ART with my Finger Vs. a Blending Stump - WHICH WINS?

i am 32 years old actually this week actually by the time this video comes out it's my birthday tomorrow yay which means you have to be extra nice to me because in 32 years i have never heard about paper stumps i copped a bit of flack for this actually in my recent video on tick tock art hacks everyone's commenting about how many comments there are about me not knowing what a blending stump is so you're telling me that a guy who's been drawing for more than 10 years doesn't know what a blending stump is we're going to need a video dedicated to planting stuff surprised you know what a blending stuff i was genuinely shocked i've known about them since first grade art class first gra you're like seven years old i was rather shocked when he didn't know what a blending stump was it blew my mind that jazza didn't know what a blending stuff was believe you don't know what a blending stuff who else was surprised didn't know what a blending stump is i'm shook that the great jazzer my art idol didn't know what a blending stuff was how in the world do you not know what a blending stuff he is an amazing artist oh and to not know about blending stumps literally shocked as like a race car driver not knowing what an engine is is it though you can't drive without an engine you can draw without a blending stump in fact in this video i'm going to share my secret maybe maybe you're the dumb one oh i don't know what a plotting stuff isn't jazza doesn't know something i know i can't believe i am shocked jazza doesn't know what a blending stumpy well smarty pants maybe i'm the real winner here because my secret is stumpy fingers so in this video i am pitting my fingers against the almighty blending stump and i'm using blending stumps for the first time and sharing that experience with you this will be either a revelation for me or you or both of us who knows learning stuff time well no stumpy finger blending time so we're gonna start really simple we're gonna start off with a sphere lightly indicate the borders the edges of our sph and i'm going to do a couple of areas of shading obviously i want the sphere to look three-dimensional so i'm just going to start lightly shading in from the outside edges bottom and right side up and to the left and the first trick is actually knowing how to blend with the pencil so to get a really smooth gradient what i'm doing is using a nice soft lead being fairly gentle with how i put it down but also building up and you'll notice changing direction a lot i'm going sort of perpendicular to the direction of the lighting and then i go back and just make sure to go over the same areas but in a slightly different angle so that i'm not strengthening the intensity of the lines that show the direction that i've been drawing now to be honest i think this actually looks pretty good like i wouldn't think it needs a lot of blending because sometimes a little bit of texture sort of works in the favor of an illustration but we're gonna be blending today so that's my foundation and the other thing i want to put down is a little bit of shadow so i'm going to be really light here and just sort of mist underneath the ball all right so now to the finger blend technique so i mainly did this in high school i haven't done a lot of graphite drawing as an adult but i would literally hold my finger with my middle finger and my thumb so i can press down and blend with a firm tip holding my little finger stump i just softly blend in here there we go look at that just little circles as you can see i'm creating a nice smooth blend now the trick with this is actually being pretty subtle because you can sort of smear it and not undo it but if you sort of start from the outside and work in towards the shadow reason being obviously you get graphite in your finger if i went back to the highlights now i'd bring shadow into the highlights which i don't want so you start in the highlights you work your way out if you want to apply more pressure you hold your finger like it's a tool i can do the same thing here in these outer shadows on the surface that the ball is resting on it feels natural to me there's something tactile about the sensation of the nerves on my finger going ooh yes this drawing is doing well and i can feel it but you can't feel that with a blending stump there you go not bad huh pretty good huh impressed i know uh and then you just let your finger clean i'm just kidding actually what i always did is i opened to the back of my sketchbook and used the old wipe clean you just wipe it off like that and then slowly use up two or three pages in the back of your sketchbook to put the graphite back on look at that clean hand beautifully blended balls i'm doing all this first because i'm leaving room for the blending stump to blow my mind but i thought it would be fun to give some context as to how i've gotten by and what i have done instead when i've wanted to achieve i'm thinking a similar effect maybe it's way better maybe it's way worse we will find out soon but in the meantime it's your refined character portrait so i've just done a bit of a portrait of a lady where i sort of thought i could approach the shading to be fairly rough and semi-textured but not so much that it won't allow me to smooth it all out with my blending technique [Music] all right so i have the lightest areas obviously being there the cheek here the front of the nose everything else starts to sort of fall into shadow so starting off in