Light and shade, volume
Sessions on how a flat silhouette turns into form: the shadow terminal, value scales, hatching and render — digitally and in pencil.
Lessons in this category come with the Basic plan — $12 a month. Choose a plan
Lessons in “Light and shade, volume”
subscribers only2:11:18The male figure in paint
Posting the recording of the stream where I show how to make a painted study of the male figure. Reference and Procreate brush attached
subscribers only0:57Stream + refs + still life timelapse + brush
For the lovers of digital painting, I’m uploading the timelapse and the part of the process that I did on stream. You can pick your own reference and try painting your own beautiful still life along with the timelapse! The Procreate brush is attached. Wishing you creative success! :)
subscribers only4:53Drawing of an archer + refs
In this timelapse with my voice-over I explain how to carry a value drawing of an archer step by step, from the first sketch lines through to the background shapes and the accents. Enjoy. And for anyone who’d like to draw an archer too, I’ve prepared references. Procreate. Time on the piece — about 15-25 hours.
subscribers only35:06On hatching and the modeling of light and shade
One of the difficulties on a beginning artist’s path is modeling form with hatching, which, combined with a weak grasp of value, produces a big negative effect. The most important thing for creating good volume is telling the zones of illumination apart properly and knowing how to model them well. The main trouble is that many artists confuse light with shadow (they over-darken the light and blow out the shadow), and the result is a mush that has to be avoided. In the video lesson I explain all the nuances and give a step-by-step scheme that will put any value drawing within your reach. Enjoy!
subscribers only2:42:56Week 5. Extra practice. Drawing portraits in different lighting
In this practice session we’ll draw portraits under different lighting, soft and hard. We’ll practice working with different core shadows and simply practice drawing faces. Those just starting out with color portraits will be able to make their first studies, and experienced artists can sharpen their color and anatomy skills.
subscribers only1:37:29Marathon week 5: "Direct and diffused light"
This week we’ll talk about color and light, types of lighting, core shadows, hard vs. soft shadows, and value relationships!
subscribers only2:52:07Week 4. Extra practice. Drawing spheres and fruit
There will be no complex compositions or character anatomy in this practice session. We’ll be drawing simple spheres and fruit, so that we understand once and for all how warm and cool light behave on three-dimensional objects, and lock that in. We’ll work out what color the highlight has to be relative to the light and the halftone, so the color reads as solid and interesting. The basics of color and painting aren’t going to understand themselves 🙂
subscribers only1:33:17Digital painting of a female nude. Evening open stream
Posting the recording of the stream where I finish off my painted nude sketches. In case anyone missed it
subscribers only3:06:02Week one practice
Today we’ll work on the week one assignments, draw still lifes in three value keys, and model the form with value and brushstrokes.
subscribers only1:39:19Marathon kickoff
Here we go!😁 The topic of week one is Value and value keys! We’ll start with understanding value relationships, go through the theory, look at the artists who own this subject, and model volume with strokes, the way it’s done in painting😁 For the homework you can work from any still life references you like, but I’m attaching a few that fit✨
subscribers only8:13Timelapse: female portrait with hands in a cool palette
Here I show the process of working on a female portrait with hands, which I did together with the students of the online course and the students at the St. Petersburg studio. The piece took about 20 hours; session after session the portrait was refined and worked up. First I chose a noir-ish cool palette of violet and pinkish large masses, which were gradually refined and filled with volume. In painting from life there’s a notion of "choosing the gaze." That’s when the model slightly changes their expression and the direction of their look while posing, and the artist has to notice it, choose the right one and catch it. In this piece I repainted the eyes about five times before I found the note I wanted. In the end it turned into an interesting, fairly worked-up noir portrait. I worked with two brushes: a textured one and Nikko Rull (both attached)
subscribers only2:07:51A painterly flower
I’d wanted to record a lesson on this topic for a long time, and the day has finally come! An interesting, expressive flower in an earth palette. The lesson suits both beginners and more advanced artists! Brushes and references attached to the post.
