52 Drawing Challenge

1. 52 Week Intro: Hello and welcome to my 52 week drawing course. My name is China and I'm going to be your instructor. During this course, I'm going to show you the fundamental skills to learn how to draw from how to hold your pencil, to how to shade and make things look realistic. At the start of this course, I want you to draw yourself portray exactly how you would draw it. We want to see your raw talent or you might say your raw, untalented ways. So draw your portray and just see what it looks like. After that, you're going to have a markers going to give you a way to compare how you were before the course and how you've developed and progressed afterwards throughout the year. We're going to look at different topics, from still life to figures, all the way down to portrait. And by the end, you're going to draw yourself portrait again. This way you can see how much you've improved. So grab your pencils. You'll need a two Ba2h and an eight B. Grab a ruler, because we always need to draw straight lines. And off we go. Feel free to do this at your own pace. You can draw it in your own time and pause the video and come back to it. Remember the key is consistency. Trying to make sure you can draw one thing a week, and before you know it, your skills will improve so much, so enjoy the course. Let me know if you want any feedback and I'll see you at the end with your amazing self portrait that you're incredibly happy with. Enjoy. 2. Week 1 8B Pencil: Welcome to week one of learning how to draw, or how to shade, or both of those things. So in this session, we are taking things right back to basics. And we're going to start looking at shading. Shading is what helps things look realistic. For example, if you look at a picture and you took away all the saturation, which is the color, you'd still be able to understand what it is. And the reason why we can understand objects in black and white is because there are so many different shades of gray, maybe more than 50. And our brains can understand things in three D because it doesn't necessarily need color to understand it. So our task today is to practice our value scales. And to do our first value scale, I want you to try and find yourself an AB pencil. You can find these from all of your local art supply shops, Amazon. But I would recommend spend a little bit more money on your pencils, because the cheap ones are ****. So start with the A B pencil and let me show you what we're going to do. Okay? So first of all, please don't judge my ruler. It looks disgusting. Actually, the more I look at it, I'm like, why did you choose that ruler? To be honest, it was the first thing I had to hand, and I've had it since school. It is a bit Ben, and it does look dirty, but it does a job. So grab anything you've got, Hopefully it's cleaner than this. And we're just going to start with this little exercise. Now what we're doing here is we're drawing a block of ten squares. And I promise you this sometimes is the hardest part. Let's better check. We've got 12, 345-678-9100, My heart just sand. I was like, oh my God. Imagine if I made this video and only made nine. Anyway. It doesn't really matter which side you start on. For some reason, I go for a slightly more challenging side. I'm right handed and my darkest shade is on the right hand side. So that means there is potential that could smudge it along the way. Depending on how much you like to live in danger. Do decide beforehand where you want to go. But I do enjoy starting on the right hand side. Now, the aim of this task is to shade from dark to light with the darkest first. And the reason why we do that is because it's so much easier finding the darkest your pencil can go. It's really hard to start off with the lightest your pencil could go because we are quite heavy handed. We start on the right hand side, we start on the darkest bit, wherever you put your dog bit, then you're going to work your way to the opposite end and you're going to try and get a little bit lighter each time. The reason why this task is really good for you is because we're trying to see if we can make at least ten different shades with our pencil. And as I said at the beginning, without these different shades, we find it difficult to see things in three D. We need to be able to practice, do our scales just like you would an instrument. And be able to show different tones, different darknesses. With our pencil, it looks like a really easy task, but once you start, it's like, oh ****, actually this one's a little bit light or this one's a little bit dark. What can I do to balance it out? These look the same. You're really training your eye at the same time. And you're also practicing how to get nice smooth squares. Work your way down. You might find that you get to do the dark bits much easier and the light bits are more challenging. Or the other way round, for me, I find the lighter bits more difficult. Hopefully you would have noticed as I'm shading While going further down into the scale, I put my thumb and my finger further away from the tip of the pencil. I'll talk about this more in detail in another video in the next few weeks. But basically, the less grip you have in your pencil, the lighter the lead becomes. That's because you're not putting too much pressure down in the start. I grip the pencil as if I'm holding on for dear life or as if I'm writing my name. I'll hold it really close to the tip and I'll have a strong line. But as we go down to value three and value two, you just want gravity to do the work. The way that gets darker is by adding another layer or go in a different direction. You're really trying to be as delicate as you can, especially with this eight B pencil just to see the difference that you can do. Give it a go, see how you get on. And you might need to practice a few times. A lot of my students do, it's quite hard to get it right first time round. But try and work on balancing those squares. Can you get each of them a little bit different each time it steps up? And can you make them perfectly even? That's another challenge in itself. So getting it super smooth so that there's no difference in the top corner to the bottom corner, everything is unison and you can clearly see the different shades in the square. So I'm just going over mine one more time just to make sure that it's very clear. The steps that I've got, and I can see that there's spaces where it can go a little bit darker because the difference 6-7 for example, is quite large. So it gives me enough room to push things darker. So there we get, this is our first value scale with our eight pencil. So yeah, feel free to show me what you've done, and if you want feedback, I'm happy to give that too. So hopefully you found that useful. Hopefully you've started to learn from your mistakes already. It's the best way to learn. Now I'm going to show you another two videos using two different pencils, Your two B and your two H. So feel free to watch along with me and see what happens, or just do this in your own time and find your own discoveries. I can't wait to see you for a week. Two. 3. Week 1 2B Pencil: So in this one, let's look at your two B pencil. When you're doing this, you're doing exactly the same thing. But I want you to think about what you can see as a difference and what you can feel as the difference. Because it makes a huge effect on how we draw and how we shade. So let's start with our two B. Now let's look at our favorite pencil, well sometimes favorite pencil, the two B. Now you're going to draw exactly the same rectangle as you did before, ten squares across, and you can literally draw this straight underneath. I would recommend you draw them very close together, if not touching, just because it helps you to see the difference a little bit more. The reason why we have a loads of different pencils is because they do different things. They are either slightly harder than the other, they're slightly softer, or they're slightly darker, slightly lighter. I choose these three pencils, 82.2 H, because they do everything that I'll ever need in shading. Let's start with our two B. I want you to do the same thing as above. You are going as dark as you can in the last square, square number ten. And it might take a little bit of cross hatching, meaning you'll go upwards and then you'll go side to side just to make sure you're covering all the area. Getting it nice and even and really making the most of that, well, the darkest it can possibly go. After that, do the same thing again. Move your pencil to the left. And you're going to move the pencil shade under squared to the left. And you want to go a little bit lighter each time. You might already start to notice the difference between the pencil underneath and the pencil above it. Now mine is a tiny bit reflective. I did have a light top. At certain angles, you can see it really well, Other angles, it looks red. I don't know why, but hopefully you can see the texture and the shade, or the color very clear. When I look at the top shade, it's a cooler pencil, that means it's more of a bluey tinge. Also, it's a lot more dark. You can see from the square ten that it's way darker than the one underneath it, like charcoal dead of night black. Whereas the one underneath it's like a shadow in the sunlight, if that even makes sense. But also the texture on the paper, the more you start to draw and shade, the more you can see that the pencil above is much softer. It has this grainy effect, whereas the one underneath is a little bit of a harder lead. That means the pencil is sharper for longer. It just makes it scratch the paper a bit more precisely. If I was ever wanting to do something with detail, I wouldn't really use my eight B. Well, that's just going to be too soft. If I want to do something really accurate, I want to use my two B. And that's why whenever I do any outlines or any light shading, I'll use my two Be. Especially when we get to the lighter areas, it's much easier. This pencil starts off at a much lighter state and that means that I don't have to stress so much about making it super light because it already starts that way. Do the same thing again, check your scale, go from left to right, make sure nothing looks the same, nothing's too dark or too light. And just try and even out those squares. Once again, hopefully you should see this huge difference that you can see in mind. And you can feel the difference too. Because being an artist and using something with your hands or making something with your hands is all about how something feels and how it looks. So you should feel the difference and see the difference at the same time. Okay, great. Hopefully you felt and saw everything, and it was really useful, and you can't wait to try one more. Well, our final video is the Two H, so this is significantly different. So let's pick up our two H and do exactly the same thing again. 4. Week 1 2H Pencil: Okay. Last but not least, the two H pencil. This is difficult just because of what it is, but you should still try. It is great to do hard things so that everything else feels way easier. So, grab it, two H, let's try it again. See what different challenges come up for you now. Okay. Last but not least, the two H pencil. Now, I don't use this pencil that much, but it does have some properties that are very useful. And hopefully, very, very quickly, you'll understand why I don't use this too much and why it's useful. So as you can see, we've done the same boxes and we're doing the same thing again. Now very quickly, you'll start to feel like you're going to rip the paper. And you might, to be honest, because you might be trying to get it so dark that it just won't do what you want it to. And actually it'll just rip the **** out of your work. So try and find that boundary before it's too late. And you can see already that this is incredibly light. This looks like the middle of the two B, where it's like a medium gray. And no matter how much I try and rub it giggetyI, it just won't work. So this means it's more challenging, because if the darkest value is already set in the lighter end of the tub, that means we have to spread that value for ten squares. And that is a lot, especially when the pencil starts super, super light. So see how you get on with this. I think this will be the most challenging one. Which should be the most challenging one because it's a smaller range of shades that you have available. But, you know, saying that you have had a couple of practices already and you might find that you are chamazing at light shading and you might be like China. What are you talking about? This was a piece of is the eight. B is the one I want to avoid with every cell of my being. But hopefully that's not the case. Because we need eight S, we don't really need two Hs that much. But to be fair, two Hs are very, very good for refining any shading that you want to make super smooth. So for example, if I took this row of shading and put it inside my eight B, so that top row that we did, the first one, I could make my eight B's look incredibly smooth without affecting how dark they are. And that's because you can see how light this pencil is. It's so difficult to go dark, it's really hard to go too dark with this pencil. And because the lead is incredibly hard, you know, as we spoke about at the beginning, it could rip a tear in your paper. It means that it can get in the grain of your paper much easier. It's like rubbing, I don't know, fake tan on you with a stone. And it's not quite getting everywhere. So actually you need a fake tan mitt. So it bends with the curves of your body. I'm not sure if that's the best example, but it's the only thing that came into my head, and I don't even use fake down that much, only when I'm feeling pale anyway, so you can see very, very clearly how light is, how hard it is. And later on we are going to practice this pencil with making those soft, soft shades and doing the fine detail that it can do. So let me know how you got on with those three because they're all very different. Even though it's the same task, they all have their own challenges. The eight B is really hard to go light the two, I think actually the two B is an all rounder, but it's still practicing the same thing and things can look more similar. And then the two H is a bit of a bugger for going dark at all. So let me know how you got on. Hopefully again, hopefully I found it useful. On our next task, we are going to look a bit more of a shading gradient rather than blocks. We're going to see something different. Amazing, so that's weak one, done. It might seem a little bit frustrating that we're not making masterpieces from the get go, but please trust the process. Everything I teach is all about