Why Do My Drawings Look Flat?

Most flat drawings are outlines. The shape is right, or near enough, but the inside of it is empty, so the eye reads a cut-out rather than an object. The fix is to stop drawing edges and start drawing light: the lightest area, the darkest shadow, the reflected light, and the shadow the object throws onto the table.

That's an easier problem than it sounds, and it doesn't need talent. It needs a lamp, two pencils and about half an hour.

Real objects don't have outlines

Look at a mug on a table. Somewhere along its rim you'll find an edge where the light side meets the shadow side. What you won't find anywhere is a line. The line is something drawing invented to get us started, and it works well for a first sketch and badly for a finished one.

The drawing course puts it plainly: a common beginner mistake is drawing outlines and leaving them empty, when real objects have edges where light meets shadow. Draw a firm line round a mug and fill nothing in, and you've drawn the symbol for a mug. Symbols are flat by nature. That is what they're for.

This connects to the wider problem Betty Edwards described in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in 1979: we draw the symbol for what we see rather than what's in front of us. An outline with a blank middle is very often that symbol, executed neatly. If you'd like the fuller argument, the post on whether anyone can learn to draw covers it.

Value is the missing ingredient

Value is the lightness or darkness of a tone, on a scale from white to black. Every drawing with depth uses it. There are three parts to know:

• The darkest shadow. Usually on the side away from the lamp, and often tucked in where the object meets the surface.
• The middle tones. The long slow gradient between light and dark, which is where most of the roundness comes from.
• The highlight. The brightest patch, which in pencil is usually the bare white of the paper or a spot lifted out with an eraser.

A flat drawing tends to live in one value. Everything is the same grey, or everything is a line of the same darkness. A drawing with depth uses the whole range, and the range does the work that you would otherwise ask the outline to do.

Beginners are cautious about the dark end. A light pencil feels safer, so the shadows come out timid and the whole thing stays shallow. Look at your last drawing and ask whether it has a single properly dark mark in it. If it hasn't, that is probably your answer.

The cast shadow keeps it from floating

Even with decent shading, an object can look as if it's hovering a centimetre above the page. The cause is nearly always a missing cast shadow.

The cast shadow is the shadow the object throws onto the surface it stands on. The course describes it as the thing that anchors the object and stops it looking as though it's floating. It also tells the viewer where the light is coming from, which the shading alone can only hint at.

Two things to watch for:

1. Direction. The cast shadow falls away from the lamp. If the lamp is on your left, it falls to the right. Check it against the shaded side of the object, and make sure they agree.
2. Contact. The shadow is darkest and crispest right where the object touches the surface, and softens as it moves away. That dark line of contact is what makes the object feel as if it's sitting there with some weight.

Reflected light, the detail that rounds it off

Look at the shadow side of a piece of fruit or a mug, close to the base. You'll often see a faint lighter band, where light has bounced off the table and back onto the object. That is reflected light, and it's one of the observations the course asks you to make before you pick up a pencil.

Beginners tend to shade the shadow side all the way to the edge in one dark tone, which flattens it again. Leave that band slightly lighter than the darkest shadow. It's a small change, and it's usually the one that makes someone say the drawing looks three-dimensional.

One exercise: an apple, a lamp, thirty minutes

You need an HB pencil, a 2B, a putty eraser, a sketchbook, and something to draw. The course suggests a shoe, a mug or a piece of fruit. An apple is forgiving. Put it on a table with a lamp to one side, so there is an obvious light side and shadow side, then work through this:

1. Look for two minutes before you draw. Find the lightest area, the darkest shadow, the reflected light and where the cast shadow lands.
2. Sketch the shape lightly in HB. Silhouette only. Marks you can ignore later.
3. Check proportion. Hold the pencil at arm's length and compare the width to the height.
4. Block in the shadow areas with the 2B. Broad and loose. No detail yet.
5. Check the negative space. The shape of the air around the apple should match the drawing.
6. Add the cast shadow. Darkest at contact, softer further out.
7. Deepen the darkest tones, then lift the highlight with the putty eraser. Leave the reflected light alone.

The course recommends roughly 70% looking and 30% marking, which feels wrong at first and is right. If you catch yourself drawing for a full minute without looking up, you've gone back to the symbol.

Then do the same apple again tomorrow. The course's advice is to repeat the same subject, and it's sound: you'll see in the third drawing what you missed in the first, and the change in solidity is usually easy to spot when the drawings sit side by side.

Where perspective comes in

Once the shading is working, a different kind of flatness can appear in boxes, tables and buildings: the shapes are lit convincingly but the angles are wrong. That is a perspective problem, and it has its own cure. The one-point perspective side quest is a short way in, and it takes little more than a pencil and a box to draw. For loosening up, the blind contour drawing side quest trains the eye-to-hand link that makes every other exercise easier.

The short version

• Flat drawings are usually empty outlines. Real objects have edges where light meets shadow, not lines.
• Use the full range of value: a properly dark shadow, middle tones, and a highlight lifted with a putty eraser.
• Add a cast shadow. It falls away from the lamp, is darkest where the object touches the surface, and stops it floating.
• Leave a lighter band of reflected light on the shadow side near the base.
• Practise on one real object with a lamp to one side: an apple, a mug or a shoe. Spend about 70% of the time looking.
• Draw the same object again tomorrow, then compare the first drawing with the third.
• The whole method is in the free drawing from observation course, and it needs nothing more than an HB and a 2B pencil, a sketchbook and a putty eraser.