How to shade letters
Let’s go over the world’s party trick: how to shade letters. It gives your letters so much umpf and you so much cred, and once you learn it, it’s a breeze. It’s also one of the most common questions I get on instagram, so writing about it here was a no brainer. I sent this guide to those who subscribe to the Tips & Trix letter. If you also want to receive tips and news from me, you can sign up for my newsletter.
Creating a kind of shadow on your letters gives them a three-dimensional feel, as if they are rising up from the paper or floating above it. It’s a very effective way to make words “pop”, i.e. stand out better, and not least it works very well to get admiring comments, hehe. And it IS cool that you can trick the eye that someone two-dimensionally looks like it has three dimensions, just by using pen and paper in a certain way.
You can shade individual words on a card, such as “Thank you”, “Congratulations” or “Hugs”, or some or all of the words in a quote that you are going to hang on the wall. With shading, the word goes from text to a picture, and a slightly more impressive one at that.
The brush pens I use
To be able to do both drop shade and drop line, we need a brush pen with a brush tip and a hard, regular tip. There are lots of good brush pens that you can use, for example my own kit with four different gray brush pens, as well as two different white pens for highlights, Throw a Shade.
In this guide, however, I use BIC Intensity to show that shading doesn’t always have to be done with gray. Color is fun, after all!
BIC Intensity is something as nice as a bunch of pens with nice colors and two different nibs (comes in bandy today, as you will soon see) which is also very affordable. And that’s great, because if there’s anything that can hamper your training and thus make it harder to get those good letters, it’s expensive and fragile tools. Feeling that you don’t want to “waste” or being afraid of ruining a pencil because it’s expensive is so counterproductive for nice letters that you have no idea.
Drop Shade
Today I’m going to show you how a type of shading called drop shade works, what we would call shading. Brush pens are PERFECT for this, and I’m going to show you two different variations, with and without a spacer. DOCK! Brush pens can be tricky to handle, and sometimes you have them around, so I’ll also show you how to mark shading with a line, a so-called drop line. It’s also a great beginner’s tip to make a drop line first and then add the shadow where the line already exists. This way you split your shading into two steps, which makes it easier when you are new. Here you can see the difference:
Where the heck is the shadow supposed to be?
Well, there can be no shadow unless there is also light. You simply have to start the process by imagining that there is a lamp shining on your letters from somewhere, to figure out where the shadow falls. So where do we place the lamp? Well, it depends on taste, but most often it’s in the top right or top left of the letter. I light mine in the left corner and now when it shines on the lines of the letter, the light rays will hit all the lines obliquely from the top left.
But we’re not here to study the light, are we? No. But light means that the shadow appears on the opposite side of all lines.
When we have lit the lamp in the upper left, the shadow
fallsbelow and to the right of all lines.
Are you in?
This way, you now know that you should put the shadow under and to the right. “Under, to the right, under to the right, under…” you can mumble to yourself as you draw, to make sure you’re applying the shadow correctly, because it gets very weird for the eye if you’re not consistent with it, so an internal monologue is definitely preferable to inconsistent shading.
And of course, if you turn on the imaginary light in the upper right, the shadow will fall to the left and below all the lines. I recommend you go with one variant at the beginning instead of switching back and forth, until you learn how it works so as not to confuse the poor brain too much.
Okay, so we know where it should be, just one more step:
How do you make the shade itself?
Yes, you can either draw the shadow with a brush pen edge to edge with the letter. I’ll show you how to do that in a minute, but first here’s an extra little twist: We’re going to apply the shadow with a little distance from the letter itself, to give the appearance of a white outline around the letters as an extra little overlay. And this is where BIC Intensity is so good: By using a small, hard tip, you can both create the distance and focus on getting the shadow in the right place, without having to wrestle with a brush pen at the same time. The small, hard tip is so much easier to use, so we cut out a tricky step while giving you the illusion of a nice outline in the process. Isn’t that great?
So once you’ve drawn the word you want to shade, take out the hard tip and draw while muttering your internal mantra and drawing lines where the shadow should be, under, to the right, under to the right…
Remember that the light rays fall obliquely downwards, so the shadow should start a bit below the top of the letter and go under it, just like in the picture above. Didn’t turn out well? Then you can do it again. If you want, you can try to do it in pencil first, so you can erase where you feel you missed, it saves time and patience. Try to keep EXACTLY the same distance from the letter at all times. There, now you’re getting the hang of it, right? Way to go! And before we move on, we need to stop to take in the fact that:
Congratulations! You have made a drop-line!