building your confidence and building your skills. This is a fundamental lesson for building those skills. So join me next week for week two, where we'll start to look at gradients and see if we can get the transition from dark to light in one smooth swoop. I will see you next week. 5. Week 2 Gradient: Welcome to week two of How to Improve. Our drawing series. Feels a bit weird in series when it's literally going to be a year long. Anyway, in this week we are going to look at gradients. And that means shading super smooth from dark all the way to light. Except this time we're going to get rid of the squares. We don't want to see any edges. We want this to be a very smooth transition from dark to light with our eight B pencil. So grab your tools and let's see how we get on making a smooth gradient. So that hopefully in the future we can shade curves and soft edges really easily. Just like a pro. Now, I've stepped up my game here. I think you'll be incredibly happy not to look at the ugly bloody ruler from before I have got this bad boy. Look how shiny that is. Now we're going to start with the same size rectangle that we did before. We're going to go for 10 centimeters. I might make mine just a little bit bigger. Yeah, I think that'll look better just for the video, but I think you should do yours around 10 centimeters to give yourself the same scale as before. Now this time we do not want to draw any squares in between. Nothing. Please don't put any squares in the middle. What we want to do, we want to do the same thing. We want to start on the right hand side and end on the left hand side. Again, that is because we are trying to find our darkest value now. Didn't manage to do any more value scales in your eight B, then this is a perfect time to try it on here. All you want to do is start on the right hand side. It's going to be quite difficult to stay within the lines because we're, well, my hat goes a bit too quick. I've got to be very careful not to go too crazy. I'm finding my darkest value here as I travel down the value scale. I'm working my way now into what would be value nine that we did previously. I'm just loosening the pressure that I'm applying. There's no difference that you can't really see where one starts and one finishes. But as I move down, I just release that pressure a little bit. It becomes lighter and lighter. The more focused I am, the less I end up talking. Maybe that's a good thing. You can see I'm going back and forth a little bit just to try and even it out. You can see when I get into the lighter areas, how grainy it gets. It's quite difficult to achieve a light shade, but when I get to number one, don't even want to see a difference. I don't want to see that line. I don't want to see any hard lines on this because this is a soft edge. I'm just working my way back up just to make sure I'm achieving all of those values. Just because I'm a perfectionist, I just want to shade these edges. Now. I'm being careful to try to match those values as they are in that area. Just a little shade then I'll just try and blend that in. Okay, there we go. There we have a gradient. This is a soft edge. It's a soft edge because you cannot see where any differences between each of the shades. Now you can obviously see the direction that I shaded in. That's fine, but you can't see any hard edges like we had on the previous one. This might take a little bit of work just to get that transition again, I practice with all your different pencils if you want to push yourself and just see where it takes you, but for now, this is the only thing I want you to focus on this week. However, if you did want to bring it up a notch and really challenge yourself, see if you can blend a hard edge, which was the gradient that we did last week, into a soft edge, which is the one we're doing this week. Next week we're going to look at how shading can actually become quite mindful. Don't miss that one, because it's going to be really, really enjoyable. I'll see you. 6. Week 3 Mindful Shading: In this video, we are going to try a different shape with our mindful shading. Last time we looked at geometric shapes, but this time we're going to look at a circle. It's a little bit more challenging, but the results I think, are way more satisfying. So grab your pencils and let's get started. Okay folks, so we are starting with an easy win. We're going to draw around something circular, like all my videos. You do have the option to do it freehand, but it's hard, as you might have seen by my perfect circle drawing video. Anyway, what you want to do after this is you just want to draw one straight line that covers half of the circle. Is that the radius or diameter? Honestly, I have no idea. It's been a long time since I went to school. And what we want to do from there is we want to start shading from that center point. So imagine there's a.in the circle. And you're always aiming towards that dot. You want to make sure that.in the middle is where all of your directional lines head towards. Now what I like to do is just shade around the edge a little bit as I move along. Just because it gives me a little bit of a buffer, it means that I kind of like hit this little groove or this little safe area where pencil already is and I'm not going outside the line. So we want to work our way from left to right. We're basically bouncing from left to right all the time trying to find this nice balance. It just makes it a little bit easier to make sure we're shading equally on the left and the right. And it just keeps us in check for our tone as well. So whenever I edge up on the left, I'll try to match that same height on the right. And I'm just kind of playing with that gradient, seeing if I can get it really nice and evenly distributed so you know, it's really dark at the bottom and it's getting lighter and lighter as I fan my way up. Now I rotate my paper, it makes life so much easier. And hopefully, you know, by now I'm a lazy drawer, so don't feel like you have to stick your hand and your paper in the same position because, my God, it hurts. You do not want what is that repetitive straining disorder? Do make sure you're rotating and you're keeping it nice and easy for yourself. As I'm edging towards the top, I'm switching to my two B as well. I started with my eight and now I'm on my two B. It's making it much easier to go lighter and my aim is to make it so the two, the final parts of the shading just blends in magically with a white, so you can hardly see where it starts and where it ends. It's a real knack to it, but so long as you are being really delicate and your fingers are far away from the tip of the pencil, you can easily do it. What you want to do is kind of go back over the whole thing in your two be just to kind of bring together those two textures and those two different darknesses of the pencil. So I am going back over, I'm seeing where things can go darker. I think my circle in general is fairly light. So what I want to do is just make sure my bottom half is within that dark area. So remembering those value scales that we started with, the bottom half should be value five to value ten. Do make sure you're going back and refining. You're filling any uneven gaps. And you can see that big swish there that I did. And just got to make sure I repeat that on the left hand side, so it starts to look three D. Actually, it looks like a cone. A weird cone. Like a flat cone. Not a usual cone that you might see on the sports field, but it's a cone nonetheless. Yeah. So this is another example of how you can use different shape in a mindful way. It's really satisfying, it's really challenging, I'm not going to lie. But it is really good to practice different ways of doing gradients and different shapes. I hope you found that useful. And I'll see you next week for another video. 7. Week 4 Sphere: Hello everyone, welcome to week four of how to become a Better artist with me. Now this week we're going to be looking at three D balls, spheres, they're everywhere. No pun intended. Now, the reason why a three D sphere is super important is because it helps us to turn things into three D. We're relying on our gradients, which we've just practiced, to show that things are curved. Grab your pencils and let's begin. You might want to grab something circular. For this, I am going to use the inside of some masking tape. You can either go freehand and draw a circle. Or again, make life easy for yourself. And find something circular, maybe the bottom of a cup or a candle. Then all you're going to do is use your two. Remember that is, I'll go to just to draw that circle. Just went a bit, not the best example, China. Let me do that again. Just go around your circle. There we go. If you've got any fine hairs coming off, just get rid of those. Now what we want to do as well is draw a shadow. Things always look more situated. When there is a shadow, we want to imagine that there is a circle that is squashed underneath here. All I'll do is I'll make the side on the left longer because our light source is coming from the top here. It needs to be longer on the left then as it curves around, nice and curved everywhere, but then it's just going curve around there. The shadow is the hardest part. Just take your time getting that. It doesn't need to be perfect, we just need a gesture of it. There is our outline. What tends to happen with the ball is where the light source is. Luckily, that's where my actual light source is. Wherever the ball is closest to the light source, that is going to be the lightest area. Imagine perspective. Whenever something is closer to something, it becomes bigger. And whenever it's further away, it is smaller. In this case, when the object is closer to the light, the light is bigger. Then as the ball is further away, the light becomes a lot less. Hopefully, that makes sense. That's a bit of a weird analogy. But let's see. Anyway, what I tend to do for this exercise, it's a bit weird. Bear with me. Remember that value scale that we did a couple of lessons ago? We have 12.3 Okay, That's our first three values. Now that is going to be around the light source. What I want to do is very lightly draw a circle around that area. I'm creating a barrier where I'm not going to put any pencil in there at the moment because it's just making life easy for myself. I don't have to worry about it. I can just go from there. What we want to do now is because this is 12.3 I just want to shade in the whole thing, value four, because what happens is the light is cascading off. That means that the next value, the next shade will be shade four. Let's shade that all in. It doesn't have to be neat and tidy. Don't worry too much, We just want to knock off that white. It just means that we're giving ourselves some layers that we can build up on. This is going to be our first layer. You might notice I'm changing the direction of my shading strokes. I'm getting a bit of cross hatching in there just to try to fill all of those gaps. Don't want to see any white in that section. We do want to leave the white in that circle that we drew to the inner circle. There we go. It's nice and messy, which is great. Now what we're going to do is test the relationship between the value we've just done and the value of the shadow. Once we start to apply the shadow, the relationship should change. Switch to your eight B pencil now and start to shade that shadow. You should notice that the value for that we just applied. Becomes well, feels a lot lighter. So it's not actually changing. But once we add a high contrast in there, which is our dark value, our shadow, our light values start to look lighter because instead of white surrounding it, making it look dark, it's black surrounding it or a dark value. It's really interesting how relationships change. Once you introduce a really dark shade, fill in your shadow. Now hopefully you can recognize that difference to me. And hopefully for you to, the ball actually looks really, really light. Now what we want to do now is work on the shadow inside the ball to try and mend that relationship. What happens? You might remember from your science lessons at school or if you're still in school, should be fresh in your brain. Often we have refracted light. That is when light will hit the floor and then it will bounce back into an object. Now what happens quite a lot is people will notice there is a high light on an object and they will leave it really light. Now it is a high light in the sense that it is lighter than another shade. But it doesn't mean that it reaches value one, or two, or even three on the value scale. It can mean that the highlight is actually number eight, but it's next to a number nine because it looks lighter. We read that to be super light. We want to show the world that we recognize. It's lighter, we leave it, and it's a bit too aggressive. I want us to make sure we're being brave. First of all, we're going to create a edge just like before, when we practice our hard edges. And it wants to curve with the ball just above that, we want to create another one. It looks a little bit like, I want to say cricket ball or it's just got a belt. There we go. All we want to do now, sticking with our eight B pencil is shade in this band that we've created. Now I want you to reach number nine. It's really dark but it's not black. Still going to be a little bit grainy, which is fine. I just want you to shade that in. Just don't be afraid to make it dark. Because if we make it dark, it means we have more of a range coming from dark to light. From number nine all the way to number one. But if you make it too light, you're only going from I do number six to number one. Your range is smaller. We like contrast now we've got a hard edge, we've got loads of hard edges. But remember this is a ball, it's a three D ball, everything is really soft. What we want to do now is remember how we transitioned from a hard edge into a soft edge when we did that scale where it was dark all the way to light. I'm going to do that all the way around this ball. I'm just going to start at the edge of number nine and I'm going to go in little strips. As I push out of that ball, I start to loosen the pressure and it becomes lighter. Now, you might not want to do it with eight, you might want to do it with your two. Let me try just next to that, see if there's a difference. It's much sharper already. It means it's less grainy, but it's not as dark. It's up to you. If you want to do a mixture, maybe you want to go over in both just to get that consistency. But all you want to do now is work your way around the ball and try and get those transitions from that hard edge into the soft edge. And make it blend, make it a gradient. I've gone back to my two now, but I'm probably