subscribers only1:42:33The painterly female figure. Mini-course
If you’ve always wanted to understand how to combine anatomy, color, drawing, and value, and to learn to paint expressive figures, this post is for you. A cycle of five sequential lessons in which I show the process of working on a painterly female figure. Every lesson comes with my commentary and is clearly broken into stages. More than six hours of practice in the intensive recordings, and all fifteen years of my experience in drawing the figure in color, went into this. I recommend spreading it over several days, in sessions of 3-4 hours a day. The first lesson is about sketching, the second about the general working up, the third and fourth about details, and the fifth about backgrounds. You’ll need basic skill at drawing the human figure. If you’re a complete beginner, the lesson will be hard. Attached are the brushes I used for the work in Procreate, and the references. When you buy the post, you get permanent access to all the material in it for an unlimited period. Happy drawing! Be sure to share how it goes in the comments!🙂✨
subscribers only2:10:35A painterly head of Venus
For anyone who wants to get color under control, painting antique heads is something of a challenge. Marble has none of the pinkness of cheeks and soft tissue, but it has interesting shades of its own, cold and warm at the same time, orange streaks running down it. In this video lesson I’ll show one of the painterly techniques you can use to render the head of an antique sculpture, with an underpainting and optical mixing of pure colors.
subscribers only2:23:48Portrait of a girl in a hat. Painting
In this lesson we’ll learn how to work step by step on a painted portrait and how to build a sharp composition and interesting textures in an illustration. Reference and brushes included. Enjoy! :)
subscribers only2:04:32Digital painting. Painting oranges
When you work with color it’s important to use opposite colors. If we’ve got orange, blue has to show up too; if there’s green, something pinkish has to appear. I talk through and show the process in more detail in this digital painting video lesson. Enjoy!
subscribers only1:58:05How to draw clouds
In landscape painting the emphasis often falls not on the ground but on the sky. And the main characters in the sky are the clouds. When they work with clouds, beginner artists quite often forget that clouds have volume, lighting and an inner form of their own. And when it comes to difficulty of proportion, the only thing clouds lose out to is a crumpled piece of paper (which is also a super cool exercise for proportions). Anyway, enjoy the watch!
subscribers only2:20:47Digital painting of a sculpted head
Portraits come in all kinds. And one of the simplest ways to practice the skill of portrait drawing is to work from a sculpture that doesn’t move. The simplest way to show volume is to show a convincing core shadow. It’s also important that the shadow isn’t too dark, or the form will fall apart. But not too light either, or there’ll be no contrast. In any case, the main thing you have to keep doing is working on new pieces and watching the nuances. Then, after a certain number of pieces, your skills will go up several times over. In this video lesson I show my approach to making a painted portrait from a sculpture.
subscribers only1:34:23Digital landscape. Nature at night
Painting landscapes isn’t that hard. You just have to paint them regularly, experiment, and bring the logic of color into it. Let me tell you what helps me: I try to push the color in the composition a little. Our job isn’t to copy the photo, our job is to make an interesting painting! Where we see a warm green, a cool pinkish shade will look interesting next to it. If there’s violet somewhere, it’ll be great to see ocher beside it. And so on, around the color wheel and the theory of complementary colors. I go into more detail in the lesson. Enjoy the watch!
subscribers only2:38:07Digital painting. Still life in a close earth palette
In two and a half hours we’ll build a composition out of simple objects in a close palette. I show how you can interpret the form of the objects, make them as expressive as possible, and find an interesting artistic solution for the fills inside them. Have a productive session, everyone!
subscribers only2:43:20Digital painting. Still life in close value
Here’s a digital painting video lesson focused on close value relationships and soft edges. Our compositions don’t always have to be high-contrast; often what’s needed is a finer, more nuanced sound. That’s where a close value range helps, and that’s what this still life shows. Enjoy!
subscribers only2:31:57Digital painting. Still life with a teapot
In this two-hour lesson I’ll show how to build a composition from several simple objects step by step, and talk about the finer points of working with shapes, color and stylizing the form.
subscribers only2:37:28Digital painting. A stylized still life
How do you start approaching digital painting? How do you get the value relationships right and keep the color from going muddy? That’s what I talk about here. Grab your stylus and paint the still life along with me.
