Shading in Photoshop

Today was quite an important lesson for me. We were going to learn how shading works on different areas of an object. As I have mentioned before, I really do struggle when it comes to this side of digital drawing. I find this quite strange as I have never really done that bad when it comes to regular drawing on a sketch book, its just transferring those skills over to the computer which seems to be my biggest problem.

We started off by watching a half an hour tutorial by a famous concept artist. It was interesting to see what he was saying, as he obviously came from the industry and knew what he was talking about.

After the video had finished, we took what he said and transferred it onto an activity that had been set to us by Steve. The aim was to get these two cubes and do them as two different types of shading that had been shown to us in the video.

My finished result.

What I did was create a scale of all the different types of grey ranging from pure white to pitch black. As you can see I measured them from percentage. This tells you the amount of black that was put into each white to create the grey.

You use the lightest grey on the opposite side of the shadow, then on the darkest side you separate it by 50%. The shadow is ten percent lighter than the darkest side, withe the top being 20% darker than the lightest side.

This has been good for me. Its helping understand how to shade much better, though, I do have to do a lot more practice, if I am ever to get good at this. It will be a long task, but it will be worth it for the end result.