going to refine it in a little bit. Anyway, just work your way around the ball. Make sure you don't miss the edges on the top. We're going to wait to do the bottom. Actually, I'm going to stick to my eight B two is annoying me. Yeah, don't do anything on the bottom just yet. Hopefully you can see what I'm talking about when I I'm referring to leaving that highlight to light. Just work on the top half. Again, don't put anything inside the center. I'm just switching back to my two mainly to smooth out the grain. And I'll show you a different way to do this when we are near the end. But this is just helping me to try and reach all those values. But most importantly, just to get in these edges near the top. Okay. As you can see this at the bottom, that was number four on the value scale. That was actually, it wasn't too light, it was like middle of the range, but now it looks nearly white. That's because we've sandwiched between two dark values. I want you to use your eight again, make that smooth transition. We're blending that in and we're making sure that we're trying to reach number eight. It needs to be one shade lighter. You can be forgiven if it's number seven as well, but I just want you to appreciate how dark it can actually be for it to still look like a high light. Okay. A final bit is to work in this light area on top, it's probably the most difficult because we're going from a shade into a lighter shade and we want to leave some white paper in the middle. We want to leave number one. I'm just going to do that same transition from number four this time all the way to number two using your two B pencil because that's much lighter all the way around. Keep turning your hand around to sue or you can move your paper around as well to make life easy for you for a more comfortable position. There we go. I'm quite pleased with that. Hopefully you should be really pleased with that too. It's not fully over though. There's always tweaks you can make. This is one of those things where it's quite addictive to keep going. I'm just going to go for a little bit longer. I'll keep the camera rolling so you can see what I'm doing. But I just want to refine it. And this is where the two H can come in. The two H has to be really, really sharp. Okay, see that point? That's quite dangerous. All this does is it fills in all those little bits of paper that are poking through. It will start to just even out the drawing. So really get in those nuts and crannies and just see what happens at the end, you might find you really enjoy this process. Cool. So there we go, Fab. So I hope that was helpful. It is a difficult challenge, but it's something you should practice. Practice, practice. Because this ball, or Sophia could be my cheek, could be the tip of my nose, it could be anything that's round. So practice this. And if you're feeling brave, please show me. I'd love to see what you've done. Amazing. So join me next week for less than five of our year drawing challenge. 8. Week 5 Shades Dissapear: This is week five of Learning how to Shade. Now in this week, we're going to be looking at how to make white boxes disappear in an actual painting. Now, some of you may have done this before, especially the ones who have purchased one of the mindful drawing box that I made last year. The thing is this time I'm going to show you exactly what you should be aiming for. I know we know what we should be aiming for, but we really need to look at it in a bit more detail because I've seen a few people do it and actually the boxes just aren't dark enough. So I want to make sure you do the thing that you need to do. So grab your pencils and let's get started on the Mona Lisa. I'm going to start just at the top here. So remember the aim for this is to make this white box disappear and blend in with the background. So what I'm doing is I'm starting with my two B pencil and I'm just gently building up the layers. Now I think a lot of you will be quite scared of this one, like scared of going dark. Not scared that it's going to hurt you, but it is quite an intimidating process. You don't want it to go too dark. And the thing is, if you can still see it, then you've not gone dark enough. So let's just start by building up the layers in this box. And try your very hardest not to shade on top of the print itself, because that will very, very quickly show a square or rectangle outline around the box you're trying to make disappear. You do have to go a little bit slower near the edges just to make sure you're not shading outside of them. So I've got my base laying out and you start to notice that there's a bit of gradient in the sky, so I really have to try and match that darkness near the top. So I just switched to my eight B pencil and I'm just gently shading near the top and you can see it's starting to get a little bit darker. I'm just switching between my two B and my eight B. I don't know why I've got 22 there, but I do. But I'm just starting to really try and fill in those tiny gaps because it's a little bit texture the sky, but I don't want it to look like pencil texture, I want it to look like this cloudy texture. Just gently work your way in there. You can actually see when I hold my sketch book like this, it looks like it's really starting to match. When I laid it down, the reflection made it look a lot lighter. So definitely hold your book or have it in a way where you can see the true value of it rather than the reflected one. Because this is looking so much different. Now look, see, It's like I've done no work, but clearly I'm done and that's blended in. Moving on to her head. Now this one is a little bit easier actually because her scarf or a hair scarf and is black. So I know to shade there in with my eight B as hard as possible. And then I'll still use that eight B for the trees behind because they are quite dark. So it's a good pencil to try and reach that darkness. And then just refine it with my two B Again, try not to go over the print itself because I don't want that to create an outline. I just want to make that disappear nice and easily. When I hold it up, it should disappear. But this light is rubbish. So in a second I'm actually going to get drawing board so that I have it on an angle and it's much, much easier for you to see the values. And for me it was a bit, it wasn't too bad when I was room, but for the sake of the demonstration, it's not looking well. Okay, there you go. So now I've got it on a drawing board so you can see that actually both the squares have disappeared or you just have helped make them out, because we know that they're there. But let's move on to this chinny, chin, chin. So again, we've got a nice black section, nice and easy to blend in. And then working into the skin itself, the skin of Monalisa is so smooth. It's this Renaissance style painting where everything is incredibly soft. Do mix between your eight B and your two B. Wherever you see the edge of the face get darker and get lighter, do try match that and try and join that from one end of the box to the other, just like on a chin here, because it does need a little bit of extra work. Okay, good, that's looking all right, that's really disappearing. And again, that reflection in the bottom left, that's the only reason why you can see that corner. But pretty happy with that. Let's go now to the neck now. Again, this is a bit like the sky. It's a little bit of a subtle gradient. You just want to blend this in, try and make that. Disappear. Try and build it up in shade, but try not to go over the edges. I bet you've done one or two over the edges because I've done this a couple of times and I have definitely done that like why can I see an outline? And it's very annoying. Anyway, it's getting there, you can see it's almost disappeared. So I'm just going to work on that tiny bit longer. And on yours, if you think it's almost disappeared, do give it a little bit more time. Clean up your edges and you'll be like, oh my God. Wow, it's body disappeared, hasn't it? It's great. So there we go. Just a little touch of the eight B, a little clean up, up that edge when a bit too dark. Whoops. A rubbed a bit too much out. And boom, there we go, we have it. Okay. Now, a bit of the fabric. This one is definitely more challenging because there might be something in that square that we can't see, actually in this shading book. I have the original drawing in black and white on the left hand side, so I could check it, but for the sake of this exercise, I'm just going to wing it because it feels more dangerous, more exciting. Okay, so all I'm going to do is take each section at a time. So first of all, I want to match the skin, then I want to go into the fabric. And then I want to start thinking about where the shadows start and stop so you can see now the skin has blended in. It's just that fabric bit and the fabric is much darker than the skin. So I want to make sure I'm not being too scared about it. It does feel unnatural or like we shouldn't be doing this, but do it, It's the only advice I can give you. Push hard, you'll notice as soon as it matches, you're like, oh, there it is. That's the point where it disappears and you do have to break beyond this. It's like a psychological barrier, isn't it? For little shading thing. So yeah, just work your way through it. Keep making sure you're tilting your drawing board to make sure you're seeing, well, not seeing the reflection and that you're seeing your actual artwork. Each square is going to pose its own different challenge. So just make sure you're looking at the edges of your white box. What value is it at the edge? Is it really dark? Is it really light? Can I see my pencil sill? It's a real balance, but once you've got your page all shaded, and you've seen all of these different squares disappear, I think you'll be very, very proud of yourself. It's a weird exercise, I'm not going to lie, but I actually think it's really good. It's invaluable actually. You're trying to make a white box disappear and it's testing you to see whether you're going dark enough at the right point. Seeing if you've got a delicate hand, and seeing if you can also get the box really nice and smooth. So what I'll do is I'll take a picture of my final stage so you can see what it will look like. Hopefully without reflection. But you know, we live in a house with a light bulb, so it might have some reflection in there. But I really hope you enjoyed this exercise. Of course. Feel free to make your own. You can find the old paint software and try and cover this picture with some white squares and then you could do it on any picture you want. It's really, really good practice. All right. That is it for this week's lesson. If you're watching this on Patrion, then I've added a couple extra little worksheets for you. So hopefully you'll have loads of fun with that. But as I said, do feel free to make your own, just print it out, put some white squares in it, and that's fine. So I will see you next week for week six, I think, of our weekly, yearly, whatever of our challenge. All right folks, have a great week. 9. Week 6 1 Point Perspective: Hello everyone, and welcome back to week six of how to Improve our art skills. This week we're going to be looking at perspective. Now our perspective comes in all different shapes and forms. We can apply perspective to geometric shapes, to curve shapes. We can stand at different angles, different points of view. We can see something completely different. What we're going to start off with this week is the one point perspective. As the Mf moves on, we're going to be looking at other things as well. We might look at furnishings in interior design where you might have an edge that's a little bit softer. We might have a look at things like for shortening because that's all about perspective as well. So grab your pencils and let's get started for today's session. All right, so grab yourselves a ruler. And if you don't have one, just grab something with a straight edge. The only thing I could find was this. So this is my ruler. Today, we don't actually need something with measuring points. So if you don't have a ruler, honestly it's not the end of the world. This is absolutely fine. I'm also going to grab a two pencil, I don't know, want to show that upside down. A two B pencil. And that's all we need, folks. And a rubber. Of course, if you make any mistakes you can rub them out. So what we're going to do is I'm going to start on the left hand side, because I want you to see both drawings next to each other. And all I'm going to do is start with my horizon line. So actually I'm going to draw a very long horizon line that will go all the way from the left side of the page to the right. Now I want this to be parallel with the edge of my paper, because my horizon line will always be completely horizontal. Okay, so the first thing I want to do on this side is start with a vanishing point. So this vanishing point, you may have seen it in pictures such as a train track. When everything heads towards there. With any one point perspective, there is a rule of thumb. And we need to think about what shape is closest to. For example, if I just just a regular square over here, three D square. We have the front face, we have the corner, and then we have the edge. There is always one of these elements in our different perspectives that are cards. If we're drawing a one point perspective, the front face will always be facing us. And that means you're going to have this perfect rectangle, square cuboid, whatever it is. But you always have vertical lines and you always have horizontal lines. Something to bear in mind when we're trying to figure out which image are we seeing? Which perspective are we seeing? We're always seeing a front face. With that in mind, let's start with our chair now. Obviously with a chair, you have the back rest and then you have the seat. And our chair is going to cross the horizon line. What we're going to do is think about what comes closest to, and that would be the front bit with the legs. All I want to do is start off with that. Bear in mind it's a design. You can do whatever you want. I'm going to go for a straight line over there. Then I might actually do a parallel one with a little vertical line. You see so far. Only horizontal. Only vertical lines. Next, I want to go down here. How far is that going to go? Yeah, it's pretty decent for a chip. I want to make sure this gap is the same on this side. I turn my ruler to the other side. How far is that? So that goes down to here, let me make that a bit bigger. Maybe a ruler could be quite useful at this point or I can just figure this out. Is that too far off? Well done showing. Yeah, that's pretty good. Okay, then I want to go and get those the