Rendering Realistic Textures (for Makers, Artists, and Everyone Else!)
by aartcritique in Craft > Art
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Rendering Realistic Textures (for Makers, Artists, and Everyone Else!)
Hello, everyone! I was recently commissioned to draw a homestead (an old, wooden house), and, having never done any fully fledged landscapes in pencil before, it was a real challenge to get the textures to look like they were "real". After about three months of painstaking work, the piece has been completed and I now have a general grasp of the art of rendering realistic grass, wood, stone, and a few others. Today I will show you how to draw these three, plus a sort of realistic water drop that I really don't like and will probably change. The grass will be done in both graphite pencil and colored pencil to give you more flexibility in the world of art. Let's get started, shall we?
Grass (Graphite Pencil)
For the grass, I will be using a .5 mm mechanical pencil and a Faber-Castell® eraser pencil (can be found at almost any art and craft supply store. Online sellers such as Blick art also carry these.
To start the grass, just make grass-like scribbles all around the designated grass area. The size of the scribbles will determine the height and thickness of the grass, so don't go overboard with it ;) .
Next take your eraser and erase individual blades of grass. It is surprisingly easy to do!
Go over it with pencil, refining it and adding details, then smudge with your finger or a blending tool.
Just keep repeating the steps until you are happy with the result. Depending on how thick or detailed you would like the grass, it can take anywhere from two minutes to almost an hour to get it the way you like it. Keep practicing!
To start the grass, just make grass-like scribbles all around the designated grass area. The size of the scribbles will determine the height and thickness of the grass, so don't go overboard with it ;) .
Next take your eraser and erase individual blades of grass. It is surprisingly easy to do!
Go over it with pencil, refining it and adding details, then smudge with your finger or a blending tool.
Just keep repeating the steps until you are happy with the result. Depending on how thick or detailed you would like the grass, it can take anywhere from two minutes to almost an hour to get it the way you like it. Keep practicing!
Grass (Colored Pencil)
The colored pencils I used for this are of the brand Sargent Art®, which is a decent entry-level brand colored pencil that has an incredibly low price for what you get. I prefer Derwent® brand pencils and I hear that Faber-Castell® makes some colored pencils that are good for everything an artist can dream of, but for what you're paying, these are really great colored pencils. Of course, there are also Prismacolor's® Primer® and Verithin® lines, and a ton of other ones that I would love to try out, but let's not get off course here...
You will need:
Leaf Green
Dark Green
Barrack Green
Emerald Green
The same general concept for graphite pencil works for color too. We will start with Emerald Green scribbles. Add depth and details with Barrack Green. Continue to build the grass up with Dark Green and Leaf Green. Keep going over it as many times as needed until you are happy with it. See? Easy!
You will need:
Leaf Green
Dark Green
Barrack Green
Emerald Green
The same general concept for graphite pencil works for color too. We will start with Emerald Green scribbles. Add depth and details with Barrack Green. Continue to build the grass up with Dark Green and Leaf Green. Keep going over it as many times as needed until you are happy with it. See? Easy!
Wood (Graphite Pencil)
Once again, we will be using a .5 mm mechanical pencil and an eraser pencil.
To start, draw two parallel lines; then draw thin diamond-like shapes in between them. Add a knot or two if you want. Lightly fill in the gaps with faint and thin lines. Erase some wavy lines from the wood, then repeat once or twice until satisfied. Quite frankly, I really think that I should have stopped when I reached picture 3 or 4, but one of my biggest artistic problems is overworking... Lesson to be learned: DON'T OVERWORK YOUR ART!
To start, draw two parallel lines; then draw thin diamond-like shapes in between them. Add a knot or two if you want. Lightly fill in the gaps with faint and thin lines. Erase some wavy lines from the wood, then repeat once or twice until satisfied. Quite frankly, I really think that I should have stopped when I reached picture 3 or 4, but one of my biggest artistic problems is overworking... Lesson to be learned: DON'T OVERWORK YOUR ART!
Rock/Stone (Graphite Pencil)
To start, just draw a deformed circle and add some squiggly lines inside. Shade around these squiggly lines, then smudge with your blending tool of choice. Erase some highlights with the eraser. Put in some more detail in the form of stippling (dots), hatch marks (lines), or "squircles," as one artist once called them (a chain of circles). Place a drop shadow under your rock and you're done!
Water Drop (Graphite Pencil)
Draw the shape of your water drop. It doesn't need to be perfect, just vaguely look like a drop of water. Shade the outer edge opposite the side which the light hits it. Smudge this; then erase the inside of the droplet closer to the light source. Shade in the droplet some more - the inner edge closer to the light source can be surprisingly dark. Smudge, erase, repeat, then you can use a Wite-out® to add highlights. This particular prortion of this particular instructable isn't all that great (not that any of it is super good), so I might redo it later on...
All Done!
Ta-da! If you have made it this far, go back to the top and do it again :D ! Practice makes (almost) perfect, after all ;) . Have fun and keep on makin'!