Transcripts
1. Welcome to Class: Welcome beginning and troubled intermediate artists to five mistakes beginning artists make. Today I'm going to go over five really simple mistakes that I keep seeing in my younger students. And I also have the feeling some of the more intermediate students might have carried over to their art from when they were a beginner. My name's Bethany, I'm an artist as well as an art teacher on skill share and in real life. And today we're going to learn how to shun those mistakes that are dragging down your art. So if you feel that your skill level has improved, intermediate artists, however, your drawings and paintings are still falling flat or not looking quite right, despite the practice you've put in, it could be you're making one of these five beginner mistakes. So let's get started.
2. Accidents Are Not Mistakes: So before we get into the five basic mistakes that beginners make, we need to change how you think about mistakes entirely. So Bob Ross is famous for his happy little accidents. O, here we go. Here's one of our happy little accidents and he'll just keep painting. I love this idea, not just cause you didn't make a mistake, that's just an accident. But the, really the idea behind his happy little accidents is one that they aren't mistakes there. They may not match the picture in your head. But keep in mind nothing will. There is something that gets lost in translation when you go from your mental idea to your physical paper. So your mistakes are not accidents. You can bring your mistakes into your drawing, you and build upon them to make them better, to make your painting or drawing uniquely yours. So that smudge you made in the corner when your arm that's hired, that is an accident. And you think, ah, how am I going to get that off? Don't this accident? You can weave it into your painting. You can bring it into it to make it unique. You can turn a introvert, or maybe there's a storm and thunder heads are building up over there and there are ways to bring some accidents into the rest of your painting to make it look like you did it on purpose. It's kinda sneaky, but it's also, it's also fun. And it also will help set your painting apart from other peoples, especially if you're drawing from the same source like we are today with our bunny. So that is an accident. It happened without you planning on it, but you're able to bring it into your painting and make it yours. This mistake then would be trying to fix it. I know that sounds backwards, but when you try and erase it, you might get ghost lines. You can get goes lines. And it'll never look quite right. Or if it's a painting, you're gonna, he try and wipe it off with water. You're going to have kinda this grayish area of their mistakes make a drawing worse. It weakens its appeal, its design. And while an accident can be brought into the painting or drawing and make it work, you can make accidents, work. Mistakes, kinda drag your drawing down with it. And it is backwards that more often than not trying to fix your accidents leads to mistakes. Now I'm not saying don't erase and don't practice or trying new things because you totally should. And with art, however, practice leaving some accidents alone or trying to rethink what it could be. But don't erase every little accidents because you think it's a mistake. You're going to rob your drawing of something that is fun and uniquely yours. That will go with your drawing and your own personal style. So if you're still having trouble with this and trying to decide what's an accident and what's mistake. First thing, can I use this to make my painting or drawing stronger? Or will it hurt my painting or drawing to get rid of it? Think, what would Bob Ross do?
3. Sketch It Out: Right? There are two myths about sketching that we need to address right now. Number one, that it's boring. I mean, come on guys. And two, that it takes for ever. Because of these things, most people don't sketch out what they want to draw before they draw on their big piece of paper. Or they're nice Canvas there, Sketchpad, whatever. But both of these things are wrong. Just wrong. Okay, there, this is a mistake. This is just a mistake. So there are actually sketches called thumbnails that are meant to be fast and easy and approved just how fast you can do alum, I'm going to complete three before the end of this video. Ready? Go. Now, I get it. When you've got this great idea in your head, you don't want to focus your attention on planning it out. You want to jump in and do it. I mean, it's fun. It's exciting. You wanna start drawing and start drawing. Now. It, it gets in the way or it feels like it does. But that's not what's happening. Sketching plays a really important role to your final drawing. Essentially, it lets you get your mistakes out early. You get the big pieces, the big your subject, your focal points, where they need to be on your page before you actually put them on your page, that way you know where they're going. But it is the most guaranteed way to make you frustrated, to get you a not as cool drawing as what was in your head. And you're essentially going to rage quit because they also help you get your proportions right, how big things are in relation to the other things and objects in your drawing. So what do we got here in our example drawing or our example photo, we have cute little bunny and carrot. And you can tell either that's a really small bunny next to this carrot, or it's a really big carat next to this bunny. Either way, the carry has to be bigger than the rabbit. And so by sketching that out, you can get the details, the finesse of how big cara versus how big to make the rabbit. It also really helps you in perspective. Now perspective is difficult all around. I haven't even tried to tackle teaching it yet because I have yet to find the words to adequately describe how to fix perspective. Still working on that. But when you sketch it out, you can usually see this doesn't look right. More of the instinctive I need to fix this doesn't look right. So sketching, it's like looking through the lens of the camera and you can frame it differently, moving around without having to erase and restart on your big page. Which is the last thing it really, really does for you scheduling. You can erase on your ruddy little paper instead of your nice paper. Erasing things over and over from your nice paper, it wears on it. You're gonna leave coastlines, which we're gonna talk about in a minute here. And it can, and those lines can show through your finished drawing. Now, you don't want that, it looks like a mess. So you've got a sketch guys, just, just little bits. Okay. And die.