same. Then I want to go up, so I'm going to go up all the way. Same with this one. All the way because my chair is going to have that wood in between. Okay, Fabu loose. So from here now we need to start thinking about where the top of our chair is now. Because of the perspective, we don't really know where the back of the chair should start and stop. So what I'm going to do is just draw some very faint perspective lines really, really lightly. I'm not pushing hard at all because I want to rub some of this out eventually. This gives me an idea of what the chair would look like. I'm starting to think, well, where would the bottom of the back of my chair go? Would it be here? Probably not, because then that means this chair is really bloody long, Would it be here? I think probably to be honest, it's going to be quite shallow. So all I want to do then is I want to draw a horizontal line that goes across there. And immediately I'll just rip out those extra lines because ain't nobody needing them. Here comes the accent. Okay, perfect. So from here I want to go up into the sky a little bit. So you notice how I'm using the leg, just to check that it's vertical. So I'll go up, have a look. Is big enough, maybe. And let's check the side. So again, using that to see if it's vertical, I think that's all right. Maybe a touch bigger. It's just a teeny tiny touch. Yeah. So remember, it's important to remember that anything that's further away from you, it's going to be smaller. So don't draw it the size that you imagine it to be, because it's further behind. So it's going to be a little bit smaller. Now, I've rubbed out my horizon line just whilst it's in its big shape because it's a little bit easier to see and I can still see the.in the middle. So that's good. It makes life easier. And then I want to do the back of the chair. So how do I want to design this? I'm going to go for horizontal line across there. And then I might actually do the same on the bottom. So trying to get at the same size. Yeah. And then I want to go for a ridge here. Ridge, I'm not sure if you can call her ridge. Piece of wood support some support there. I kind of want to do two in the middle. Okay, this is a risk because I don't have a ruler. I really should have just got a small ruler. But all my rulers are so big. It's like just too much. So let's see, this is a real leap of faith here. I know I'm just going to move this over. I actually think you could be a tiny bit thicker. Okay, so make you a tiny bit thicker. And then you are going to move and then you are going to move. That'll do fab. Okay. So now what we want to do is make the rest of it three D. Rule of thumb with perspective is if your shape is below the horizon line, then that means we can see the top of it. We're going to see this ridge, we can see this ridge. And then if the shape is above the horizon line, we can see underneath it. So we're going to see under there. And we're going to see any edge that faces the vanishing point. Basically face, face that face that face. It all makes sense in a second. For the legs, I want to figure out where the back legs are. All I need to do is align myself with the vanishing point and the corner. And again, I'm going to draw a really faint line. I'll do the same on the other side. It knows how I pivot at the vanishing point and then draw that. Then I want to decide where do I want my back legs to go? I'm going to start on this side, actually, I can just align it a little bit with the back. So if I go here, so it's not too far away, then I want to roughly find the same spot over here. There we go again, You can measure like this distance with your ruler. I'm just going to draw this edge. And then I'll do the same here, I think. Fake that a little bit. Thing, new deal. Okay, good. And then because you see the angle there, goes backwards, so I know that that's going to be the back of my leg. So I can do a skinny one on this side. But then to really complete that back leg, I need a horizontal line. I need that to be longer. So good, there we go, for that. And then we need to do the same on this one. We've got a tiny edge inside here, so I'll just draw that. Now the trouble is, because this is so close to the vanishing point, if I did a perspective, I'm from here to here, it's going to really cut across my edge. So instead of that, there is a little cheats way that we can do it. So first of all we want to just get this inside edge, so that's going to be really skinny. And then the same for this one, so we want to try and get them the same. And then now we switch sides because now we're facing the vanishing point. And then the same over here. Okay. So what we could do now is we can actually just attach these corner to corner. So we're going from the of there to the corner of our edge. Now it's so small that it's actually quite difficult to see. Maybe I'll make this one a little bit bigger because it's further away from the vanishing points. Just get those in there. You see here, I'm just going to go corner to corner to corner to corner to corner. Okay. There's our chair, but I do think we should shade it just to make it a little bit easier to see. So I'm going to make a little rule for myself. Anything that's on the inside, it's going to be dark. And then anything on the outside is going to be medium. And then we outside facing us there. And then anything on the top is going to be really light. So if you follow these rules, I sound like I was going to cry there. Follow these rules, then it will look very, very three D. So let's get inside inside. It looks way tidy as well. There's quite a few lines that I was rubbing out there, but you know, just shows I'm normal, right? Maybe if you want perfection, you will get that with me. But we do make a mess along the way, and the ones facing the ones facing us are going to be medium. So this one is medium basically. It's any rectangle, any perfect rectangle that is facing us. There are just skipped the front ridge there on the chair. I think it's actually a ridge. I said the right word. I'm not worrying about what pencil I'm using because this is all about perspective, this one. But I do want us to see the three D effect. I think that's really important. Okay, good. And then I think these ones I might just see if I can make them extra dark because they won't have any light facing towards it. So I'm really pushing it down then. I mean, here's the perfectionist in me. You don't have to do this, but just a slight shadow under here, you know, because we're prosogradients now, so I'm just trying to get that gradienting down and then move that across on this side. Oh, yeah. Okay, good. I mean, this won't be completely white, so if you wanted to, you can do like just a touch of that. Looks like wood perfect and they get make some wood. All right, there we have it there. We have a one point perspective with a chair. Now I would recommend that you try this chair, or even just a very simple geometric shape to follow the rules of the one point perspective. In case you're not aware, there are videos on one point perspective, two point, and three point as well. Hopefully you found it useful and see where you can apply it. Have a look at something in your room and stand right in front of it and see what happens to the shape. All right, I'll see you next week for another lesson. 10. Week 7 2 Point Perspective: Hello folks. Welcome back to the second part of this week, which is a two point perspective on the same object. It's still a chair. But this time we're going to turn it around ever so slightly. Instead of having the front face facing us, the edge is going to be the closest thing to us instead. Now do remember, if you find this a little bit challenging or complicated, you can head on over to the other videos and check out how to do a two point perspective in a little bit more detail. Grab your ruler. I did find one for this video, and let's see what we can do. Last time we looked at the one point perspective, if you remember, that means all the lines on the inside and the outside of the shape heading towards that vanishing point. And we had that right in the middle of our chair. This time we want to do a two point perspective, and that means we have two vanishing points. Just start off with two little dots that go left and go right here. This means that our chair is going to be on an angle and we'll see more of the left side and the right side, rather than looking at the top and the front. Let's start with the most important thing in this perspective, which is the edge. Remember when we had our cube, the face was the most important thing that was closest to us. We started off with a perfect rectangle. Well, when we have a object in a two point perspective is actually the edge. Our chair is standing as a normal chair. That means we want to start with a vertical line. We always have vertical lines on our chair or our object in a two point perspective. Essentially what I'm doing is I'm starting with the edge of this part of the chair. Imagine this chair has now rotated and this edge of the leg is coming towards us. What can I do from there? Well, first of all, I am going to just draw a very light perspective line so that I can rub out any lengths that I don't like. It just gives me a chance to see what the proportions are. Again, I'll do a very faint line there and a very faint line here. Whenever we have an edge, we end up starting to build corners. That means I need a perspective line coming from my first vanishing point. Hit in the corner, and then going towards a second vanishing point. This is a rule you need to follow all the time with your perspective. Now what I want to do is start to think about how will this chair look on its edge? How wide will those gaps be with, with the legs behind there. I'm just going to draw a tall leg there. I'll have a look at it. Actually, it's probably a good size according to my edge there. I could probably make this chair a touch bigger if I wanted to add detail, but to be honest, I don't really want to. So that's all right. On my right hand side, I'm going to go literally like a millimeter bigger. Not even a millimeter, just a tiny bit. Because when you sit on a chair, it is longer the more forward it goes. Let's get this to a point where I can actually understand it a bit better. I'm going to do the legs, remember this one will be smaller because it's further away from us. This one closest to that front edge will be a little bit bigger. I'll just see what that looks like. Then I'll just draw this one. Quite difficult to see still because just constructing it and then I want to get that bit of detail in there again. You see I'm going to my vanishing point. If this was going to keep going, it would probably touch here on the chair. And then that means I can just draw it there. That shows me that they're the same size. Let me just rub out just the extra lines that we don't need. But it still looks a bit weird because we don't have that depth. We essentially have another corner here and another edge. Anything as I say that goes from vanishing point number one touches a corner and goes to vanishing point number two. Let me just do a small line to show it's three D. You see it starts to look like this leg in the front. I will do my vertical line following that rule. Then I want to do the same on this leg here. I just want to do very small edge, then a vertical line. Let's work our way up then. And we will start building that little lip that's right on the top there. All I want to do is find my edge. Is it going to be exactly? Where my chair is. I think probably. Let's do that. Then. I want to reach my corner. I'm heading towards that vanishing point. Moving my rule with pivots on that vanishing point and that's going to go out. And then the same on here. At any point you're like, what on Earth are you talking about? How did you get that? I would recommend going back into patri and or skill share wherever you're watching this, try and find my perspective videos because that is going to be very, very helpful for your drawing. I will now go up back of the chair. I'm just using that leg as a parallel comparison and that's going up there. I will get that back corner. So we've made another corner where all these lines are meeting. I'll just do it quite light so I can figure out how far it goes. On this other side again, I'll put my ruler on the vanishing point and then go to the corner. Then that will tell me how to do the top of my chair at the moment. Now I've done this, it looks like this is way too tall. That's because the size of my chair is smaller than the one on the left. That's fine. Because I'm following the rules and it will still work. I'm just going to draw my line up there and start to think about what that looks like for proportions. Let me remove the horizon line because I don't want to see that now. Okay, then my ruler. Because this face is facing the left hand side vanishing point. I just want to think about the top of it. You can see it starts to twist. I think actually if I added another line on the top for that bit of decoration, then that starts to represent that top part there. I had a mini heart attack for there. I was like, oh my God, is this going to work? I'm like, yeah, of course I followed the rules and it works. Okay, great. Then let's do the same at the bottom. Remember I had bit of decoration, bit too small because I stupidly covered up. Let's get that design at the bottom as well then. I might actually just want to make that a touch big. I'm not bothered at all about making mistakes, I'm just fixing them as I go. Okay, good. So I'm happy with those sizes. And then what I want to do is just make this a little bit more, three D. All I'm going to do is line up with the edge of my excess there and it's very tiny. I've got a corner. It either has to go to my left vanishing point or my right one. But because it's facing the right hand side, it goes towards the right hand vanishing point A. What I'm going to do now is get those beams of wood going up here. I just want to start with those two, then I'll get a gap at the wood. Remember last time I fudged it, he had to do it again, but that's fine. Oh my God. I think I've nailed that one. But it's a tiny bit harder to see because, well, actually it's just a bit confusing with all these lines. I now want to make it three D. What I'm going to do is put my ruler on this vanishing point. Actually I'll show you underneath then I want to see underneath it in the gaps. I'm going to draw a line that goes all the way across there. And then I'm going to do a vertical line for that three D section up there. Then it gets a teeny tiny bit bigger as it gets closer to us. Then the inside again, we do have a slight problem with the angle, just