subscribers only4:57Digital painting timelapse. The figure. A long pose
For an artist to grow it’s important to take on tasks of different lengths: very quick ones as well as longer ones. This setup is one of the long ones. Try to trace how it all began and what stages the piece went through. To get the most out of it, I recommend picking a similar reference and trying to reproduce the process step by step. Or just make a copy. Go for it! You’ve got this! :)
About “Light and shade, volume”
The section is built around light and shade: how light falls on form and how that is translated into value on paper or on a tablet. The core is the marathon “Value and Rendering”, six topics from hatching and value scales to the parts of the human body, with three-hour teaching streams and separate hour-long work reviews. Alongside it sit lessons on direct and diffused light, practice sessions with spheres and fruit, two-hour digital painting recordings with still lifes and plaster heads. Forty-five classes in all, and almost all of it is long recordings, not short tips.
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The order of work changes. You start a drawing not from the contour but from the boundary of light and shadow: first the core shadow is laid in, then the form shadow with its reflected light and the cast shadow, and only then the halftones inside the lit part. You pick up the habit of squinting at the work and reducing it to four or five steps of value. And one more, more useful still: let nothing into the light that is darker than the lightest place in the shadow.
Value drawing almost always breaks in the same place. The light is over-darkened, the shadow is lightened, the boundary between them dissolves, and the form stops reading no matter how much hatching goes on top. Then people try to save it with a contour and pressure along the edges, which makes the object look cut out of paper. The half-hour lesson on hatching and light-and-shade modeling covers a scheme that keeps the zones apart, and on the sphere and the cylinder from week two of the marathon the mistake is caught fastest: on a simple form you see at once where the value went wrong.
The first thing to watch is that very lesson, “On hatching and light-and-shade modeling” — thirty-five minutes, and it sets the vocabulary that all the other recordings use. Then week one of “Value and Rendering” with hatching and value scales, then simple objects. The still life with several objects runs over two classes in a row, and that is normal: that is where the hardest thing is taken apart, how to tie several volumes together without losing the overall value structure. The timelapse with the archer in value is better left until later, fifteen to twenty-five hours of work are compressed into five minutes there.
What the section does not have is linear perspective. Vanishing points, constructing a cube and interior perspective are not part of it: value is worked out here on form that has already been set up. Foreshortening and the perspective of the figure sit in the neighboring section on figure and anatomy. Reviews run in the general flow of the streams; the section does not give a personal review of every piece.
FAQ
Can I work in pencil, without a tablet?
Yes, most of the topics are not tied to a tool. Hatching, value scales, the core shadow and reflected light work the same on paper and in Procreate. In the recordings the artist more often works digitally with a pencil brush, so the logic of running a drawing carries over without loss.
Where do I start if my drawings come out gray and flat?
Start with the lesson on hatching and light-and-shade modeling and immediately after it draw a sphere and a cylinder from week two of the marathon. Gray almost always means that light and shadow were taken too close in value. That distance is easier to set and remember on a simple form than on a complicated setup.
How do the marathon classes differ from the standalone lessons?
The marathon recordings run in sequence and assume an assignment for each week, while the standalone lessons are self-contained. If you want a system, watch “Value and Rendering” in order. If you want an answer to one specific question, take a single recording on the topic.
Is perspective covered here?
There is no linear perspective in this section: no vanishing points, no cube construction, no interiors. Value is worked out on form that has already been built. For foreshortening and complex perspective of the figure, see the Figure and Anatomy section.
What do I need to get access to the classes?
A subscription. The Basic plan opens the archive of lessons and their assignments; the Club plan adds mini-courses, reference packs and a place in the current marathon. Recordings of past marathons are part of the archive.
Light and shade, volume — how Azat draws it
Works by Azat Nurgaleev on the subject of this category: not an illustration to a lesson, but what the lessons lead to.
Portrait on blue 
Gentleman in a bowler hat 
Young woman in white 
Man in a white shirt 
Figure on a colored background 
Young woman in a shawl