10 Minute Art School - How to Draw a Bowl

1. How to Draw a Bowl: Bowls are wonderful little things. I love them so much that I have collections of large and small and every size in between. They're iconic, and they represent abundance and collections. And there are so many ways to use them in your sketching or your drawing or your art, they're a big star in traditional still life for sure. And they're simple, and so they should be easy to draw. However, They have a circular top. When you look at that, from an angle, watch that circle, it becomes an oval or an ellipse, and that is not easy to draw, and that is what this class is for. We're going to learn to draw a bowl and your project is going to be to draw some bowls and fill them with some interesting things. 2. Let's Draw a Bowl of Balls: To draw a bowl, you have to be able to draw any lips. Any lips is a circle when you see it from an angle. In order to draw an ellipse or an oval, you can't be in tight the way that you would draw many things because there is a balance to it. And so instead of moving your fingers or your wrist to draw it, you move your whole arm and you get a pendulum effect and you have a light pencil and you get your arm going, and then you allow the pencil to start to touch the paper. It's just like those machines with a pendulum and they finally settle out and they draw something nice and even. So I advise that you take a scrap piece of paper, and you draw several ovals, moving your whole hand and your whole arm, doing it over and over, try different sizes, but go with your pencil really light, let it get down on the paper and let it go until it balances the oval. Now, what do I mean by balance? I mean that if you can check the balance of your oval to, if you divide it exactly in the middle, and then you divide it in the middle of the other direction. Ch. These four sections should be a match. So in other words, if this was a piece of paper and you cut it out, you would be able to fold it up. Fold it up this way, fold it this way, and everything would match up on the edges. Now, that's a give or take a little bit because a little bit of something being off is not going to hurt your drawing. A lot of something being off, something like this is definitely going to hurt your drawing. So that's the reason we use our bodies to do that. They know how to draw an oval. Once you have drawn your oval and you've checked for its balance on its four sides, it's time to make it a bowl. The best way to do that is to imagine that you're drawing a backward C and connecting it to the other end. This takes practice. You don't want to be too flat here, but you're not going to be absolutely parallel to the top circle. Other benefit of drawing your ovals this way is that you automatically get rounded ends. And that's what you have to have on an oval. Something that has pointed ends like this is a different shape altogether, and that just doesn't happen in real life. The height of a bowl is determined by this length right here. So if you want a deep bowl, you're going to come down with a s that comes way out here, a much more rounded backward C. And you have a nice deep bowl, good for solid or whatever. And a benefit of putting a guiding line in for the height of your ball is that when you have a line for reference on a symmetrical item, it makes it easier to tell if your two sides are matching, then if that line was not there and you're just playing with it back and forth. This reference line, which you will is going to tell you if your curve here is a match for your curve here. Afterwards, this line is erased, of course, and so are all of the extraneous lines that happen when you are drawing with your pendulum swinging arm. Now we have our bowl. But before we fill a bowl, we have to consider that whatever we fill it with, almost whatever we fill it with is going to make us not see that back edge. And so if you were going to ink over your pencil, you wouldn't want to inch that back edge because we're going to put things in here. We can do a bunch of balls if we want. I would do that by I'm drawing circles here in sort of the same way that I drew the ovals, and I start with just a few of them, and then we'll have one that doesn't show because the edge of the bowl is hiding it, and we'll have one that's in front of those two. One that's in front of those two. And then here again, we might have a couple that are partially showing. So we have this one here is in the front. We've established that. This ball over here, we're going to have the front hidden by the edge of the bowl in the back of it's going to hide parts of the other two balls here. And that is pretty good, except that this space bothers me right here. So there's a ball back there, that's just partially showing, and since I did that, I may as well do this. And now we have a bowl of balls. 3. A Gallery of Bowls and Ideas: Now that we know how to draw a good bowl, we're going to take this final lesson in order to look at a gallery of bowls that I've drawn, and hopefully there will be ideas here for you. If you had added inklines to the pencil drawing that we did, your drawing might look like this. If you added some color, you start to suggest what these balls might be. Now, they could have just been colored balls in a bowl. But with a little work, they can be oranges with a little more work. They can be oranges that are a little more fancy and decorative with some spots on the m and so on. Bowls are famous in still life, and bowls of fruit are a great thing to draw. Always have something like that around your house. This I've used for heading on some of my Facebook groups, obviously a bowl of cherries because life is just a bowl of cherries. Sometimes I just do a bowl because I see one and it's beautiful, and I don't put anything in it. This was done in Procreate, again, just making a study of what a jewel bowl from a museum collection might look like. Bowls are great in recipes because you can put all your ingredients and have them land in a bowl that shows what it is you're making. I do this quite a bit. And sometimes there are a lot of bowls in a recipe. I want you to notice something here. These are drawn from a different perspective than this one. You can tell because we see really more of the oval shape on these bowls than we do on this one. The edge of the back of this bowl is just about there. And so we are seeing this bowl more from the front side and not looking down on it as much as we are on those bowls. A bowl can be a bird bath just as easily by sitting in on something. This is a acrylic painting that still life again that I did. Like a bird bath is sitting on a pedestal. Flowers and plants can be in bowl, and this is really a fun thing to do. And little of the back edge of your bowl is blinded, if you will, by the plant in this case, but it can be completely gone in another case, depending on what it is, what the plant is that you're putting in there. These are some succulents that I wanted to save. And I planted them in a bowl and tried to do the most realistic version of that terra cotta kind of rough bowl. That is that, and I want you to go forward for your project and draw one or two or three bowls and upload them in the project section so that I can see that. And if you are interested in more comprehensive drawing instruction from me, you can find my drawing from the ground up class and skill share. It's much more than 10 minutes long, and it takes the same approach to teach you to draw things using basic shapes, and that's what they do in art school. Hope you've had fun drawing bowls with me.