like we did before. But actually I think it's fine because it's very small. Okay, there we go. There we go. There is the two point perspective version of our chair of do add some shading. Do follow those same rules where you're thinking where is a light coming from and what does that mean for the value that the shading will be for me. Anything that is underneath these faces, they are going to be really dark. Well, you see this one is facing the left. That's going to be darker as well, especially the ones that are at the back. My light source is basically going to be coming maybe from here. Actually from this angle, the front going to be like this. Now we can't see, we can't see the leg behind because it's covered by the angle of the chair. Chair actually, it doesn't have to be in the middle. It can be left. It can be right. And you might end up seeing more legs than this one. You can only see three. It just depends on where you place the chair itself. It's the same with a one point perspective. You can have things off center, you have them lower, have them higher. There's a lot of scope for play on the perspective. I'm actually going to make this on the inside leg because that will be in shadow. The light source is really going to struggle to get in there. I'll make that darker. It's under here. And then this can be a lighter, be a nice contrast. What I want you to do is just work your way around. Now, just trying to improve the shading just mainly so you can visualize and understand what it's all about. The main point of this exercise was to try and draw the same shape in two different perspectives. It doesn't have to be perfect, nothing ever is. Please don't beat yourself up. Definitely watch the videos previously about the 1.2 point perspective because that gives you whole rounded version of what it actually means. And to understand it a bit more, I think, especially if it's a little bit confusing for you because it's your first time, you definitely should watch them. They're at no extra cost. That's great. If you get it really quickly, they're amazing. Hopefully this all made sense. And it was just about putting those pieces together. I'm pretty pleased with it not going to lie. It's not a bad share at all. It rotates. Definitely could have done it a bit bigger, but it's great. It works. You can sit on that one, you can sit on that one job. Done. 11. Week 7 Curved Edges: Hello folks. Welcome to this week's extra piece of learning, which is, well, you might have guessed already, a two point perspective drawing with curved edges. So we're going to look at a modern sofa. So just remember it is modern, that's why it looks a bit weird. But look at the picture first and then hopefully that will help you to be able to follow along with this drawing. Remember, you can pause it at any point and I'd probably recommend for you to watch it first and then go through it again. Pause it and draw your own. All right, Grab your pencils and you'll roll it and let's get started. Right, so just as before, we will start with our horizon line, so just draw that across your page. And then add the two vanishing points, just like we did at the beginning of the week. So what we want to do now is start with that thing that's closest to us. So what is it? It's the edge. Yes. Hopefully that's what everybody said, in sync. Okay, so once we've got our edge, we want to connect the top and the bottom corner with the left vanishing point and the right vanishing point. This starts to push your shape forward and it's showing that the faces on either side going towards the left and towards the right. So we already start to create depth. So it looks a bit weird at this stage, which is perfect. That's what we want. But what we want to do next is close off the left face. It could be the left one or the right one. But I'm trying to think about how deep this arm chair is. And as soon as I've got my vertical line, I want to connect that to the right hand side vanishing point because the left hand side is already connected. Then I will just start to form the arm of the sofa. So I'm just going to do a little dash rather than go all the way across. And then the vertical line will just close this off. And that is the top part of the arm of the chair. Now I'm just moving my ruler across and going underneath our box because this is the base of our sofa. And you might decide it's a little bit shallow, it's a little bit deep, and this line is really easy to change. Later on in the video, I actually do change this a bit. I do make it a bit wider. If you're copying mine exactly, you might be looking at the original picture being like, what the ****? This doesn't look right. But all you want to do is is just draw it anyway and then we can tweak that one, there's no interruptions to that one. So that's fine. Close off the left face and the right face. And then we want to start to think about the depth of the chair. Now, I'm not actually adding a second arm because I'm modern AF, and my furniture is really quirky. So it's a bit like a she long I suppose that's why it's like hard on this doesn't look like a sofa. It's like a mattress with a weird headboard. But there you can see that it needs to be closed off still. So we're following those rules. Left side, right side, and then using vertical lines just to finish the sides off. Remember, do feel free to pause this video. I would watch it before I draw it and then be like, okay, let's start. But you might be much quicker than me and you might be like, oh, I have got this. The fiddly part that I'm on now is just like the back edge of the sofa. So I'm just wanted to make sure I'm still facing the left side on the right side. I keep saying that left side on the right side, but the space is really small and it feels way too small, but actually when you draw it, it's not too bad at all. Now as you can see, I'm about to change the depth of the base of my sofa, and sometimes it's hard to see it at the beginning of a drawing. So I do often make changes halfway through because I can start to see the size of it better. But I do find scaling drawings or getting proportions a little bit more challenging. The way I kind of beat that is by doing it by eye and thinking, okay, maybe I need to make this line a bit bigger. How will that affect my angular line? Once we've done that, we want to go into our shape and start chopping off those corners. I don't want any hard edges on the corners. I want them all to be curved. And remember, we are like sculptors. We've been given this block of granite. And what we want to do is far away at the corners and make it nice and soft. The more complicated shape is essentially this one in the middle, because it's coming right at you. So it's like how do we make that soft? All they want to do is focus on the face. On the right hand side, I want to make that at least look like that's curved. And then the rest of it will be done by shading. Once you've carved your corners, we will then start to tie to the edges. Rub out any of the excess parts of the cube that you don't need so we can really start to see the shape as quickly as possible. You might need to redraw some lines just because you rub them out, which is fine. That's what I'm doing all over. It's good practice, you know, breaking something down that we feel quite precious about and not being afraid to make things better, fabulous. So once you've done that, get rid of your vanishing point and your horizon because we do not need it. Now what we're going to do is add our shading, So we should definitely think about where our light sources and mine is coming from the right hand side and probably slightly above as well. So let's start our shading and making sure that anything facing our light source is much lighter. And anything away from it or having a shadow cast from one of the shapes or on the floor that is much darker. So this is the fun hard part is done, it's been done in just 4 minutes. Kind of, it probably took a little bit longer than 4 minutes, but this is definitely the part where you get to relax and be like, holy ****, I've drawn a three D chair that's curved. Sorry, a three D modern chair that's curved. Fabulous. There we go. I don't think that's too bad actually, and hopefully you enjoyed that. The shading might be a little bit challenging, but we are working on that and we're building up from our January sessions, and there will be lots more shading practices to come in the next few weeks. So well done, folks. And I can't wait to see what we do next. Well, I can't wait to see what you do next. 12. Week 8 3 Point Perspective: Hello, my name is China. And welcome to week eight of our yearly challenge of how to become the better artist. Now this week we're looking at a three point perspective. We've looked at one, we've looked at two, and now it's time for our third one. It's a little bit more complicated, but if you follow the rules and you just think about where your face is facing, then you'll be absolutely fine. Just remember there are no vertical and no horizontal lines at all in this drawing. Grab your ruler, grab your pencils, and let's begin. We're moving on from the two point perspective where we had two vanishing points. We're now going to try a three point perspective. What I want to do to start is just move your horizon line a little bit higher. I'm going to go for a straight line there. And I'm going to pop two vanishing points on, just like before. What I want to do after that is I want to add a third one. This is going to go down here. It's a bit like your belly button. They can be whatever you want. Now we're going to try and draw a building. Basically what we're doing is we're saying that we are high in the sky, not taking drugs. We're actually just higher up, maybe in an airplane and we're looking down on some buildings. What we need to do in this scenario is we actually need to have the corner of the object coming closest towards us. Rather than the edge which was like this or the face which was like this. We need the corner. Basically, everything is tilting and nothing is straight, nothing is flat. All I'm going to do to start is I'm going to draw an angular line hitting my third vanishing point. This is telling me that the corner is here and that is closest to us. Then from there, I want to make sure that my lines are coming from the left vanishing point, hitting that corner and coming towards the right vanishing point. Very quickly you start to see this shape emerge just well, just to make life easier for us, I'm just going to rub out that horizon line because most of the time we don't need it. Then to finish the edges off of this, I want to go for a line that goes down there and a line that goes down there. You can just see this tube going all the way down to here, but it's like infinite. We don't want that, we want some land. All they want to do is get the bottom from the left vanishing point. Turn my ruler on the corner and head towards the right vanishing point. Then for ease and for quick visual effect, you can see that this has become a lovely building. Let's decorate it showery. Let's add a door. We don't have any straight edges anymore, we don't have any flat edges. That means if any edge is happening, we need to think, well, is that going to face the left vanishing point? The right vanishing point or the bottom vanishing point for the door. I'll do a wide one. I'll do one of those shutters, would it be a shutter shut and do slidy ones. I need to figure out the top. I need to get my vanishing point there. I'll go across there. And I just missed that corner, so I can chop that in. Let's try and split this in a half roughly. But obviously the left side is smaller, the right side is bigger because of perspective. Okay, amazing. Now what I want to do is I'll add some windows. I will go how many times? Going to say dash without annoying that probably that many times A. Then top, why am laughing? No one else here to reinforce That's funny, but Well, it happened anyway. Let's work our way across. Actually, I might close it off from the bottom so that I can see how long the lines are. It just makes life a little bit easier. Essentially, every corner is being pinched. The left corner, right corner, everything is heading towards the vanishing point. We don't see this often in life. I think we see it actually, You can stand above a bunch of boxes and you'll see it. But if you think about other scenarios, like in an airplane, you might see it for a millisecond before it whizzes up into the sky. Or actually if you're walking in the street, you would see, looking up at the building, you would see it in reverse. It would still be exactly the same, but instead of the small point being at the bottom, because where we're up here actually the building would close up at the top. It is interesting when you're walking down the street, just look around you. What can you see? You can also start to figure out what perspective you're seeing. Am I looking at, looking at the corner of the street at two point perspective? Are you looking at one point perspective? It's a great way to practice just we're looking what you're seeing then. Feeling brave. Bloody. Sketchbook bit aggressive, but you know what I mean? Okay, let me just tidy up these extra lines. Just needed to give that a tweak. Okay, fabulous. On this side, let's just draw some different windows. I'm going to go for some long ones. So you can see I'm pivoting at this vanishing point. You can use your pencil in your ruler just to pivot that across. I'm trying to get these gaps fairly equal because they will be, well, I can think about this side to be equal rather than the right side. They're tiny bit uneven, but that's all right. Then let's get the edges cool is so satisfying. Drawing perspective happens so quick. Well, these lines are not long enough. Just bosh that in there. Obviously, when you're doing it, spend a bit more time. But I just want you to, I want you to see what it's like. I don't want you to have to wait too long. That is looking good. That's definitely a building. There we have a basic three point perspective for a building. I'll see you next week for our next lesson, which is a point perspective. Oh my God, I'm nervous as well. 13. Week 10 Mushroom: Hey folks. So we've done a lot of hard work the past couple of months. So this week I wanted to draw something fun. Something that's kind of putting some of the things we've learned early in January into practice. So grab your pencils. You don't need your ruler this time. And let's get started. Okay, so there's a few different ways you can start this drawing. But for me, I decided to start with the cap itself. I think it's the cap or the bonnet. I don't know, I should pressure for my mushroom