With the peach coloured pencil, shade the most part of the figure, leaving shine on the skin where the light would hit it. Remember to let your light flow with how the body is shaped, and figure out what side the light is hitting, otherwise the shading won't work. The peach is just a base coat, so don’t worry if it looks quite orange at this stage, its NORMAL! And it will even look more orange as you go along.
Step two: The Honey coloured pencil
Most people I know skip this stage. However I feel that to move on the step three without this part, makes the drawing lack impact. The whole point of having these 5 steps is to create impact with shading and it will not look what you want it to be like if you miss any out.
With this pencil, do the same, avoiding the shine areas, but don’t go as far in as the peach has, leave a bit of space. REMEMBER…you are creating shade! What is the point in doing the peach stage if you go over it in honey? Let us SEE the peach as well as the honey. Go lighter towards the shine areas, and darker for the shaded areas.
Step three: The light/mid brown pencil.
This is the stage that most people get annoyed at. IT’S NOT ORANGE! It only looks orange because of how light the back round is, once you add hair and eyes, back round etc it will look fine, don’t give up on it!
Do the same with this pencil, not going over the honey, only this time, concentrate more on the shaded areas than the light parts, this gives a good base for steps 4 and 5.
Step four and five: The dark brown and the black pencil.
These two steps I have put together because they are very similar, so much so that you don’t really have to use the black, but I feel it gives better definition. With the dark brown, use it again mostly on the shaded areas, don’t go too into the skin otherwise it will perhaps look too dark. Pay attention to detail when doing between arms, under neck and around the hair line.
For the black pencil, it is completely up to you. Some don’t feel comfortable using it because it apparently ‘dulls’ the picture. I personally would only use it on the very inner deep shades, just to define it, nothing more.
Once you have the rest of the picture completed, the skin tone will look fine. It only looks dark because the back round is so pale. to prove this, i have the finished result of this drawing, to show you that it DOES turn out ok:
Stumble!