Drop line is a neat and subtle way to shade with just one line, and already you can see the 3d effect, right? Nice work! If you want, you can stop here, you’ve already achieved the illusion of a third dimension on your paper.
But since you have a shadow line ready, it will be quite easy to apply a broader shadow with a brush pen now – you have already marked where it should be, now you just have to turn the pen and work with the larger brush tip. Before you start, think about two things:
- The shadow should be the same thickness everywhere (provided it fits, that is, remember to keep a distance from the letter bodies so that the white outline fits). If you have written the letters with a brush pen, the lines are narrow in some places and thick in others, but it does not matter for the shadow, it should be evenly thick everywhere regardless of the width of the letter line.
- When applying the shadow, keep the brush tip at the same angle as you imagine the light rays falling, so that the shadow will follow that angle all the way, even at the ends
Time to shade
Well done! Now it’s time to go. Apply a shadow, preferably as wide as the entire brush tip, where your shadow lines are. Ta daa! That’s it! You’ve now shaded a word (or a letter, if you start sensibly).
It's the details that make it
And hey, if you want to score some bonus points, you can always go over the parts of the shadow that are directly below a line once more, so you get an even darker shadow color there, which gives the effect that there is other, more diffuse light from above. Directly below is the only place that none of the light reaches, so those parts are darker.
There will be a subtle, but nice, difference, check:
Time to shade
And now that you know shading, you can of course try to do the same thing but without a spacer – that is, apply the shadow directly with a brush pen, right at the edge of the letter lines. Same effect, but without the white outline. But – yep, there is a but, that’s why I chose to teach you to apply the shadow with a spacer first – if the colors you use are both water-soluble (and most are) then they will rub off on each other if you let the shadow touch the letter itself, and the shadow color will be contaminated and ugly. The alternative is then that you:
- Is sure as hell on the hand and lays the shadow block by block without accidentally touching the letter.
- If you write the letters with an alcohol-based marker (e.g. Sakura Pen Touch) or a waterproof brush pen (e.g. Staedtler Pigment Brush Pen), they will not dissolve in a water-soluble shadow.
- Use coated paper, then the colors dry on the surface and it is a little easier to avoid that they do not mix.
- Do as I said from the start and work with a spacer.
Now we had to remove the distance, so I used option 3, BIC Intensity on coated paper. Look, no smudging! Also look at the angle of the pencil as I mentioned before. Same as on imaginary light beams.
DISTANCE IN RETROSPECT
Sometimes I add a little spacer afterwards by using a white jelly pencil, I draw right on the border where the letter and the shadow meet – this creates a thin spacer. It’s small but not to be despised!
The gel pen works best on coated paper because the white paint dries in its own layer on top and stays dazzling white instead of sinking into the paint underneath and blending into an unmistakable muddy color. See the difference between the image above and the one below? Subtle, but important!
CREATE HIGHLIGHTS
You can also use the white jelly pencil for highlights if you want. It makes the surface of the letter feel arched, kind of bubbly, you know. Keep in mind that the shine should be on the left side of the letter because that’s where the light comes from.
The world's trickiest letter
And before we finish – one last thing that may be good to sort out: Putting the shadow under and to the right of the lines is one thing when the lines are straight, but becomes a little trickier with, for example, ovals, so we take an extra look at it. Assuming that we turn on the lamp from the same direction, the shading will be like this:
But how the heck do you put a shadow on an S? This tricky letter that is neither round nor straight, but just… tricky? Well, it depends on what the S looks like. It can either be curvy as hell or a little straighter, and the shading will be accordingly:
The S on the left curves more, so there is even a fairly horizontal part in the middle. Then you have to split the shadow a little more, while the right and more straight diagonal allows you to run the shadow on the same side of the middle part all the time.
Dare to skip gray
Before we part ways, I would like to strike a blow for daring to skip gray and shadow with a lighter version of the letter color as I did here. But BIC Intensity becomes the base colors become letter color, and the pastels shading, how nice!
I used pencils from 12p base colors, and added the shadows with 6p pastel. I also have a 6p base colors in the shop. All the pencils have double tips. You’ll have to look hard for a more affordable way to create beautiful three-dimensional letters.
But if you are TRS (Team Realistic Shading), I can highly recommend my kit Throw a Shade, where I have collected four different gray brush pens, both waterproof and soluble, in slightly different sizes and shades, with two noble highlights in the form of acrylic and jelly pen. In short, there is everything you need for shading in different variations on different surfaces.
