black, or any grayscale color really, you’re actually taking that color away from your art again. I’ll show you here! Look at this beach ball. Imagine it at a… well… warm sunny beach, bright blue skies. Let’s get out our black brush and add some shadows. Hmm… well, it did shadow it, but it’s not looking so great. There’s still technically some color there, but it’s so dark that it might as well be grayscale. If I shade it enough it turns totally black. Which isn’t really too surprising, because it’s a black paintbrush! That’s what it does. Turning the layer opacity down makes this less intense, but it still has that drab color-removing appearance.

Look at this traditional version! Same thing. Graphite over marker, it just turns gray. These colored parts shouldn’t look like that. It’s all muddied up. Bleh! What the heck do you do, then? How are you supposed to be shading? First we’ll talk about some color theory… but I’ll also give you some easy tricks to use in your art without thinking too hard about it.

So what’s a shadow made of? It’s really what it isn’t made of: light. A shadow happens when light is missing. In a dark scene with exactly one light, and no other surfaces, an object in shadow will yes, be completely dark. But even in a dark studio environment that’s near-impossible to achieve. The shadowed side of an object is still lit up by light bouncing back off of the floor, off the walls. And this is what happens everywhere: even on a bright sunny day, your stark shadow isn’t pitch black. It’s lit up by reflections of the sky, plants and trees around you, buildings, even grass nearby. Light bounces around everywhere, lighting our world up. That light isn’t made of gray. It’s made of the colors of everything around you.

My favorite book on this subject is Color and Light by James Gurney. It’s a genuinely fascinating book that shows so many ways light works in a scene to produce color, and how artists have used that over the years. It’s also filled with tons and tons of artwork of some cool heckin DINOSAURS and you could even get it for that aspect alone. If you do find yourself into the weeds of figuring out how to color a complex scene, I highly recommend it.

There’s some easy tricks we can try that don’t require a complete understanding of theory or need to ray-trace every aspect of your scene. One of my favorites is this: if you’ve got an outdoor scene, shade using the color of your sky. That’s usually the biggest ambient light source when your sun is blocked. Usually this means blue, but you can get some really rich shadows with orange and purple tones at sunset too. Be gentle; work lightly traditionally and use a low opacity layer digitally. In fact, if you are trying this out digitally, I use this exact trick in my Digital Dabbles series. I’ll link that video now! Sky blue on a multiply layer gives you nice rich shadows that show off your art with some style.

Another popular method to approach this is to shift the hue of whatever you’re actively shading. Orange becomes a darker red. Green starts to tint yellow. Just the slightest change can make some bold but nice stylistic eye candy. Is this physically accurate? No, but it does look really cool and can be a neat stylistic marker in your pieces. Way more visually interesting than losing color in your shadows. If you’re clever, you can use some digital tricks to make this process easier. Taking your colored layer, or even a screenshot of it, duplicating into a new layer, hue-shift that, and use a mask to paint that hue-shifted variant back on to your piece. I know I didn’t spend a ton of time explaining that here, but it’s not entirely the point of this video. I can break that down in another video later if you all are interested.

One more, if you just want something really easy: shade with the same color as the character, just a little darker. Only a little! It’s not the most eye-popping of results, but it’s way better than shading with black, helps preserve your colors, and lets you focus on practicing tone and value without having to think too hard. If you’re working digitally and know how to use a Multiply layer, try that for some free automatic color blending that works well with shadows. Again, I talk more about this in Digital Dabbles. And hey, by all means, if you find a creative way to shade that I’ve not shared here, share some thoughts in the comments. There’s lots of ways to go about this.

In fact, this isn’t an absolute rule. If you’re making some bold few-toned stylized piece, stark markings of gray and black amidst vibrant colors can work well, but it’s rare to see, and chances are if you’re an artist that can do that well you don’t need the advice of this video. And of course, I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this but if I don’t I’ll get snarky comments: you can shade with black and gray on a pencil sketch. You’re already using grayscale, you’re not removing color by shading with darker grays. Grayscale drawings can be a great practice of values, which will further strengthen your rendering and shading skills. Gray drawings get gray shading. Color drawings get color shading.

Anyway, I’ve already rambled way more than I meant to on this, but this is one of those things I see people get confused about enough that I felt it was worth explaining. If you’ve been shading with black, don’t feel bad about it, we’ve all done it. Instead, try to get excited at a new skill you just unlocked! If you’ve got some cool tricks to share yourself, leave a comment! Chase that passion with some vibrant color in your artwork. I’ll see ya!