those lighter areas i don't want to touch the white then i'm just going to start to blend out and then press quite firmly as i reach the more shadowed areas now as you can see this actually adds intensity to the shading it makes it look darker sort of overall because it's spreading uh the graphite that i've put down even here where i had really rough and really dark graphite under the hair by being quite firm actually ends up looking pretty soft you can still see a little bit of that original texture but it's soft enough that the smoothness is much stronger than the texture so i think it's actually the oils and then the friction of the skin that grabs and spreads and sort of smooths and blends uh the the graphite and i think honestly the result of this which you know just using my finger has only taken me you know a minute tops and completely blended and transformed my illustration and actually give me a little bit of power to add a bit more darkness in some areas if i control it that way and in fact because i have graphite on my finger i can actually use this to why not you know add a little bit of misty shading to the hair which i haven't shaded at all that actually looks pretty bloody good there you go i've shared my illustrious finger blending technique now it's time to see if it's very dumb in comparison to these or blending sticks is that what they're called again blending stumps are uh what they're all cracked up to be so i got them in a variety of sizes and how do you when you've used it how do you i'm assuming they're like a pencil but you don't i mean i don't have a pencil sharp in a hole big enough for the big one does it work with the little one i don't know did that work all right let's let's start from the start so same as last time during a sphere reasonably textured but as smooth as i can blending with a pencil first then we're gonna see how a blending stump makes a difference to this as opposed to my finger and before i put the blending stump down i just want to share a term that i have found useful to know and this situation in particular conjures it to mind that term is cognitive dissonance let's say you've lived your whole life thinking a b c but then someone else comes along and says hey no you're wrong it's one two three so a little person in our example here can do one of three things they can disregard one two three no you're wrong abc is right the second thing is they can add one two three to the mix and decide hey maybe there's a point to one two three but i like abc so maybe abc is as easy as one two three baby you and me girl or three they can completely reject their original world view abc in favor of the newly learned view one two three i may well be about to face a cognitive dissonance i have all my life blended with my finger stump but i am about to blend with the blending stump i mean it's papery like rubbing paper against paper i guess that's the idea now as i do that it's picking up the graphite and you know obviously if i draw with that that's going to spread the graphite so i have to i guess turn it as i go i'm using the angle now but it's picking up a lot of that graphite so if i want a clean bit i go to the clean bit of the blending stump and as i spread out just like i did with my oh no no i didn't accidental smear all right it's okay i can blend it away it's okay don't worry relax calm down all right i'm gonna angle down now apply a bit more pressure oh this is uh it does this has a more immediate impact i will give it that but actually it's less smooth it's not blending to perfection now obviously i have no technique so i have no idea how to use it maybe i'm using it wrong and maybe these things need to be worn in like maybe uh you use it for a while and it gets softer and you get better blends this is pretty cool as i work with it first of all there's a couple of things i'm noticing one i'm taking more time with it uh which i think produces more results i think i had a ceiling on how much i could do with my finger obviously no surprises there whereas here i can keep working at it to get a softer and softer blend and i have a bit of control in the sense that obviously my finger is a very broad area and i'd go over edges whereas here i can keep quite a sharp point go right up to the edge without smearing over it they're pretty cool clean up the edge here there we go look at that nice sharp edge i have uh infinite amount more control uh and i can look at areas that okay i think this isn't as soft so i can just go in this area and just keep working it until it it matches what i want the rest to be like maybe we can go back with the pencil add a bit more shading here and then duck back to the blending stump and soften that in i mean to be honest there's actually a different kind of texture that seems to be emerging from using the blending stuff it almost makes the sphere look slightly dimpled anyways let's go to this outer shadow area now obviously i've got a darker shadow but then i want to go back out to the lighter shadow my blending stump is very heavily colored now so i guess i'm just going to flip to the lighter side which i haven't yet used how do you clear a blending stump i i feel like there are some areas where i have a lot more control and somewhere i feel like i have a bit less like here i wanted to just softly gradiate out there and it just got a bit harder and sort of pushed the shadow further out than i wanted to i could erase it back but then again that's sort of like a harsher transition and that