4. (Re)starting At the Beginning: So drawing and restarting your drawing. This was a mistake. I didn't realize was a mistake. All I knew was that a lot of my younger students would do it. They would start drawing, erase it. Start drawing again. You race it, start growing again and erase it again and again and again. And all I knew was that it was frustrating. I'm like, come on, guys, just just keep going. But it is actually a mistake. And here's why. Well, the first thing it does is you don't get very far. You're focusing on a line instead of your drawing. And so it's, it's keeping you from actually moving on with your drawing. Something I've kind of noticed is that the reason people will start and restart and restart is that they think this line is wrong. Some kids and some students have actually told me that it's like no, this is wrong and they'll they scrub it away. Well, there is no perfect line. Now granted. If you're like pencil goals, troop off the page onto the table, onto your pants. You probably should erase that line, maybe even get a new piece of paper or a pair of pants. But I'm not talking about obvious mistakes. I'm talking about I'm talking about, you know, you made a line and it may not be what you thought it should be, but it's where it should be. And you are going to make it what it should be. You are going to expand on that line by shading it, by adding form and sometimes color. And that will, that will help the line even if you see the mistake, other people are gonna go, wow, hey, look at this box. You like it's crooked. It is a lot of people just don't notice your mistakes because you see them. You made them. And so you kinda feel like they're going to notice a lot of people won't. But the idea of a perfect line is just striking it down on the page. Getting it out there is more important than perfection. That perfect line doesn't exist. And remember Bob Ross and his happy little accidents starting over and over and over is going to keep you from making those accidents, those, those little unique things that are personal to you and you're drawing and make it look different than the photograph or someone else's drawing or painting of the same object. So long story short, quit restarting your drawings.
5. Too Much Pressure!: Everyone does this. Everyone. You always start out with too much pressure guys, especially the newbies. So, you know, it's kind of expected. Most, most experienced people have with a pencil is a writing pencil or school pencil. And you wanna write hard because it's smudges. And you wanna make sure you can understand what you wrote later. Again. In art. It is so unhelpful, so ridiculously unhelpful. Now keep in mind, drawing light is a skill. You're going to have to build on it and work on it. But it is a very important skill. It's gonna save your paper and it's gonna save your fingers from hurting all the time. So if you remember nothing else about this, hard pressure is hard to get rid of. This is where coastlines come in, especially if you've been starting and restarting. But goes lines are lines that you erased. But you haven't erased entirely. And you can scrub at it all day long. But you're not gonna get everything. And it's because you drew really, really hard. I have an example here. Here is a very hard pressure line that I erased Intel. It's still there even though like anger, even though I erased it, it's still there because I can't get rid of all of it. Now here are some light lines that I erase. And you don't see him at all because the eraser was able to take them off. So these ghost lines from using too much pressure really kills your paper. And it can show through your drawing, which can really mess with your design and your layout. And it kinda looks like you painted or drew over something else. It just doesn't look as nice or clean. You know what it is. It's someone tapping you on the shoulder going, hey, hey, I was here first. We don't want them to be their first. That's why we erase them. So draw light lines.
