When discussing decorative wraps, you will hear the terms “shading” and “fading” thrown around a lot. For this particular course, it’s important we are all on the same page so that nothing is confusing or misunderstood. How I teach the difference between the two is, shading refers to using the same color but transitioning from light to dark in order to create shadows and highlights. I always imagine looking at a painting or drawing. In a painting there are always highlights (where the light hits an object) and shadows (where no light reaches the object) in them, so to make wraps have the 3D look to them, I shade from light to dark.
So if you look at the picture above you see the same object has a spot where the light is hitting it directly vs where the object casts a shadow on itself. That is the concept I try to keep in mind when shading. I have a tendency to ALWAYS shade from light to dark for this reason. It’s usually easier to highlight the pattern this way. Here’s a few examples.
So this is a sparkler pattern that I used the red shade pack to shade from light to black. As you can see the lighter red behind the sparkler creates focus on the main pattern and then the darker close creates the “shadow”. It automatically creates depth in the wrap with very little work.
Another Sparkler example that I used the charcoal shade pack for the background. The only difference is that instead of fading to black completely, I threw in some of the fuchsia colored thread at the close to give it some spunk.
Now that you have seen some examples of what shading looks like in a wrap, let’s discuss “shading ratios”.
