Level 3: Light and Shadow

Who this level is for

People whose outlines are fine. If you can draw a mug that reads as a mug, a box that reads as a box, and your remaining complaint is that none of it looks like it exists in a room with a light in it, this is the level that answers that.

It is also the level for anybody trying to draw people. Faces, hands, eyes and mouths are all here rather than earlier, because they are the subjects where knowing what the thing is actively works against you - you have looked at millions of hands, so you know a hand has five fingers of certain lengths, you draw those, and the result is a diagram.

Go back to Level 2 if your boxes still look like folded card or your ellipses tip over. Shading a form that is not constructed correctly makes the error more visible, not less, and it is a demoralising way to find that out.

What each lesson trains

The eye is construction, proportion, value and edge control at once, in a subject small enough to draw four times in an evening - which is why it is the single most efficient study on the site. The nose is the planes lesson: the first subject where thinking in flat faces beats thinking in curves, and the best available argument against outlines.

Lips are edge quality. There is a hard edge along the line between them, a soft one where the lower lip meets the chin, and effectively no edge at the corners, and using one line for all three is what makes drawn mouths look pasted on.

The rose is construction under chaos - there is no simple outline to fall back on, so the spiral has to hold the drawing together. The hand hands you a structure and then makes observation take over, because no two hands in two poses are the same shape. The face is the measurement lesson and it comes last because it needs everything else: construction from the cat, ellipses from the mug, planes from the nose, value from the apple, edges from the lips.

The value drill is the pairing that matters here, and the photo tool earns its place at this level too: upload a photograph and it is broken into shapes of light and dark, biggest first, which is exactly the way you are being taught to see.

Value scale exercises · Proportion drills - for the face · Break your own photo into values

How to work through it

Expect this level to feel slower than the other two, and expect that to be correct rather than a sign of failure. Value is the skill that takes longest to become automatic and it is also the one that changes your drawings the most, so the ratio of frustration to progress is worse at the start and much better at the end.

Repeat rather than progress. Drawing the eye four times in one week is a better use of an hour than drawing four different subjects once each, because at this level the improvement comes from noticing something on the third attempt that you could not see on the first.

Work from a photograph or from life, never from memory, and use directional light. Flat lighting hides exactly the information every lesson here is about, which is why a face lit from the front is much harder to draw well than one lit from the side.

Squint at everything, constantly. Half-closing your eyes deletes the detail and leaves the big light and dark shapes, and if two areas merge when you squint they are the same value - which is usually the answer to why something is not reading.

And go darker than feels right. Beginners routinely stop two or three steps short of dark enough, and a drawing with no genuine black and no untouched white will look tentative however accurate it is.

What gets measured as you go

Value range is the dimension to watch here: the spread between your lightest and darkest marks and how evenly the steps in between are spaced. It is the slowest of the five to move and the one where a month of work shows most clearly on a chart.

Proportion is the other one, and on the face lesson it is the whole game. The measurement reports the ratios you produced against the ratios you were aiming for, so a drawing that is uniformly too large still scores well - scale is not an error, disagreement is.

Edge quality is not measured at all, and it is arguably the most important thing this level teaches. We can see where your marks are; we cannot reliably tell a deliberately lost edge from an unfinished one, so nothing is reported rather than something invented. That gap is real and worth knowing about.

How the measurement works