MOST UNDERRATED Drawing Technique for Beginners

Hey everybody, welcome back to my channel. In today's video, I'm going to be going through one of the most underrated drawing techniques for beginners. And I'm going to be demonstrating this technique using this drawing that I created of Jimin from BTS. So the materials that I'm going to use for this technique are just two pencils. I'll be using a black and white pastel pencil, but you can use charcoal, colored pencil, or any medium for this technique. It doesn't really matter. I'll also be using a Tombow mono eraser, but you can use any stick eraser. And for blending, I'll be using a cotton bud and a blending stump. And I'll also be using some tissue as well in certain areas. But you can just use whatever blending tools you have. And don't worry if you don't have a stick eraser, you can use any eraser you have as well. So this technique is using toned paper for your drawings. Toned paper is a great way for beginners to practice learning how to create contrast in their drawing and how to build up different values. Because with toned paper, you are starting with a mid-tone value. You're already having that middle value down. So all you have to do is build up your shadows and your highlights. And this is a really good challenge and a great way to practice building up your shadows and your highlights to really make your drawing pop. And it's even more important when you're doing realistic drawing, because with realism, it is so vital that you get in your values accurate to the reference, otherwise it won't stand out or look realistic. So for this technique, I just used two pencils, and that's all you should use to get a feel for this technique and to really try and build up your confidence with picking your values and creating more contrast in your artwork. I feel like a lot of beginners get too bogged down with adding lots of detail to their art, and that's how they feel they're going to get really realistic results. Whereas in actuality, if you don't have your values accurate and you really don't have many shadows or highlights in there, then your drawing is going to look flat, it's not going to look 3D, and it's going to lack that realism. So this is a great technique because it helps you to practice those key skills that you will need for all of your drawings, no matter what style you are using. So like I said, I only used two pencils for this, a black pencil to get in the darkest shadows and a white pencil for the highlights. And all you have to worry about is blocking in the shadows and highlights that you can see in your reference. And you've already got that mid-tone value there, so you've got to try and identify which areas are darker than that tone of the paper and which areas are lighter. And you are really just sculpting a really 3D-looking drawing if you do it this way. So I'm using pastel pencils, but you can use charcoal pencils, coloured pencils, whatever you want. It really doesn't matter. All that matters is that you have a white and a black pencil. That's all that matters. And I'm going to run through how I use these supplies with this technique to give you an overview of how you can start and approach this technique yourself. So I've just finished the hair and I will talk you through now how I go in and work on the face. The way I like to do it is I start off with the shadows. So I will look at my reference and go through each area and try and identify which parts of the face are darker than that tone of the paper. And normally that will be the eyebrows, the eyes, especially the pupils and the nostrils and parts of the mouth, but it really depends on your reference. Now, it's so important that you don't go in and cover every inch of this paper with your pastels or your pencils, because the whole point is that you want to utilise the tone of the paper and only be adding your pencils to the areas that are really dark in your reference and really bright. So I started off by filling in the eyebrows and the eyes and I blend out the shading as I go using a cotton bud, especially for the skin or for little details like the eyes, I use the blending stump and this helps to really smooth out the pastel and it gives you a really nice, smooth look without any graininess and this really helps with the realism as well. And then once I've done that, I decide whether I need to go and build up a second layer of shading, still using that black pencil, or whether it's fine as it is. Sometimes I don't even add pastel directly to the paper, I just simply use any excess that's left on the cotton bud or the blending stump to help add a really subtle shadow to any areas of the skin, particularly like the contours of the skin on the nose, on the tip of the nose, anything like that. For example, I'm just using the charcoal while the pastel on the blending stump to add some shading to the lips and this is a great way to get those really smooth values without having to worry about getting any graininess and grainy shading on the paper. I'm using the pastel pencil to darken up the center line of the mouth and the outer corners and also to add some shading to the top lip as well. But I'm really being intentional about where I use this black pastel and it's unlike working on white paper where you're simply trying to darken everything up, you've already got the lightest value. So with white paper, all you're doing is darkening things up. With this paper, you will need to add your highlights and you'll need to only darken certain areas. So this is a great way to practice contrast because with white paper, you can't go any lighter. So you really have to try and preserve your highlights whereas with this, you can intentionally add them in using your pencils. I like to get in the darkest color first because if I go in with all my highlights and then try and add dark shading, you could potentially go and smudge over your highlights and get them all gray and dirty. So I like to leave the highlights as the last step with my drawing process so that they stay really nice and bright. For example, when I did the hair, I did the highlights at the last sort of step. And