How important is shading in illustration?

I work with toned art as in painting as well as straight line drawing in black and white illustration work. One question I hear sometimes is: "How important is shading in illustration?"

Line drawings tend to be flat. Depth can be added with different techniques in line work but none are as effective as shading the forms.
As in real life we see things not in lines but in shades of color. This is brought on by the way the human eye works in conjunction with the way light works as a direct source, an ambient source or as a reflective source.
My first college art professor (Alan Shaw, Oklahoma State University School of Technical Training then called OST cir.1979) that taught life drawing and anatomy was one of the most technically gifted illustrators I've encountered. Every class felt as if Albrecht Durer was standing before you sharing knowledge. And the thing he shared most often, in
fact it was his mantra..."It's all a matter of highlight and shadow." That was his secret to understanding drawing.
And to use highlight and shadow you have to have shading. Line work simply won't do.
A few of the reasons we should consider the use of shading because of this is the following: 'Spotting Blacks'
When you work on a drawing, a painting, a comic page or storyboard, etc. you want to be able to show depth. A camera captures depth-of-field but can be a poor tool if it washes out the image due to improper lighting or settings. An artist captures that same depth of field by his
use of shadows first then followed by adding highlights.

I recommend the shadows first, a building of the image from dark to light (This can be confusing by the way I say it so let me clarify, the medium you use sometimes can determine this method by it's nature for example: oil paints require you to work from dark to light as it is an
opaque medium like acrylics; watercolors like transparent dyes require you to work from light to dark building up shades in layers of color.)

What I mean is find your darks, the dark areas of the image. The shadows, the dark colored areas if there are no 'pure black' areas are what I am referring to. You want to be able to 'spot' those areas first and pay careful attention to them as these areas bounce your eye
around the image, provide balance and grounding in an image as well as creating an underlying rhythm.

They add a mass and weight in the areas that they occupy and can cause receding from the foreground. Shading by the use of shadows helps to add that third dimension in our 2D work. It is helped by highlights.

Highlights add that sense of reality to the work. We get reflections off of objects as the light source bounces off of an object helping to create it's visual form for the human eye. The closer the object to the eye the brighter the surface. As the object recedes into our depth of field it
begins to take on shades but the part closest to us is generally the brightest and the part that will have the highlights. The thing to be aware of is that light sources can create highlights in unusual ways depending on type of source and the direction along with the ambient light mix but
that is a whole other subject and I don't want to digress.

With highlights coming usually at the end of the creative process, they are sort of like the spark that Dr. Frankenstein used to animate his monster. They create that spark, that glint of reality that we expect to see in a multi-dimensional representation. The best example I can think
of to keep this short is looking at a drawing of a person's face. In portraiture the eyes are the key to capturing the person's image. And the key to bringing those eyes to life is near the end of the drawing process and we add the final detail that is known as 'catch light'. Catch light
is that little glint, that little sparkle or twinkle we see in someone's eyes. The glassy, moist, curved surface of the human eye reflects the light it is taking in and that little tiny highlight can be key. It doesn't have to be a huge mark or stroke but just that tiny little addition can bring the final work to completion.

That is why becoming a good illustrator requires more than just hand skills, it requires knowledge and keen observation as well. Letting the shades of an image create our positive and negative spaces is another key element to good composition, leading the eye around the work and providing balance and harmony in the image. Knowing how light works and how color works combined with all of the other ingredients that go into drawing, help to make an illustrator more well rounded in the skills that they posses.

Once you learn the basics of line work, you've only just begun as highlights and shadows aka shading will literally take you to that next dimension in your work.

What is the Difference in Raster and Vector Images?

Sometimes I get asked this question or a variation of it so I thought I would include a response here on the blog for everyone else who may have wondered about this topic.

"What is the difference between pixel-based images and vectors? When do you use a vector instead of pixels? Or, when would you use a pixel-based image instead of vectors?"

