Shade Form
A downloadable practice tool for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android
"Though this sort of thing may seem rather dull to you, any artist will tell you it's of the greatest importance. If you are going to give your life to art, you should certainly spend at least a day performing the experiments I am describing"
— Robert Beverly Hale from Drawing Lessons From The Great Masters, on studying the way light transitions on form.
This software is made to assist you in learning art. It does not teach you but rather you use it to teach yourself in an expedited way. It is to be used as an integrated tool at your disposal.
With this tool, you may ingrain the way light transitions on primitive forms into your intuition through application rather than books and lectures.
With shading in your intuition... drawing, the act of juggling, becomes a lot easier.
What does it do?
This tool automatically generates a primitive in your chosen lighting situation with your chosen material (plastic, metal, clay), then gives you the position of the light source to let you train your ability to visualize lighting and then put it down onto a canvas.
It gives you grades — overall and in the different sections (core, highlight, etc) — and allows you to analyze how you did.
Its greatest strength is in the shading intuition and visualization it trains you to have, while allowing you to analyze and get better at actually doing it.
When you can shade all of the basic forms, you can shade anything.
This tool holds many features to assist you on your journey, including:
- A customizable timer mode that cycles automatically
- An immediate grading system which shows you overall accuracy as well as accuracy on specifically the highlight, midtone, core shadow, and reflected light
- An automatic, live, and filterable improvement graph
- Nearly infinite variations of lighting angles and reference images generated on the fly
Additional Customizations:
- Customizable focal lengths for building perspective intuition as you go
- Customizable pressure curves for the brush
- Comes with an additional browser version that can work on any browser on any OS that accepts pressure sensitivity
- Option to shade the interior-plane
This software has been tested with and works on Windows, Mac, and iPad.
If you have feedback, feel free to post it here.
If you find bugs, report them here as you wish.
If you need help with an issue, visit the troubleshooting thread
Status | Released |
Category | Tool |
Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux, Android |
Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 total ratings) |
Author | Ashroo |
Made with | Three.js, Sublime Text, Adobe Photoshop |
Tags | artgame, Drawing, DRM Free, Hand-drawn, Painting, practice, shading, Shadows, tablet, tool |
Average session | About a half-hour |
Languages | English |
Inputs | Mouse, Touchscreen |
Accessibility | Interactive tutorial |
Purchase
In order to download this practice tool you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $10.99 USD. You will get access to the following files: