AIDS TO BETTER DRAWING
You get yourself best in what you practice. You desire, determination and intelligence will always helps in improving your skill 
When you see your work is going wrong, try to put it correct. Obviously you will get confidence when you correct the mistakes identified by your own. This will help in improving the other areas of work If it is possible, try to watch the working methodology of other artists. Study his or her working techniques Don’t throw your work away. Preserve them. After a period of time compare your latest work with your previous work, am sure you will feel a big difference
Shadow and Light
Light creates various tonal effects on objects such as areas of light, shade, cast shadows, reflected light, highlight or bounce light, etc... The flat surface of the objects show uniform tones and the curved surfaces show tonal variations. The pattern variations depend on the surface curvature. For example we can say a cylindrical surface will show the tonal variations in lines, a conical surface will show the tonal variations in a pattern which is narrowing towards the apex and broadening at the base and spherical surfaces will show tones varying in a circular way.
Tips: A good practice in the primitives will help in drawing real world objects. The shades and shadows will help in detailing the objects.
The figure will give a clear understanding of the basic shapes and perspectives.
To represent the object in three dimensional nature the real depth should be given to the object. The real depth is obtained by giving the proper shade, cast shadow, bounce light, highlight, etc...
The cast shadow if formed by blocking the light source. The cast shadow falls outside the object. The size of the shadow will depend on the angle of the light. The size of the shadow will be small if the light is above the object and will be large when the light is in the side of the object. Also the object nearer to the light source will produce a bigger shadow and the more far object will produce smaller shadow. For an example here a spear is projected in the path of the light. By observing the figure we can see the size of the shadow for the angle of light. For creating a perfect shadow for an object, a very good understanding of light and its angles is must.
The bounce light are formed from the light of the other nearby objects. The lighting area is called as spots or highlights. These spots are perpendicular to the light source.
Tips: Newbies are recommended to use HB pencils in the starting stage, so that they can get a good hand flow in shading and strokes.
Added on: 16th Feb 2009
Filled under: Shadow, Lighting, Perspectives, Shapes
