About Shading

I have been struggling with shading.

At the beginning of my tangle adventure, I simply skipped shading.

Then I started doing it every now and then, when I felt inspired.

Now I am following the Zentangle Primer 1 and I feel like I must do it.

And then I reached chapter 4. Shading. My hope was that all secrets about shading would have been unveiled, but I felt like they weren't.

Since I did not want to go to Chapter 5 without being a bit better at shading, and still had two tiles to fill a page of 6, I was checking the web.

And Barbara Langston came up, with this video

I indeed recommend it if you want to learn something about different ways of shading.

If you are a bit in a rush, check this post or the following video with 7 tips about shading by Tracy Ann Wilkinson. More than tips these are questions we need to answer to understand what we want.

I also did a tile inspired by the following video by Miura Takao. Not usual shading, but cross hatching is also an option!

In the end I did not find any video to understand some more shading concepts with a plain search, so I repeated one primer exercise in the last tile of the second shading page. Taking into account more concepts I saw after drawing the first two tiles.

Shattuck, Printemps, Crescent Moon, Florz, Ennies, Wadical, Betweed, Static, Hollibaugh, Huggins, Cubine. 14-15 August 2025

Nipa, Printemps, Crescent Moon, Shattuck. 16 August 2025

And for shading, and Zentangle Primer, it's everything for now! Barbara cites a book about shading that seems interesting, I will double check if I want it or if I rather try other stuff instead of shading more and more.

Here a list of some things to take into account when shading.

1. You can (not must, can) forget real life shading rules. Zentangle is non-representational. Shading adds depth, dimension, emphasis, contrast to your tile
2. What you want to appear on top should be white, and shadow/graphite should be placed out of its borders
3. For the same concept, if something overlaps something, you should place graphite outside to make it pop up
4. And if you want something to sink, you can shade it inside its borders. You can check the Nipa tile with the small orbs, how some seem on top and some holes in the waves
5. And for the same concept, the deeper parts of the drawing, or the places where everything is converging, should be darker and have more graphite.
6. Start with little graphite, you can always put more later, eventually with a softer pencil
7. Unless you want a gap between pen and graphite for an effect, like with orbs to make them look like perls, you should put your graphite just by the pen lines, without leaving any gap between ink and graphite
8. You should not use the point of the pencil or tortillon, but usually you should incline them a bit to have a softer effect and to blend the graphite better.
9. A bit counter-intuitive. You should not use the tip, but you should keep your pencil and tortillon sharp. Remember, a paper clip inside the tortillon can help there!
10. Do small circles with the tortillon to blend the graphite
11. Remember to leave white zones! If you shade everything, it is like if you shaded nothing.
12. Sometimes the pen line can disappear if you put lots of graphite, or you simply want something to pop up even more in the tile. You can then pass again the lines with a fine liner.
13. If you do not have a pencil or feel like not using that, you can shade with the pen with 
1. Stippling: small points with different density
2. Hatching: lines with different pressure/length 
3. Cross Hatching: lines intersecting
4. Enthatching, lines spreading from a tip, is not exactly shading, but could also be used as such
14. Nobody prevents you to do the same with a pencil, but possibly you should then not use the tortillon or not use it to shade every line
15. Sometimes you don't want at all the pencil line in some part of your tile. You can steal graphite from other parts of your tile or do a graphite puddle on any piece of paper and get the graphite there with your tortillon
16. Shading on the two sides of an element can give an impression of roundedness. You can see it in Betweed.
17. Sometimes graphite is used for coloring. You can see it in Cubine

Did I forget anything about shading? Please let me know!

Zentangle Original Patterns
Betweed
Crescent Moon
Cubine
Ennies
Florz
Hollibaugh
Huggins
Nipa
Printemps
Shattuck
Static
Wadical