terminology. So what I'm starting to do is think about the curve of the top of the cap. So trying to get the angle, trying to make sure it's tall enough because it is surprisingly tall. And then when I get to the top, my curve suddenly takes a change. So I'm trying to make sure I'm getting that angle as well. So at any point you can alter your line. This isn't like a definite, this is my line. This is where it needs to be. You're going to play around with it, and you're going to change things, and you're going to notice things as you draw. So once we have done the top of the cap, we then are going to move around to basically draw the outline of the black part. Now I'm looking at my drawing here and I'm like, it's a little bit skinny, but that will change. So keep refining and keep working on your mushroom. Now, this stage is just trying to basically differentiate between light and dark. So you just see that edge around there and I'm just softening the curve on the top. It was a little bit too steep and I'm much happier with that. Now, once we've done that, we're going to start to put our stem in there. So think about the negative space. Think about where is the stem in my mushroom? Is it in the center? Is it to the left or to the right? And I notice my stem is more to the left. So I'm looking at that negative space in the black of the mushroom to see how big that should be. And that really helps for getting your stem in the right place. So make any amendments that you need at this point. I need to make mine a little bit fatter and I'm just going to refine the edge up inside the mushroom as well. So trying to get that little jaggedy bit right in the corner. And then we're ready to start shading. So what you want to do for the shading is we want to hit the dark shades first. This is going to help our drawing to start to have depth. It's really important when we have something like this that has a lot of light and a lot of shadow, to make sure we're stretching our shades as much as possible. So let's start off with the dark shade now. Just notice that underneath the cap, the umbrella. It's the umbrella, I think it's not actually black and it's not all black. There's a little bit of black in there, but it's a tiny bit lighter then black in most of it. And even in some areas, there's some flashes of mid gray. Now because there is a lot of detail in the mushroom, we do get to decide what information we keep and what information we get rid of. So for me, I decided to just kind of put most of the black area fairly dark because most of my detail is going to be on top and on the stem of the mushroom itself. So feel free to copy mine and get those dark shades and kind of skip that detail underneath the cap. Or if you want to really challenge yourself, you can always try and put that detail in as well. What I'd recommend if you do do that is do do is you add a lighter base and then you add a darker line drawing. Or you shade darker around the light bits just to make the texture pop out. And we'll do a little bit of this actually up into the top of the mushroom, But for now, let's get that cap underneath the cap, nice and dark, and we'll start shading in on top. So we're going to switch to our two now. And this is going to start to create the shadow that's being cast onto the mushroom. So this is quite a delicate shadow. It doesn't have a hard edge, but it is relatively dark. So you can kind of ease yourself into this one. You can get your two B and just play around with the shape, trying to get it in the right place and trying to get the gradient nice and soft. So pop that in there and just try to figure out where the shadow starts and where it stops when we get onto the lighter shading. So that's right underneath it. I want to press really lightly now. The shadow that I was just playing with before isn't quite dark enough, so I know I need to push that later on. But for now it's a bit of a rehearsal stage, trying to play around in my shadows, get them really soft, and just keep popping them in the areas that they should be. So slightly more challenging part is the cap. I think I was kind of avoiding this for a decent amount of time just because it has all that grainy texture on there and there's a lot of stripes I guess like guild type things, even though that's the outside. I know any mushroom lovers will know that as well. But I want to start by thinking about the underneath tone. So first of all, is there any white? And the answer is probably no. But I can leave some areas extremely light and all they want to do is start to get that curvature as well. Put a base shade down. And I'll start to think about getting that nice and round. And the way to do that is through gradients. So we're getting better at gradients and this is a great way to start to apply that. So my shading is darker on the edge, lighter in the middle and the top, you can see on the top right there is much lighter, and then it's a little bit darker on the right hand side. So I first just want to get rid of all that white on the paper and start building up that tone. Very gently, very easily. So what you want to do now, now that you've got your base layer of shade on the cap, you want to start to build up the darker tone. So this is where it starts to look three D, This is where you start to see the curve. We're applying this by using gradients. Just along the bottom where my pencil is there, you'll notice that this is much darker, but it's not a hard line, it's a really soft line between underneath where it bends and folds over and from the top of the cap itself. So what we're going to do now is we're going to start to just look at the form, look at the shading and seeing where it's lighter, where it's darker. Now if you wanted to, you could download the picture and turn it into black and white and it'll be much easier for you to see where it's dark and where it's light. But, you know, often we do like to draw from nature and we do like to draw from real life. And it's good practice looking at color, looking at real life, and seeing where is it dark and where is it light. I feel like I'm saying those two words all the time. It's like like a cat phrase. Where's the dark, where's it light? I was about to go into a rep no, China. Okay, Fab. So once you have started on the base work on the outside. Now if you ever confused about where it should go darker, where it should go, lighter, there it is. Again, I need to find another word for that. Just look at what I'm doing. Look at where I'm putting my pencil. See what shade I'm doing. See how I make it curve. See how I push the gradient. So keep looking at what I'm doing to be able to draw your own and keep looking at your picture and think, okay, is it soft enough? Is it dark enough? Is the shape right? It's all about refinement and just pushing things, pulling things, tweaking it, making it softer. And very soon your drawing will become very, very three D. But just make sure the edges are super nice and soft. We can't see any harsh edges, so we want to start adding a little bit of detail. And it's not something that I'm looking at the picture and saying right where is this line exactly? And it needs to be 100% in the right place. I'm actually taking like an average texture, I guess, and putting it on there so there's lots of stripes on the top. It is important, however, to think about where are the gap, where the lines are darkest, how big are the gaps between the lines? That's going to be enough to continue with the principles of nature and perspective. I'm working my way around and I'm thinking, where does my line curved half way of this dome. Then it starts to curve to the left beyond way of the dome on the right. Then it starts to curve to the right. I'm really starting to show the shape of this texture and the curvature of the dome. Just by thinking about the lines right at the bottom where the cap curls underneath. That's a really short sharp turn. It's not a long elongated curve like the ones on the top of it, it's a short bend. So it's really important to think of those principles. But other than that, you could just kind of wing the lines. You could do some short ones, some lines that go all the way up to the top. Some that kind of stop halfway playing with texture, playing with gaps, and also the darkness of the line will start to help your texture become more three D. So if I stop my drawing here, I'm sure it will be fine, but I like to push things even further. So I've got my detail, I've got some mid grays, I've got some dark ones, but on the top of the cap is not looking super three D And also on the stem as well. So what I want to do is switch to my eight B and start pushing those darker tones. Within the darker tones there is texture as well. So I am paying a bit more attention to where the lines are going, how thick they are, and how dark they are. And this is a difference between an alright drawing and a very good one. So you want to work your way around now, thinking where can I push it darker? What about the stem? Does that have any dark edges? Is there any texture in there that I can push forward? What about the edges of the cap? Do they need to be a little bit darker to show the curvature? Things like this are going to be really helpful for your drawing to become three D, to look like the shadows are really being cast from each other onto the other surfaces. And it's going to make your drawing look fan, bloody tastic. I really like drawing mushrooms. I do get a little bit put off sometimes 'cause I'm like, oh my God, the so much texture. But actually it's quite a good challenge. And being able to decide what you keep and what you get rid of is, I hate to say, empowering, but that's the only word that I have. So it's a really fun way to test your skills as an artist and just become a little bit better at making decisions and a bit more confidence. So I'm really hoping that you're feeling that too and we're nearly there, actually. When you've done your stripe a bit, I want you to play around with the dots now. Don't just throw loads of dots in as if you're, you know, a three year old and you're just jabbing a pencil at the paper. I want you to think about just the collection, like what sort of general shape is it? Is the texture a little bit more dense? Are the dots a little bit more sparse? So just adding a few of these and pushes some really dark is a great way to add another dimension to your artwork. So in your final minute or so, well, for me it's a final minute. I'm just going over everything with a sharp pencil. I'm trying to define some more of those stripes. I'm looking at my dots and thinking, are they textured enough? Are they standing out enough? And I'm really looking at that tone to make sure it's nice and dark. So there we go, our first proper drawing. Now for me, this was really fun, and I hope it is for you as well. All right folks. I'll see you next week for the next lesson. 14. Week 11 Mug: Hello folks. Welcome to Week 11 of learning how to draw. This week, I thought we could draw something very classic of an artist. It's like a rive passage, it's the classic mug. Now, in this lesson, there's a lot of blending and we kind of work our way up to the drawing, make sure that we're not too nervous and just kind of etching our way to those darker shades, because often it's quite scary. So I wanted to take our time a little bit and work on the form. Make sure we're happy with our symmetry and our outline. And then we want to ease into the shading. So grab your pencil and your paper and let's get started. The cup is quite a classic thing to draw, so I really hope you have fun with this and take the time to get that symmetry and that beast of an oval. I bloody hate doing ovals. So what I'll do with my drawing instead is avoid it like the plague. So what I want to do to start is just get these two edges which are not straight, but if yours end up being completely vertical, that's absolutely fine. And then I want to get a nice curve at the bottom. So the bottom isn't a straight line, it's actually the same curve as the oval on the top. Well, most likely it is, because if this is a cylinder, it's going to be a direct correlation with the curve on the top. So what I want to do is make sure these two curves are exactly the same sort of bend. So it's worth just spending a little bit of time trying to get your oval right and you need to make sure that it's always bending. Think about where your peak of the curve is. Think about where your edge of the curve is. And think where the lowest part of the curve is. Now, I will be doing a full episode on ovals at some point, but for now, I just wanted to draw something really, really nice Now with the mug you need. Well, we have the opening, but we don't have the lip, so you just want to draw an oval on the inside. And when you think about the spacing, think about the thinner ridge being at the back and the thicker ridge being at the front. Because obviously we have perspective. And that means when something's further away from us, it's smaller and when something's closer towards, it's thicker. Now, after you've done that, you can add the handle. Now if it's not perfect. I'm sure no one's going to be sad or angry at you. But you just want to at least try and get it so you can fit a hand in it. That's all I'm asking for. I think handles are under rated and I think they're a lot more challenging than what we think we think. Oh, a cup, it's easy, handle is easy. But I do struggle with a handle because they're often designed in an interesting way and they have to be able to fit a couple of fingers in it. You have to often try and get symmetry in a different way, trying to make sure that the clay is the same thickness all the way through. Is it at an angle? Well, how do we make sure that that's coherent? Again, spend a little bit of time on your handle. Keep carving away at it, making sure that it's a solid form and it doesn't look like it can break. If it looks like it can break, stop, do it again, because it will just ruin your drawing. Once we've done that, now we've got a modern mug here, and it's been glazed in one of those fancy glazy layers. Now, I once went to a pottery course, several pottery courses, trying to learn how to glaze my pottery. But both times, you just had to paint it with your hands. And I was so devastated. I was like, God's sake, I just want to learn how to glaze and make cool things like all the other potters, but I'm still yet to find one. If you know of any cool pottery schools with a wheel and a thing, let me know. Okay, so that's our outline done. The next part is all about the shading. Make sure you're happy with the drawing. It is worth spending time on this before you shade, but once you're ready, we're going to