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Art Studies and Tutoring

Increase Your Drawing Skills

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 thru #8, choose the correct numbered Stump according to space, 
subject, or object in the drawing. It is used by artists 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

The Drawing Stump

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

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

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


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 Drawing & Painting Illustrated Glossary

An Artist's Glossary

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

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, organized and combined. You 
may want to arrange the things you are going to 
draw by strictly following the rules of composition. 
The terms 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

Orchestrating A Fine Drawing or Painting