How to create 3D drawings

Many people are thrilled when they see a three-dimensional drawing

To learn the most important principles, it is better to start with a simple drawing exercise.

Take a pencil of thickness 2b, a kneadable eraser, and a white drawing paper. In order to draw a 3D picture, you need to be familiar with tonalities. Now draw a gradual gray shading with the pencil from white (as bright as the paper) to the darkest shade you can get with this pencil. This is called a value scale:

Draw 9 equal-sized boxes on the paper, as shown above. The first field remains as white as the paper. Start with the last one, the 9th field, and shade it as dark as you can. But do not push too hard or too often with the pencil over the same place. Because when you put too much graphite then that spot will shine in the light – we do not want this effect. Even if the exercise seems easy, please do it with the utmost care. You have to make sure that you move gradually from light to dark or vice versa. Each field should be shaded evenly. To do that, work only with a sharpened pencil.

In this way, you have created a useful drawing tool while practicing shading. A value scale can be used if you are not sure how dark or bright a part of the picture must be.

The next exercise is to turn a circle into a sphere. Take your materials and draw a circle in the middle of your paper with a compass. The circle may have a diameter of 10 cm.

To turn a circle into a sphere we have to work with shades. We have to take into consideration where the light comes from. So that we can decide which side of the circle is in the light and which in the shadow.

In our example, the light comes from the top right. Therefore, the darkest area is bottom left and the brightest one top right. At the bottom left in the shade, we have a so-called reflect light. Remove with your kneadable eraser a bit of graphite from the dark drawn area.

In the end, do not forget to draw the shadow the ball creates. It is very dark and looks like an ellipse. Now, when you think about how easy was to start the drawing and how the result looks like, you´ll realize how important shading is. With a little practice, you can give a 3-D effect to all the objects you want.