start with the lightest shade. Now often I do say start with the darkest. But I figured on this one we might need a little bit of warming up into it because it's soft and it's a classical thing. Why don't we just edge our way into this with a little bit of care and softness and more of a gentle approach. What I want to do is start in the light bit and just get an even shade that's nice and light with your two B pencil. And you're just going to fill in that bottom light. So don't worry about anything else right now. Don't worry about any detail. I just want you to fill that in and make it as smooth as you can. You can go in a couple of different directions just to fill in that grain. But once you've done that, then I'd say you can start to push your details a touch darker. So you'll notice that my shading is becoming slightly darker on the right hand side and there's a little bit of a shadow underneath. So we're showing that this is curved before it just looked flat. But with gradients like this and subtle changes, things start to look really curved. So I'm starting to show myself more than the audience that this is a curved shape. And I'm starting to see the form and be able to imagine the rest of the picture much easier just from this base. So let's get this small bit of detail on there. And then we can start to do the same process in the glaze part above fab. So we can see now that it's already starting to look curved. So why don't we just add a little bit of dark in the opening. This is quite a significant area and if we can start to get a bit of contrast, actually this could be really good for us. So grab your eight B pencil, and let's just start working in that empty space. So I'm just working from left to right. And you can see that I've got a bit of a gradient. I think this was an accident. I was trying to get it all one shade to start. But I just love gradients. So we want this to be the opposite in terms of lighting. We want it to be dark on the left and lighter on the right, whereas the bottom was lighter on the left and darker on the right. So let's pop this in with our eight B. And this is, it's going to start to really take shape for our drawings. So just keep looking, make sure you're not pushing anything dark where it doesn't need to be. I think the temptation to sometimes just fill it with black, but that doesn't work as well as trying to have a bit more of a gradient in our artwork. Of course, you can see that I'm aiming for this really soft touch all the time. I've switched now back to my two pencil again, I want to just knock off all of that white for the main part of the cup. So I'm just trying to get my pencil lines as close together as possible and trying to fill in all that paper, get rid of the white. Now for the actual cup, this is darker than the base, so eventually it will become darker than the first part that we did. But for now, we want to just build up that tone a little bit slowly. It might look like it blends in with your base. To start with, just keep an eye on the edge. Don't worry about making it like really dark or pushing your outline really hard because that could sometimes ruin your drawing. Instead, just try and get the white colored in, get a nice gray. And then we'll push the detail very, very soon. Nothing to really write home About a minute and you can see I've left a few gaps just at the bottom there. But I was struggling to see the difference between one section and another. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to shade this darker anyway. I'm just going to leave gap at this point. This is when we can push it a little bit darker because a glaze is a bit more three D, It's like a thick texture on top, so it does create a bit of a shadow. What I'm doing, instead of just drawing a thick, dark line, I'm actually trying to blend that edge in. I'm just moving across, trying to get the edge of the glaze. And thinking about the size, thinking about the edge, and I'm not leaving it to be a harsh line, just work across that and you can start to push the whole area a bit darker. In general, if you're feeling ready and comfortable to, hopefully you're starting to see a little bit of a result with your drawing. But I always find with things like this, it's not often in the first 15, 20 minutes that it starts to look good. It's actually in the 25, 30 minutes when you've spent time Ix. I think the early stages, it's all just quite cartoony and frustrating. Do persevere with this and just keep watching what I'm doing now. I'm trying to work on the form and the curve. You'll see my direction is kind of going in the direction of the cylinder itself. So it's bending slightly and I'm not doing massive lines that go all the way across. I'm just trying to break that down into smaller chunks, showing that this bends around to the back. And each section I'm doing is becoming lighter towards the light source on the left and darker as it bends away from the light source. This is a part where we start to show the curve and the form. And then after we're going to add more detail. Once you've done that, you can then move on to the next stage, which is adding more detail and more of that reflective textured surface on this cup that I'm looking at, you can see the handle reflected onto the glaze itself. Now, you're not drawing a handle, you're drawing its reflection, which in this case is a bit like an old telephone that's been pulled down in word unstretched, so it kind of cuts the handle and then just pulls down and it's a little bit darker than the rest. But you'll also find that in my drawing, it's definitely not anywhere near as dark as it should be. So again, I'm just edging towards me in the tone that I want and just trying to blend in. Around it and make sure it's not standing out like a saw thub. The surrounding areas need to be just as much cared for, just like the detail is. So we're going to just work on this section a little bit more. And we're going to start to push the darker bits a little bit darker and start to get that form looking even more, three D. So most reflective surfaces will have little highlights here and there. And in this glaze, there is a thin highlight on the left hand side. So all I'm doing, instead of rubbing anything out, I'm just shading a little bit darker around it and that leaves a nice light glow underneath. So once we've highlighted that, we can then pull that gradient across to the right and show that this is more of a dynamic cup. So I want to get that, well, those highlights on the left a little bit more contrasty and I'll do that by making everything around it a little bit darker. Then we get to bring everything together and do some of the handle because it does look very weird without the handle. So let's do the same process. We'll add a very average shade over that, and then we can start to add some darker details. So you're really looking at where your light sources, what part of the handle is dark, what part is light? And don't be afraid to mix up your pencils as well and think, okay, well this is super dark, especially where the handle meets the cup, so you can make that we very, nearly black. And then you're thinking, where is the shadow being formed on this? Is it underneath? Is it on top? And then try and make sure that it's opposite here, underneath is dark, and then on top is light. So you don't want that to blend too far into it. You want to keep the differences between the light bit and the dark bit. So it's starting to look really good. Now, that was basically a rehearsal and you started to see where darker areas are and you start to push them in, but you probably use your two B just like me. So what I want you to do at this stage is I want you to start to push your detail in. You're going to use your eight B and make sure that you're getting the contrast, getting the shadows, getting the light bits. And this is what really pushes a drawing to look like a realistic object. So leaving really light bits that show reflection is incredibly powerful when it comes to a shiny surface. And we need that next to our dark areas to show that that's shiny. Because we know that reflection is bright. It's just something that we kind of know. But we were never taught this is something that we have observed as humans. And we just know subconsciously that that's how shine works. Otherwise, if it had no shine and no light bit, we would see that as a mat object. So this contrast helps to tell the eye that this is a shiny object. So well, the next stage of your drawing, focus on trying to push your shadows and keep your highlights nice and bright. So this is going to be a really exciting time for you and I'm very excited to see the work. But feel free to watch the rest of this video before you commit to it. And then give it a go on your own. Remember you can download the picture so you can stop and do in your own time. And also remember that everybody will be different and everybody will see different things. So you might actually see something much darker. You might see a shape slightly differently, but allow yourself to see things because that's when we really learn and when we develop. So I might see something that you won't and vice versa, and that's not a bad thing at all. So when you're ready, add a little shadow underneath so, so that the cup is sitting on the table. And then there you go. There's your wonderful still life of a very lovely cup. As always, I hope you enjoyed that. And I'll see you next week for another lesson. 15. Week: Hey, folks, We're now on week 12. Jesus only 40 to go. This week, we are going to be looking at silhouettes. And not because it's necessarily easy, but because we're going to use a silhouette to figure out how to check the lines and whether we're doing it right. So I've chosen a bird, but you could choose any image you want. And it's all about learning the vertical and horizontal comparisons. So really, really helpful for any drawing that you're doing. Using these lines should help with everything in life ever, Okay, So grab your pencils and let's get started. Don't be afraid When you see this bird, it looks complicated. But we're not working on the inside, we're working on the outside. So I like to think of a place that is a nice place to start. And in this situation, I'm starting with the neck because there's a strong bend in direction. And it also means if I start here, I can kind of gauge where I need to be because the neck is quite close to the top. And then I know I need to put on my paper a little higher up and hopefully the head won't be too big. So it's also helping me to set the boundaries of U of how tall it should be and nothing will slip off the page. What I'm doing is just going for it at first. I'm going to check it very soon, but I need to get something on the page. And I think often when we draw something, we hinder ourselves and we're like, I do this or I need to do this or like where do I start? For me, it's just get something on and see what happens. If you have nothing to compare to, then how can you keep testing it and keep pushing it and seeing where things go wrong? Because you've got nothing on the page. I'd recommend just to put something on the page for now and try to avoid putting detail in there. Put a little bit in so you kind of have some anchors to compare to. But I wouldn't bother with like the eye or individual feathers. I would just think about like the odd shape that's important to you. I've done this little nub it on the nose, I think I actually got carried away and was like, oh no, we're doing a silhouette. Let's maybe ignore that. Okay, so it's looking okay so far, but I have no way to check it. So what I'm going to do in a second is I'm going to start to show you how to check your line, so get your outline on there and then I'll show you a little method that can help with the measuring or the angles of the lines. And it's going to be super, super helpful. So a good trick whenever you're drawing is to use vertical and horizontal lines. We use these for comparisons. So I'm going to use my pencil on my bird and I'm just going to check the vertical line. Now this means nothing if I don't compare it to my original picture. So I'm going to pop a little vertical line of my pitcher as well. So I can compare the two spaces. Now you can see on the left, when I have a vertical line there, the line is touching the chest of the bird. And there's a gap at the bottom between the feet and the line. Whereas mine, it touches the chest of the bird, but there's no gap on the feet. I have two choices. I either move the chest outwards or move the feet inwards. So I'm going to try moving the chest outwards. And usually when you have these two choices, there's not a right or a wrong. It's just whatever I think is easiest. I don't get me wrong, there are sometimes the right decision. But if you change one thing, it will affect the other. So I could have made the feet smaller, could have moved the chest and made that wider. So there's always a choice to make. And I always say, work smart, not hard. Now let's look at a horizontal reference. So I'm putting this along the feathers with the feet. So I'm trying to see what's in line with the feet. So my straight line touches the feathers at both points. And then the front toe on the right is dipping down. Now on mine, my front toe is not dipping down at all. So I need to change that. I need to make sure that that little claw is going down at an angle. So I'm just going to amend that now. So check that on yours and let's see what happens to your feet and where it is in relation to your feathers. So this method, doing the vertical and horizontal reference is so, so good for checking your drawing. You're looking for not only what your line is in line with, but also the negative space between your vertical line and your object. It creates a barrier for you to compare to, because as humans we can easily see a vertical line. And we can easily see a straight line. If you imagine you're hanging a picture on a wall. You'll be the first person to say as wonky, won't you, 'cause you're that person. No, I say that because that's what I used to do as a job. I used to hang artwork and the amount of clients that were like, it's wonky and often they were right, it would be like a tiny bit wonky. But even if it wasn't, it looks wonky. So we already have it in us to see something wonky. So work around your drawing now, comparing, checking using this method, and hopefully it should help with your proportions and the angles of things. It's just really, really helpful. It's another tool for you to have to become a better artist and become a bit more accurate. And then once you've done that shade away, just throw some pencil in there, because as I said, this session is just about silhouettes. It's about a way to find out how you check artwork. And a silhouette means we don't have to stress about all the stuff in the middle. Hopefully you found this really useful. I definitely did when I was learning to draw and yeah, keep going with it. Good luck and I can't wait to see your progress. 