actually is where my finger is going to get a softer transition so this makes me think my conclusion may be that the answer is why not both there is a speed to using your finger and there is a softness and a broadness to the blending that actually is a lot easier than the blending stump but okay yeah like i mean in fact let's go back to our finger blended sphere yeah okay you can actually see flipping between them the original pencil texture is there a lot more in my finger blend it still looks quite soft but i have the ability to further and further blend until it's almost completely gone detailed guide how to use a blending stump smudging drag the stub to smut yeah i figured that one out shading draw some tight scribble okay i mean the the drawing bits is pretty straightforward and it turns it from this to this i mean it's subtle how oh this is what i need to know how to clean a blending stump when the tip of your blowing stuff becomes too dull or dirty you can sharpen using a sandpaper sharpener am i an idiot for not knowing what this is either sandpaper sharpener so sandpaper i don't have a sandpaper sharpener but i've got sandpaper all right sandpaper floating stump i don't know if it needs to be a certain grit of sandpaper but i mean that did a pretty good job hey alternatives to stumps and tortellons makeup or paintbrush q-tip or using your finger to blend a portrait is unknown wait is it big no no because the natural oils from your skin can cling to the graphite making the area impossible to erase this cognitive dissonance thing is painful all right final test i'm gonna make an artwork using nothing a pencil and blending stumps i wanted to go for intensity i wanted to push my ability to use blending stumps in my very little understanding of them to their limits but also push the physical blending stumps blending capabilities to the limits as well my sketch coming together i actually really like how the original illustration looked so i feel like we should just take a little screenshot here and we'll come back and compare to what it looks like after the blending stump has been applied all right blending stump time now this is all very experimental i have had very little practice with this obviously i mean my sum total of blending stump experience you've seen in this video but i just got stuck into it felt my way through it and i have to say it's really cool guys okay it's really good i really like how you can blend so well and it's accurate and with light and dark areas just blends really nicely and it's good okay they're really good i don't know why i haven't known about these for 32 years here's my finally blended illustration now i i don't like these sunbeams i put in there but because i used a blending stump there's no oils that put it down like it would have if it was my finger meaning i can erase it in this situation i might just come in here with my eraser just slightly add in just a little bit more highlight in some areas and then if i've taken it too far back i could just go with my blending stump and soften it again it's pretty cool how there's a lot more push and pull using these things so at the end of the day what we were talking about with our cognitive dissonance the reason it's a term the reason it's dissonant is because it's not the truth or the transition particularly that matters it's how you feel cognitive dissonance is a term about facing something that's uncomfortable like the fact that you've been doing it wrong your whole life when it comes to how it's blended and how much it can be blended obviously the blending stumps win i don't think the finger blending method is entirely ruled out i think there is a place for it and to be honest these things take up space and make mess and there are situations where both of those things are problems so i think my response to the cognitive dissonance is neither the complete accepting or rejecting of either but the knowledge that both can work in harmony it's my birthday as well so i don't want to be completely wrong this was a lot of fun i hope you've enjoyed coming on this journey with me i hope that my finger blending techniques help some of you and also that some of you learn about blending stumps through me with me for the first time let me know if there's anything else i'm missing here guys any like art supplies or methods that would be dumb to not know right now everyone's gonna be like have you heard of a pencil before yes i've heard of a pencil let me know in the comments if there's anything you think i haven't tried that isn't obvious i mean maybe these were obvious i don't know guys what i do know is we will continue to explore the obscure or obvious art techniques together we'll teach each other things and sometimes they'll be obvious and dumb and sometimes they'll surprise us all thank you for joining me for this video tell me how i did using for the first time and uh make sure to subscribe for more fun with art and creativity because that's what we do here this has been a lot of fun thank you so much for watching there are more videos over there you're bound to enjoy if you like this one but otherwise that's it for now and until next time i'll see you later

Channel: Jazza

Views: 1,500,732

Keywords: josiah, brooks, jazza, jazzastudios, animation, newgrounds, flash, humor, drawing, adobe, photoshop, Artist, Painting, challenge, funny, crazy, weird, draw, art, entertainment, hillarious, bob ross

Id: SN02XRDamUs

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021