Recording texture and surface
Art & Design · Key Stage 3 · The School
The mark should match the surface
A smooth surface, like glass or polished metal, often works best with smooth, blended tone and small, sharp highlights. Few or no visible marks are needed. A rough surface, like bark or coarse fabric, often works better with broken, varied marks running in different directions. These echo the surface's own rough, uneven pattern.
Pressure and density carry information
Changing how hard you press a pencil, or how close together your marks sit, can show a texture changing across one surface. Heavier, denser marks suit a spot that is genuinely rougher or darker. Lighter, sparser marks suit a spot that is smoother, or catches more light.
Light behaves differently on different textures
A shiny surface makes small, sharp, high-contrast highlights. A matte, rough surface makes soft, spread-out changes in tone, with no sharp highlight at all. Watching HOW light sits on one specific surface, not just where light and shadow fall in general, is what really tells a drawing of glass apart from a drawing of stone.
Draw a scene with a glass bottle, a woven basket and a rough stone. The GLASS gets smooth, blended tone. Add one or two small, sharp white highlights where light catches it directly. Almost no single marks should show at all. The WOVEN BASKET gets a repeated mark, following the actual weave. Vary the pressure to show which strands catch light and which sit in shadow. The ROUGH STONE gets broken, uneven marks, changing in pressure and direction, with no clean edge anywhere. This echoes its own rough surface. Now look at the three drawn textures side by side, with no colour and no other clues. Each one should still be identifiable purely from its marks. That is the real test of whether texture has been recorded well — not how much detail went into any single one of them.