Another great way to introduce shadow into your drawing is to use texture, and to create darkness and light through the use of texture. And you can do this through something like stippling, or cross hatching, or wood graining and some of the things that we've already touched on. But it's important to find your own style of texture and to really experiment with what you're doing on the page so that you can come up with your own ways of texturing and creating what you see. And yes, there are things that you can learn and there are rules that you can follow in relation to texturing. But what I really believe makes a huge difference is being able to look at an image or a surface that you are wanting to recreate and creating your own way of doing that creating your own style of texturing. and building a relationship with your hand continuing to draw will really help you to do that.

As beginners we often don't use dark and light enough. It's like we're always afraid to put too much onto the page because we're afraid of ruining our drawing. And what I encourage you to do as a beginner, is to go one step further with your shattering, go one step darker. And also learn what your medium whatever medium, you're you you're working with, learn what is the darkest that that medium can be a what is the lightest that that medium can be? So what is the shade of the other scale of the shading that your medium can do? And with a graphite pencil, we'll talk about this more in exploring mediums.

But you have different levels of graphite pencils. So find out what is the darkest level of that. And what is the lightest level even when you're working in color. This is a great exercise. So make sure that you're exploring that full depth in that full capacity that your medium has. Also, what textures does the paper create with that medium.

So when you're working with different papers, they can be really interesting for creating different textures. So always do a test page on the paper that you're planning on doing your drawing on and use the inherent nature of the paper the inherent texture of the paper to enhance your drawing and enhance, enhance your rendering style. There's also some funky ways of creating texture by putting paper over surfaces and rubbing leaf textures for example, for example, I won't go into that today, but you could experiment with that at home if you wish. But some textures work better with different mediums as well. For example, pen can work really well with some more sort of scratchy styles of rendering and texturing whereas a graphite pencil will make much softer rendering. So you can also use the choice of medium to influence your end result in your texturing.

Shadow and texture are complements to each other and should be thought of as part of the same family. Regardless of what type of text you recreating. I believe the best way to use texture is by applying the heaviest texture to the shadow areas and tapering off the texture to the lighter areas. So I want to introduce you to a favorite principle of mine called advancing and receding color. And we can use the principle of advancing receding color to add even more three dimensionality to our drawings. And as a basic principle, it goes as warm colors advance and cool colors received.

It could also be seen as light tones, advancing, and dark tones are receding. And you can see this in nature, you can look at a landscape and you can see how the warmer and the lighter tones are often in the foreground and the cooler, darker tones are in the background. And they're receding away from us. And the other thing that advances and receives in drawings is the detail the level of detail. So you will have more detail in your foreground than you will in the background and in the areas that are further away. So have a play with that principle and see if you win you By creating your drawings, you can create more lightness, more warmth and more detail in the foreground, and maybe a bit more coolness, and some less details and more haziness in the receiving areas, along on the subject of color.

It's also a really great technique to break up the use of strong color with neutral tones, whites, blacks, grays, and neutral, muddy colors as well. So another thing that you can do is have your vibrant hues in a foreground and have you sort of muddy tones in a background and help that to break up you're advancing and receding. Having a look at the work of the Impressionists will really help you to advance your knowledge on color, looking at the way that they used warm and cool colors to create shade, and to create tonal variation. Also looking at the work of Matisse, who really introduced us to the idea that you need those neutral grays and those neutral black and whites to help color have a stage to perform. form on and to be able to speak in their own pure form. The next thing we're going to do is have a textured animal and it's going to put all of these texture knowledge into practice, I encourage you to really take some time to do this drawing and enjoy the process.

For this particular exercise, I want to look at all of the different elements and how they can come together in this very dramatic looking bird, is going to be an interesting study for all of the different elements. And I've started by drawing an outline of my Eagle, so that I've got a starting point for this drawing, I was really quite careful to look at the different proportions and I've got a little bit of an outline ready to go. So the first thing I'm going to do is start at the beak and work my way Across the drawing. One thing that I think is really important when you are defining an area is to try not to have harsh lines that don't fade into anything. And this big shape is really important. So I'm just going to clean up that shape that I've already drawn by giving it quite a harsh line.

And I'm going to come back with my rubber and rub out the inside of it so that I have a clean palette to work with there on the big area. Now, how am I going to define the big area if I'm not using color, and I have the same background as I do foreground or negative spaces, I do positive space with the big so the only way to get depth and dimension into the big is to do a little bit of shading. Now before I start shading, my drawing, I want to do a practice page or a test page and I'll grab my paper Oh Here, I my test page, I want to test out my pencil. And I want to see how dark and how light it can go. So I'm going to create an area of gradation to say that I can get really, really dark.

Oh, really light. And now I know the full depth of that my pencil is going to do and in my Eagle image, I want to save that dark area or that dark ability of the pencil for the feather area down the bottom. And so I want to be ever so soft on the bake and only shade in areas that really need it that will help define the shape of the bake as I'm shading here, and I'm looking More and more at my Eagle image and getting to know my subject better in the first couple of minutes of looking in detail at that big, I can see that there are some different areas of dark and light and without color, I need to exaggerate that ever so slightly and look at these details and bring them out in the shading, I'm still being as light as possible.

And what I can do once I get to a certain point is come back with my eraser and ever so lightly use that to further back. And just to take a little bit more off and just soften those edges. Again, I have a very dirty eraser, so I need to clean it at the bottom of the page here. And otherwise, it's not going to be great for those areas. So make sure you keep your eraser clean all the time. And I'll take some more around the front of the big here.

