This is my first selfmade drawing:




and here are two other drawings I have done recently:




I realise that I have to learn a lot of different things to make the drawings look better. Could you please give me some advice how I should start with practising to become better shadings in my pictures?

Thanks very much in advance for all you advice and critics.

Cheers Dan

These are pretty impressive Dan. Not sure I could get this standard at the moment! As for advice! Just keep doing what you are doing. Practice is vital to make improvements.

Hi Dan! For just starting out you're doing great. I especially like the Claudette. If you'd like to learn to shade better, you might want to try some of the first lessons offered here at Drawspace. They cover the basics of hatching and shade graduations, and they really help to establish a solid foundation for improvement. I look forward to seeing more of your work in the months to come! -Mindy

your lessons are coming along quite nicely

Thanks everyone for the positiv feedbacks. I really like to improve my shading and hatching skills.
I think that will help a lot to improve my drawings.

The other thing I'm planing to do is to get differnet pencil types. At the moment I just have one HB pencil but I think it would help a lot in regards of shading and hatching with different kind of pencils.

Thanks again for all your comments.

Cheers Dan

Fantastic drawings, Dan! Your start is really impressive, keep on practising. One thing I would suggest is to use drawing paper, because those squares on the paper you're using now may distract you from clearly seeing the values in your drawing. And the drawings look much nicer when there are no squares on them

Nice job on these. With the first one it looks like you were trying for the cartoonish look correct?? That one is cute. The remaining 2 it looks like you were going for a realistic look. If that's the case here are some tips. Try not to draw so much with lines. Lines always make drawings look flat and cartoony. Instead, try drawing more with shading to define areas. I have lots of drawing tutorials on my website if you'd like to check them out. They may help you some.

Hello siksnosparnyte

Thanks very much for you advice. I will organise a new sketch book with no lines.

Hello golfiscool

Thanks very much for your advice.

The first image shows a cartoon caracter I tried to copy from another picture.
All three pictures are from tutorial lessons here in drawspace. I tried to copy the picture with a grid as acurate as possible from the original. I checked your website and I found a lot of usefull tutorials for hatching and shading.
I will start a new project in the next couple of days and I hope I will be able to implement some of the shading technics in this new project.

Cheers Dan

A good way to work on your shadeing skills is to get a egg, or white ball, and draw it from different light angles. Like with light hitting it from the top, then from the side, on so on. When you've done that a few times get a box of somekind and draw it a few different times with different light sources. Then mix them together with eggs and boxes togeteher in the same picture. You can learn from just drawing pictures of anything, but this way you really don't care about the subject, just the shadeing, so you can relax and just draw.

Hello pencilnhand,

Thanks very much for your advice. I just started a new project but after that I will definitaly go ahead with your advice.

Cheers Dan