The example at left is shaded with the point, at right, with the side. The difference doesn’t show up clearly in the scan, but you can see that the side shading has a grainier, softer look and covers a large area quickly (a chisel-point pencil will also give this effect). Using a sharp point to shade allows you more control, you can do much finer work, and get a greater range of tone out of the pencil. Experiment with both to see how they look on your paper. Try shading with hard and soft pencils, too. This article is copyright of Helen South. If you see this content elsewhere, they are in breach of copyright law. This material is NOT open source or public domain. Now, if you are shading an object, even if your shading is more even and the pencil marks less obvious, this effect is still there - just more subtly. You can use it, to create a suggestion of an edge or a change of plane. But it will also suggest a change of plane even if you don’t intend it to. You don’t want to randomly change direction in the middle of an area. The eye will read it as ‘meaning’ something. Control the direction of your shading. Try shading an object in various ways: using no visible direction (circular shading), one continuous direction, few big changes, and many subtle changes. In the second example, the direction of shading follows the perspective correctly, with the angle changing gradually so that it is always along an orthogonal (vanishing line). With a practiced eye, you can do this by instinct, or, as you see in the example, you can draw subtle guidelines back to the vanishing point first. The right panel of this box is shaded vertically. This doesn’t accentuate the foreshortening as perspective shading does, but it also doesn’t fight against it. Another good option is to use circular shading and avoid creating any directional movement at all.