To make things easier in answering this question I will refer to 'pixel based images' as 'raster images'. I am more accustomed to thinking of images composed of pixels as raster format files as that is the correct terminology. Now to the nitty-gritty of this discussion. Raster images are like Vectors, unique because of the way the file types store information. They both produce a visual result but they do so by different means.

Raster images are sometimes referred to as bitmap images. The information contained in this file type is stored with a bit by bit comparison of the images that you see on your computer's monitor. Each individual pixel is part of a larger collection of pixels that compose a giant grid.
Each one of those pixels contains information from the file that the screen shows you in an identical location on the grid when it is viewed on the screen. These grids represent points of color with-in an image. And based on the number of color bits assigned to the file, your color
depth can show more or less of the color variety available in the overall image. Since each one of these little rectangles combine with all the rest to provide the information for the image, the file can become quiet large especially the more the color depth increases.

When zooming in very close to the image you will notice the little jaggy stair step type edges that are formed by the shapes of the edges of the combined pixels. In a way this is similar to the process in which the Impressionist painter, George Suerat combined tiny dots of various
hue to form the desired visible color and light in his images. Each tiny brush dot may have been composed of a slightly different shade or tint but when all were combined they formed the visual color the artist desired by letting the viewers eye mix the colors while actively viewing the
image.

These blending hues, 'contones' as the print industry refers to them, are a 'continuous tone' in appearance, though when you zoom in the differences of each pixel becomes visibly apparent.
You can find raster graphics used more with images like photographic files or files of an image like a fine art painting. Many of the newer applications for working with raster images now contain a selection of built in vector tools for things like typography so that this hybrid format
can maintain the crisp edge found in vector files.

Vector files are nothing like Raster images because as we said earlier, the file types both store information in different ways. Vector has a method of information storage that involves lines, points and curves. This is all done with mathematical equations that represent the image we
are working with.

Since less information is stored in this format, the file size is considerably smaller than Raster files. And unlike Raster files you can stretch and re-size Vector images and the image will stay crisp and clear. If we zoom in close we do not get a grid full of colored rectangles but just a zoomed in view of the image we are looking at.

While a photograph saved as a vector would require very large amounts of processing time, simple toned images and type work better with the vector format. Vector formats are also very popular in animation file types like flash animation files or the older .gif format. Even the most
basic, the .gif file can contain a stack of vector images that sequence through based on a time line and create an animated image like those found in many web sites. Since the vectors contain the information in a compact system all of the continuous toned parts of the images do not have to have information for every individual pixel the area is composed of thus saving much file space and keeping the overall size small for the information it contains.

This can translate into more data being included in distribution via the internet by faster download speeds or even in being able to fit more files into a back-ups device like a CD or DVD for example.

Depending on the type of image you are working with and the ways in which you need to store it, distribute it, or transform and re-size it through reduction or enlargement; you should be aware of the positive and negative elements of each file type and how they work with the
information contained with-in.

Test For Title #2

I'm working through the title posting issues on ping.fm.

New Changes Today^Today I set up new services to be reached via ping.fm This is a test post to check their status, please ignore.

New Look Blog

I've been away from the blog for a couple of weeks working on various projects. When I logged into the blog today I realized it had been a year since I changed the look here, so today we are trying a new template from blogger. I'm hoping it is easy on the eyes and makes reading more enjoyable than the previous version.

Meanwhile I hope to get back to posting on a regular basis as I have wrapped up several projects that will allow me more time to post here.

News is coming soon of big things.....

Blog Quest

I've been on a bit of a quest of late to try all of the various blogging platforms. At least the most accessible ones.

After I work with all of these services for a few weeks I will offer my opinion on the different tools available at each site.

I started installing Movable Type on one of my domains that are not public yet and found that it is problematic in its installation. It may make up for the difficulties once it installs but as it stands this is like trying to update a Wordpress installation on your own server. Plenty of back-end stuff, which I find a waste of time. But I press on in this experiment and we will see what comes of it....

Stay tuned!

Hi

I'm just setting up at utterli today.

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