Happy Thursday all, we kick off this Tool of the Week by telling you that this review is specifically for illustrators/designers. It’s an all-new 3D image design tool to help those improve or alter their shading skills. The tool is called Shading Reference and should provide some useful tips and tricks on how to throw some shade!

Shading Reference requires no sign-up, and the home screen is a showcase of several different shapes, from spheres to doughnuts to heads! Each shown with various types of shading for you to draw your skills from. Any object can be clicked on and adapted to suit your requirements. Whether you’re using them as inspiration for a drawing you’re actively working on, or you’re just wanting to learn, Shading reference has you covered with massive amounts of personalisation. You can edit anything from the shape, roughness, colour (using hex codes), the angle at which you view them from, the intensity of your shading, the orbit and even the type of shading… it’s incredibly thorough.

Shading Reference comes from the mind of @skeddles - a pixel artist with an excellent aesthetic and style (check out their Twitter!), they want to share their shading skills with the world and we couldn’t recommend Shading Reference enough for any illustrators, budding or professional. But don’t take our word for it, try it for yourself!

We appreciate this isn’t the longest of reviews but we feel the website needs to be tried out by yourself to get a real feel for it. Shading Reference provides an excellent service, and it’s endless parameters make it a potential game-changer in the world of 3D illustrations!

Shading Reference, very nice. You get 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼/5

Shading Reference review