Really soften that off Now that I have some areas that are being defined by tone, I want to go back and start to create the texture around the eye, there's some really interesting and fine textures happening. And on my test page, I'm just going to do a little practice run at first as to what sort of dots my pencil can create. So, this is actually using the element of point in repetition and therefore it is creating a big dark pattern and I can see that I can do some quite heavy darts I can move into lighter, smaller dots. And I will do an area that I can then practice on because I feel like looking at these, the dots in and of itself is not really enough, it doesn't have enough depth and dimension. So what does it look like when I also start from a dark area and work to a light shading over it?

And that seems to work quite well once I blend both together. Can I come back and do more dots on the top as well? What happens if I reverse the effects there and do some shading first, and then dots over that? Does that look more defined? And yes, it does look more defined. And I definitely like this version much better.

So I'll start out by doing the dots all around the eye and I'll be paying particular attention and To where the fun sort of feathery his around his eyes are, because I don't want to go above his eyebrow there with the wrong texture because we'll introduce other textures to define other areas. This definitely does go down onto the beak quite a way though, and it seems to get finer and finer as it goes down the big sign need to be more delicate. We're going to come back and do the shading in this area here in a minute. I just want to show you what I like to call the transition in technique and when we're going from this area and the eye into the feathers. We want the Whether it's to introduce that element of line, so I'm just going to start practicing here with a bit of a feather technique.

So I'm just going to see what it looks like when I try and do diagonals. And if you look closely at the ego or not, when you draw a typical feather, it would look, you know, like this, and you would have the stalk in the middle and the feathers coming off. However, we're not doing that what we're actually doing is drawing the shadows in between the feathers on this Eagle when you look really closely, the feather itself is not in the defining area. Now, I think that this diagonal effect is probably even true, definite, more definite than what I need. I really like this first set of effects that I was doing, but I just need to make sure that I can free up my hand so I can go in different directions with it. And perhaps just work a little more freely across the page.

And I think that will give my effect a bit more of a And drama and maybe if I want to take bits off later I could with my eraser and help to define areas. Yeah, we'll see how we go with that maybe a little bit. Um, it's as part of getting to know your hand as well getting to know how your hand wants to interact on the page. So I'm gonna start to transition that here around that guy, we've got more of a line effect, and then start to transition from the dots out to my feathers. In these adjoining areas, I'm going to go back to around the eye, and I'm going to really shade in some depth over that texture so that I get this nice definition of form through the variation in tone. All around here, but I maintain that dot txt applying some controlled yet random texture for all of the wide feathering areas trying to create that sort of edge of feather look but without being too precise.

So, one thing that I find with texture you can use the movement in texture to create a focal point. And if I type out the detail in this lower area and allow the detail to be more around the eye and the center part of the drawing, then we will naturally spend more time looking at this area. So therefore it creates a bit of movement to a focal point by grid dating the detailing texture. And I may come back at the end and add a bit more shading around the neck area. But before I do that I want to start working on this area down here because it's going to be quite a dark area and my hand might smudge it a little bit so I'll be quite careful of that because I may want to work back up in this area but for now this area is finished.

So I'm ready to move on to my lower part and in the eagle picture, it is quite a beautiful rich brown, and you can really just see the highlights of the tops of the feathers. So therefore I really want to look at this technique where I'm using the full gradation and depth of the darkness that my pencil can create. And I'm going to look at possibly rubbing away some areas of that to create the feather texture. Now if I use this Rubber, it's going to be there won't be enough of a corner. So I'm going to try and find a corner part of my rubber and create the thinner lines. So I think I might even get something even thinner than this one.

I'm ready to do that. But for now, I am going to start shading in this area and it's not as dark at the front of his little chest. So I'll come back and do a bit more there but I'm going to start with using long strokes and just going around the front of his body there and then I'm going to get quite dark towards the back. I will come back as well in a minute and highlight and make a stronger line of detail around the feathers. So sorry, I just had to put my book out way, I will make a stronger line in a minute around here but for now I'm going to start by getting some darkness in this area and at the bottom or the edge of the ego or I don't want to continue the drawing any further I'm going to allow that to just taper off.

Tapering off rather than creating the solid line, same as I have around here. Okay, so I finished reading in this area and added a little bit of depth at the top and I've cut an eraser with some scissors. So now I'm just gonna go through this area and create a few little V's can be quite liberal as to where they go. I've got a little bit of lightness to play with at the front there and a darkness to play with down the back. And I don't need to reference my picture perfectly. I can just go ahead and create a few lines wherever I like there's quite a few nice details at the back here.

So I just put them wherever. And that's so effective and so easy to create. I just want to put a bit more in this front area and anything that I erased too much of, I can always come back and add some more depth in between if I feel like I need and what I really like about having this jacket tying down the bottom is it's balanced by this doctor turn up around the eye area and I feel like now that I'm looking at the drawing as a whole as I get towards the end, I want to create a bit of darkness around this I will also help to lead the viewer to that area again and I'll just get a bit more darkness in this area here. And I feel like I'm done. I was going to come back and create more interest in the feathers up here, a bit more shading and darkness.

And I feel like I just want to do that in this corner a bit. And maybe add some longer strikes through here but I really like the relaxed feathering that I have done in the wine area. I know that it's not so technical. But it kind of helps with that relaxed feeling even though this guy doesn't look like he's very relaxed. He looks intense. He's got contrast.

He's got movement. He's got all of the elements there in a really balanced and sophisticated way.