Joanne's visual diary

Tone create depth and atmosphere in a drawing. In order to make a drawing look "realistic" you need shadow because in the real world everything has a shadow. If you draw something with only one width line and don't render shadow, your drawing is going to look flat, two dimensional, and unrealistic. Adding shadow automatically adds a small bit of perspective to the drawing because the shadow indicates that something is in front of and/or behind the object that would cause it to cast a shadow.


Line is the most basic element of the drawing. And in it's most basic definition, it's what separates one area of the drawing plane from the other. A single line will segment your piece of paper into "that area" and "this area". The more lines that are added, the more complex and numerous the separations become: light from dark, foreground from background, positive space from negative space. Line can be uniform and all one width, or to be more interesting, and to convey more information with a single line, a single line can be of varying widths.
Shape.

Shape occurs when the first line is drawn. The most basic definition of shape is the white area on the paper. Shape is the information that is presented between two or more lines, or is the thing that is enclosed by line. Shape helps define the object that is depicted as much as the collection of lines that make up the object in the drawing. Incorrect use of shape will cause the drawing to "not look like what it's supposed to be."