I work from the top to the bottom of my drawing to really help prevent smudging as well. I'm also adding some shading to his chin and also to the neck as well. And once you've done that, we'll be ready to go in and add the highlights. But before we move on to the next step, if you want to see how I created this drawing and this technique in real time, then the full real-time tutorial for this drawing as well as over 300 other real-time tutorials are available over on my Patreon for just a small amount per month. You'll get access to tutorials for not only charcoal, but also colored pencil, watercolor, and much more. And you'll get all the resources you need to follow along with these tutorials. But if a monthly membership isn't right for you or you just want to focus on improving your black and white drawing skills, then over on my website, I've got lots of individual courses to help you master drawing realistically. I've got a whole course for drawing portraits in charcoal and also one for drawing animals in charcoal as well. Also, if you want to get all of those courses, then I have got a bundle that includes three charcoal courses that you can really use to master and build confidence with these techniques. If you're interested in any of my courses, you can use the code SAV15 to get 15% off at checkouts. And I'll leave a link to my Patreon and my course website in the description below. But let's get straight back into the tutorial. And now we are building up the highlights. And this is definitely my favorite part of this whole technique because this is when the drawing really starts to pop. Before we add in the highlights, all we had was the shadows and the mid-tones. But the highlight really is that final sort of cherry on top of the cake to really build up that 3D look in your drawing that we really want to make it look realistic. And for this drawing, a lot of the highlight was on the left side of his face as well as the side of his nose. And I really do look at each area specifically and identify any areas in my reference that are lighter than the tone of my paper. And really, you shouldn't have any of that black pastel on the areas that you want to go in and add the white pastel. But if you do, then it's okay. You can use your eraser, your Tombow Mono eraser or a kneaded eraser to lift up any charcoal that's accidentally got on the areas that you want to brighten up with the white pastel. Because if you don't do that, then the white can mix with the black pastel and you can end up with getting really muddy gray highlights which is not what you want. And then I make sure to use a clean cotton bud, a new one, not the one that we used to blend the black pastel. And I use this to blend out all of the white pastel in exactly the same way I did the first time. And as you can see, we've got really nice soft highlights and the highlights has really helped to add a lot of depth to our drawing. So once you've done that, you can go in with the white pastel and build up even more highlights because once you've blended out, you may feel like you need to go brighter in certain areas like I have here. I wanted to go brighter just above the lips, the tip of the nose, and you can add in the tiny highlights within the eyes as well. And like I said, there was a lot of highlights on the left side of his face. So I really wanted to make sure that that area looked really bright. And once you've done that, you can go in and tweak any areas that you think you need to. I really like to take this time to compare my drawing to the reference and study to see if there's any areas that I need to make darker or any highlights that I need to brighten up a bit more. And this is such a great technique to practice if you are a beginner to drawing because you really do have to pay a lot of attention to your values when you're using toned paper. Now, the last thing to do with this drawing is just to finish off by drawing in his clothing. And you can see that no matter which area I am drawing, I'm using the exact same process. I start off by using the black pastel and I will be using the black pastel quite a lot throughout his clothes because they were very dark. He was wearing a very dark jacket and then a frilly sort of collar. It looked really, really nice. I loved the pattern of his jacket as well. It had lots of lighter sort of patterns to it. It was really cool. But I'm just adding the shading with my black pastel, blending it out with my blending stump to make sure it's nice and smooth. And then once again, once I've blended it with that blending stump, we can go in and identify whether we need to add another layer of black pastel to make it even darker. Don't be afraid to build it up in layers because after your first layer, after you've blended it out, it may not be dark enough yet. So keep going in and building up your shading with your black pastel until it is dark enough. It's so important that we get the shadows as dark as they need to be. And the same thing with the highlights. It's so important that we get the brightest highlights as bright as they need to be as well. So I'm just finishing off by adding some shadows to the collar. And now, because I wanna add a bit more shine to the jacket, I'm going in with that eraser and I'm lightly lifting up some of that black pastel in areas where I wanna add more shine to the clothing and also where that pattern is going to be to prep it for the white pastel. And finally, I'm going in with that white pastel just to add the highlights to the clothing, the little patterns on the jacket. And that is pretty much it for this tutorial and for this technique. I really recommend giving it a go. And if you do, I'd love to see your work. You can tag me on Instagram and I'd love to see what you guys create. I'll leave my Instagram in the description as well and it will be in the end screen. Thank you guys for watching. I really hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you're new around here and even tick that bell icon so you do get notified on my future videos. But that is it from me and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye, everybody.