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Art Studies
and Tutoring

By Dennis Lee Brown
"Enhance and Advance Your Drawing Skills Far Beyond the Next Level"
By Dennis Lee Brown
By Dennis Bookcase IMG-SS-052938
The Drawing Stump is a cylindrical drawing tool, usually made of soft paper that is tightly wound into a stick and sanded to a point at both ends. The stumps are mostly pale in color and turn to the color of the medium it is used for. Stumps come in assorted sizes: #1 through #8, choose the correct numbered Stump according to space, subject, or object in the drawing. Artists use it to smudge or blend marks made with charcoal, graphite, Conté crayon, pastels, chalk, or other dry drawing media. Skillfully using stomps, shading, gradations, and halftones can be produced. They are a great drawing tool, which can create countless effects, and smooth blending is its’ most popular usage.

A Guide to Stump Drawing

Effectively Use the Drawing Stump

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Drawing is visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark onto a two-dimensional medium. Commonly used instruments include graphite pencils, pen & ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, stylus. Drawing is defined as the marking of marks, lines, and shapes (some standard and non-standard), usually supported on, but not limited to various papers (an assortment of acid-free fine art drawing papers with a wide range of texture); although other materials such as cardboard, plastic, leather, canvas, and board, may be used.

Drawing Techniques

How To Draw Like A Pro

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How to capture the texture (smoothness, roughness, pattern, and lines) of the surface of objects in a drawing.

Texturizing in Drawings

Texturizing the Surface

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There are two types of shadows. “Form Shadow“ is a shadow caused by the planes turning away from the light source. A “Cast Shadow” is caused by one structure blocking the light from hitting another object or thing. Example: A wooden block hinders the light from reaching the part of the table right behind the opposite side of the block. An object's cast shadow is the object's adjacent shadow in which its outline is distorted (softened/burred). A cast shadow is distinguished from a core shadow in that it is slightly brighter, and its edges are softer the further it gets from the object.

Creating Cast Shadows

Light and An Opaque Object

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The Fine Drawing & Painting Illustrated Glossary is the artist’s wordlist of art terms and their definitions. If someone is serious about their drawing or painting, learning these phrases and how to apply them in their work is always essential.

Fine Art Illustrated Glossary

An Artist's Glossary

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Everywhere we look, we observe objects containing various degrees of light and dark. This lightness and/or darkness, to individuals in the art world, consider it as tonal value. Between the continuum of light and dark lies, a world of gray tones, and these tones are measured in terms of steps in a graduate scale. As the tones progress in value towards white or black there is a vast verity of shade values considered as graduate tones. These graduate tones gradually increase as they creep towards white [light] and decrease in value as they descend towards black [dark].

The Art of Graduate Blending

Graduate Tone Blending

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Composition is an arrangement of subject matter in your drawing or painting… Defined as the way the arrangement of items and subjects that you are going to draw, organize and combine. You may want to arrange the things you are going to draw by strictly following the rules of composition. The term composition means "putting together". The composition is known as the placement of elements in association with each other, following the rules of art layout. This principle of composition when applied to any form of art including, music, graphic art illustration writing, performing arts, and others

Creating Great Compositions

Creating Drawing or Painting

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Methods are the steps taken by an artist to create a work, such as planning the composition, sketching, selecting materials, and executing the artwork. To gain a better understanding of these terms, reading up on the different techniques, principles, and methods used by famous artists is a great way to gain insight and inspiration.

Methods, Principles, and Techniques of Art

Methods, Principles & Techniques

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The illustratede color wheel, sometimes called a color circle, is a circular arrangement of colors organized by their chromatic relationship to one another. The primary colors are equidistant from each other on the wheel, and secondary and tertiary colors sit between them. In painting and other fine arts, there are three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. They are called primary colors because they cannot be created by mixing any other colors. Primary colors form the basis for color theory or color mixing, as these three colors are the basic building blocks of color from which it is possible to mix most other colors.

The Color Wheel Guide

How to Apply Color Themes

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