6. Outlining the Problem: Death. All right guys, let's look at our example subject that we're working with today. Okay? The beanie and the caret. I love this one because it's super cute. But let's talk about its lines. It's big fat black lines that wait a minute. I don't see it. There are no black lines outlining this rabbit. Does this mean then I should make the rabbit in big fat black lines? Probably not. Now, again, this is a mistake. I really understand outlining a subject. Let's you know, where it is and you essentially fill it in like a coloring book, the complicated coloring book, but still a coloring book. The problem is that those fat black lines, as you see, they don't exist in real life. Take a look at your surroundings right now. How much of your room, the people around you, the pencil you're holding in your hand. How much of that is actually outlined with fat black lines? Well, unless you're looking at a cartoon poster, nothing, nothing has bet black lines. They do have is edges. Edges are different because they are planes. They are surfaces filled with color and texture and they end. And where they end their borders is where we usually put the black ones. We're not gonna do that. We're going to skip that as best as we can. So we're going to draw in edges. Now, some of you may not think this is very different from drawing in lines. In some ways it isn't because usually you start with one edge, like the edge of the rabbit. Ok, well that's just a align that's fat and fuzzy. Let's see. I also fill in around in and add to it so that it's all one plane, it's all relatively one shade. What definitely one direction. And it's, so it looks like one thing. However, drawing in a line, you're not making that line blend into everything else. It's just itself, it is self-contained, it is align. And mostly where we use this is comics and cartoons. And there's reasons for that, that self-contained this makes it really easy, very clear to see objects, to see people. And this is features. And you'll fill it in with color so that it looks relatively like a person so that we can recognize it. Clarity in cartoons and comics is essential. So of course they're going to do this. Now this isn't a bad thing because they want that clarity. However, it is really important. Learning to draw an edges. Goodness, if nothing else, to give you the option. But honestly, I think it also helps you focus on what you actually see. So instead of say, defining the edge of this carrot and I fill it in with orange. Okay, yeah, it looks like bunnies cared. But it also shows I'm not actually focusing on what I see in this picture. So by drawing in edges, I have to focus on where it meets another object, the floor or the background, or the rabbit. And I have to focus on what texture is there. So you, there's hard edges down below it and a slight reflection while there are fuzzy edges around, around the rabbit's mouth. So instead of relying on those thick black lines to tell you where an object ends, you have to look at the edges. Really. You have to actually look at them so that you can't just, you can't just draw a line and done with, you have to actually look at what you're drawing. So looking for these edges will help you with your observational skills as well as some more realistic drawings because it helps with the weight of your object, that texture. And it's outside form. So a more rounded object, you'll have to focus on the rounder edges. And those edges will come around to form the surface so that you are focusing on the roundness of it instead of just filling in one color when Shade. Like a coloring book.
7. Remember Your Backgrounds: Last mistake. I'm only going to say one thing about your backgrounds. Don't leave them out. I'm serious. More often than not, my students just won't include their backgrounds. They don't even think about it. But you need them. They are important. Not only are they setting the scene for your drawing, they also help to balance it out. Help you focus on your subject. By drawing your viewers eyes to your subject, you can really use your backgrounds to help strengthen the rest you're drawing. In a way, it's your foundation, it's the most receded thing you see. And it is playing the role of setting. So if you have a stage play and you have say, a house way back here and you know, Hansel and Gretel in front of it. Hansel and Gretel or your subject. And the House tells you where they are and what they're doing. And beyond the house you'll have the forest and that tells you also where they are. But you can use the colors of, say, the forests back there, make them dark and spooky, and then have the brightened, cheery colors of the house. And you're going, oh, this must be a good place. That's what Hansel and Gretel thought. There were horribly wrong. That's what they thought. So your background helps explain what is going on and it helps you to focus on what is actually important. So even if you have a very simple background, like are the rabbit we're using today. It's just green background. And then whatever table there on, the green is largely just one flat color. But in the table you have some reflections so that you can see it's kind of glossy, hard. You can infer things from looking at the photograph that we definitely want in our drawing. So again, with your backgrounds, don't leave them out. They serve an important function. So even if it's just like the empty green background here, add something. It's, it makes it better, I promise.
8. Practice With Your Project: So that's our class for today, but you're not getting away without a class project. So enter our bunny friend who has been with us throughout this class. You can download this photo down below in the resources section. Now you're going to draw bunny here, but I got some rules. Well, number one is you must draw three to five little thumbnail sketches. You can tie them, give yourself just like ten minutes maybe for all of them. And do really quick and simple. We will number to think in edges instead of lines. And that one's a little harder. But if you use the society or pencil instead of the point, you can use that to wean yourself off lines and start getting more into edges and surfaces. You must also rule number three, include a background. If you make it all one color. Well, preferably make it two colors. He got obvious green color and obvious light-colored. Just just include a background. Also remember to draw blight. And this is rule number four. You may only restart your drawing once. We're going to wean you off this one, it's hard or gonna get you there. Okay. Post you are finished drawings of beanie down below. I can't wait to see them.
9. What We Learned: That's our class for today. So today we learned five general mistakes that I've really noticed beginning artists make. And some of you may have even carried over to your more intermediate level art. So sometimes we just skip basic things like backgrounds or sketches because we either don't think of them or they take up too much time. While other times I'm really putting on too much pressure and that can hurt our paper and later our drawing that we're going to put on top of it. Especially if you're the kind of person who starts and restart, or if you outline everything regardless of whether lines are actually there. So I hope you enjoyed today's class that you learned to work with edges instead of lines. And that not all accidents have to be mistakes, right? I hope you enjoyed today's class that you will put your class project, been, been here into the class, into the project gallery when you're done. And leave me a review to say, you know what you liked about today's class and maybe what could use some work. I do have other art classes here on skill share that you can find in my profile. And from there, you can also find me on Instagram, my website, things like that. So I hope you'll check it out and that you will follow me here on skill share until next time. Bye.
Bethany Lindell, Author & Artist