16. Week 13 Tap: Hello folks. Welcome to Week 13. Unlucky for some but not for you, because you get to draw it with me. This week we're going to look at metal. So some of you have done this with me before in class, but it's always good to have a reminder and have it to hand. So metal is actually a lot easier than it looks. It looks really effective and that's because we're separating our lights and our darks really quickly. Reflection is all about super dark and super light, which I think you hear me talk about every single week. But it's a really fun exercise. And not only that, we are also going to do this in the grid method. So grab your pencils. Grab a ruler. And let's get thid, so the pencils, we're going to use our two and our eight B. This is going to be used for our outline and our shading. I'd like to start with your two B pencil. This is so if we make any mistakes, it's really easy to rub out. Now, try not to press too hard just in case you do need to erase any of the marks. Now we're going to use the same method as the grid method. However, this time you are going to draw your boxes in a random order. You're not going to follow it around one by one. Instead you're going to jump around to different squares. You might want to choose the squares that feel a bit easier or you can go for the hard stuff first. But this just means that we prevent ourselves from guessing what the image is doing. And if we follow a pattern, sometimes we can just jump the gun a little bit. By jumping around to different squares, it really helps us to focus on that square in hand. And we're not relying on what we did previously. We're attacking each box as it comes. For this first part of the drawing, I just want you to focus on getting the outline. That's by using this junction method. Trying to find out where you think the lines are situated, where they cross the box, and putting those little junctions in to help you join everything together. We do have the grid method in a longer version, if you're interested in that too. Now the thing with reflective surfaces and anything that's metal, we do need our lines to be nice and clean. It is worth just spending a bit more time on the outline to get it where you're happy with. Um, and we've tried to be helpful in this one. We have a grid printed out, so all we need to do is download the grid and you can have that ready for you. However, if you want to remove the grid after your drawings done, you won't be able to do that, obviously because it's printed out, so you can draw it by hand. But if you just want to use this exercise for practice, you can download it. Now, once the general outline is done, your next task is to block out the shadows. So what I mean by shadow, just so we're all clear, is those really, really dark patches. It's really difficult to actually see a shadow on a reflective surface because it's always catching light and bouncing it back. In this situation, I want you to draw around every area that is black. That's a nice, easy way to know exactly what you're defining. And I know there's some mid grays in there, there's quite a few mid grays. But for the purpose of our shading, this will make life a lot easier once you've isolated those darkest bits and on the paper, because this is what's really going to define your drawing as a three D metallic object. Is these clean, crisp lines that are soup super dark next to extreme white. Do make sure that you're looking for every single dark section in the piece. Do pay attention to the curvature of these dark bits and also to the thickness. Don't treat them all as the same thickness because each section is different. It's a little bit skinny in some places and a little bit thick in others. You do want to be watching and getting that balance of proportion throughout the shadow phase. And remember, you can pause this video at any point if you just want to double check your drawing against the demonstration. Because sometimes you might find that you've missed something. So that's the outline done. Now it's time for the fun bit. This is where we get to shade the darkest parts. And I wanted to grab your eight B pencil. And you're going to shade in those sections as dark as possible. A common mistake that I see people make all the time is that they are too scared to go too dark unless they make a mistake. And I completely understand that because It's a big commitment. Going dark is quite a big commitment. So I want you to trust your drawing stage. And if you spend a good amount of time on your drawing stage, then there should be no reason why you doubt yourself. And from there then, you know that the hard work is done and you can just shade in the section. It's a bit like coloring within the lines at this point. And hopefully you can see by mind that quite quickly you're starting to already envisage, I don't know if that's the right word, Envision, you know what I mean. You're starting to see that the object is coming forward a little bit more. It is starting to have some texture and our brains already recognized that it has some shiny surface because we have this high contrast. We've got really dark next to really light. And this is something that I jabber on about all the time, is high contrast, getting your lights, getting your darks, and making sure you're not afraid to go too dark. So really push in with that pencil. You can see how closely I'm holding that pencil to the tip as if I'm writing my name. I've got a really strong grip on it and it's making sure that my lines are as dark as possible. I also want to ensure that my lines are crisp. I mentioned earlier that metal and reflective surfaces, they all have these crisp lines because light will just follow the direction of the shape. If you imagine the middle section of this drawing is just a cylinder. Well, those light sources, that dark strip, for example, is just traveling up in a straight line. If you want to use a ruler for this part, by all means you should, because that will get you even sharper edges. But if you want to push yourself and do it by hand, then you should do that too. Now, once you've done the dark bits, you're going to get your two B and you're going to shade in those midtones here, we're looking for that medium gray, Sometimes it's a light gray, sometimes it's a medium gray, which means it's in between light and dark. But this is again, going to push your drawing to another level. To start, I just want you to get a base color in or a base value so that we're knocking off the white where it's not white and we're starting to really feel that the item has curvature, It has depth, and it's more than just black and white. Adding loads of different shades really makes our drawing look realistic. Work your way around and see where you can add these midtones. Luckily, it's quite easy to figure out where they start and stop because reflective surfaces are very clean. They already dictate where value starts and stops. There will be some gradients in there, and we'll get to that in a moment. But for now, it's more important just to knock off the white, where areas aren't white. Then once you've done that, you'll start to look at the detail. At the top, there is a bit of a gradient. There's also some really thin lines, intricate details that we want to pop in after you've got your base layer, this is where you start to pick it up and not you want to start asking yourself questions like, okay, is there anything darker in this little patch that I need to put in? Can I get my shading super, super smooth? Can I make sure my edges are really crisp? It is worth spending a bit more time on this as well. I find that this is the fun bit. I absolutely love shading. The outline is the graft and this is the reward at the end. It's really making it come to life in a way that you probably didn't think that you could, but you definitely can. Everybody is super capable of doing that. As we start to wrap up this lesson, hopefully you are happy with it, and hopefully you can see that this is a reflective surface. It's a really satisfying drawing to do. And I think actually metal can be quite terrifying because we already have expectations of it. But so long as you've followed the process, as long as you've got this high contrast of light and dark and you've added a bit of detail, then your tap will absolutely come to life. So definitely spend a bit of time on it and look at the finer details. I hope you enjoy that class and I really hope to see you soon. Final. 17. Week 14 Pear: Hey folks, welcome to Week 14. This month we're going to look at fruit. Now, a lot of you love drawing fruit, so this also makes me very happy to know we're drawing something that you enjoy. So in this one we're going to look at a pair. It's a very classic thing to draw, So I wanted to make sure it was both realistic classical and also a tiny bit challenging. So our main challenge here is actually the texture, the speckled bits on the skin of the pear. There's also the curvature that we have to look for, but we've practiced that in a few things now. So grab your pencils and let's get started. So the first thing we want to do is outlined. You'll notice on the pair that it's not a circle. The circle would mean it's an apple. On our pair, what we want to do is start with one side and just think about the curves. Think of it as a nice juicy bum, and then we've just got a small, I don't know, thing on top of it. But it might take a little bit of playing around with. As you can see, mine's not very good to start with, so I'm just slicing bits away from it. Thinking right, well, if I like the top, then I'll work on the bottom. Or if I liked the shape on the bottom, then I'll change the top. Just spend a couple of minutes trying to get the shape of your pair similar to the image itself. Then we're just going to add the stem on the top. So this has a bend in it and it points towards the right hand side to try not to make it straight because nature isn't very straight at all. It's very curved and bent and wiggly. So we want to make sure we are honoring that. And then what we're going to do to start is we're just going to add a base layer of shading. So this might seem rogue and you're probably like, what the hell, Charlie, we've not done the leaf yet. But I kind of just want to go for it a little bit before we do anything else. Just to kind of knock off the white and see if that affects anything in our drawing. I'm even covering the little light patches on the pair as well, because I can either use a rubber to remove it or I can shade around it darker. I'm just trying to play around with the shading and make sure it's all covered so it's got a nice even surface. Once you've done this, I want you to switch to your B pencil and you're just going to try to push this a little bit darker. You're looking at where we have the darkest parts of the pair. Now we have a bit of a glow on the left hand side. So I'm leaving a gap. And then I'm adding my darker shadow. And just notice how soft I'm applying it. This helps with creating soft edges. It means it's not too dark and it's almost like a rehearsal stage. Because sometimes when we draw we get nervous. Especially with something like this where it's super organic and curvy, we're just not sure whether it's in the right place. So it's always good to kind of do a little practice bit, push it a little bit darker and then go back and refine it. Now you'll do the same on the right hand side, so this is a wider gradient and you want to make sure that you're pulling from that edge on the right and you're pushing it into the center on the left. Now I can see on the pair, it's really dark on that absolute edge. So I'm trying to push that as dark as I'm feeling comfortable with for now. And you can start to see the curvature of the piece quite quickly. So what we're going to do now is just go over the left hand side. So again, we're trying to stretch that gradient from the left a little bit more into the right. So I'm basically leaving a lighter part of the pair in the center. I'm just like walking towards it from the left, from the right. So we're bringing our gradient towards the middle and we're still being careful about it. Sometimes I'm like, right, if I can go for it. But this one I'm like, no, let's be careful. So we should look weird at this stage. Min does, it doesn't look great. But we're starting to bring those shades together. So once we've done that, we start to join the shades around those little reflections. So just make sure you're paying attention to where the reflections are. And you can hopefully shade around them and you can start to see the glow. Now, I like to work on a piece like this in many different ways, but I'm often moving around it because I'm trying to find this balance. So I might notice at the top, well, it's a little bit light compared to the bottom. Or I might notice that the bottom should be darker because it's in shadow. So I only kind of notice these things sometimes when I'm in it. So if you're like hold on, weren't we just doing the highlights why we're doing the bottom? It's because I'm trying to find that balance, so don't be afraid to move around your pair as well. To find the connection between all the shades and pushing things darker. You can see that the highlights now are starting to come more forward. But it does need a lot of work still, so there's a lot of graininess that's happening. So once I finished with my dark shading, I'm going to go over it in my lighter pencil. So when you're at a point when you've kind of mapped out where your highlights are, where your shadows are, and where your dark bits are. I want you to grab your two B and just go over the whole thing because what this does is it goes inside those little white pockets of paper. And it's starting to push your shadows a bit darker, but it's doing it in a gentle way. So you're going over the whole piece, accept your highlights, and it's also helping you to kind of carve those shapes in a little bit better. Go in different directions. See if you can push your drawing a little bit more just with your two B, and then we can push it further with our darker pencil. So we're switching between the two now. We're trying to see, okay, where can I push it, where can I refine it? This is what makes a drawing better than how it started, which is a very weird thing to say. You're basically trying to just sketch up your shape. You're trying to put everything in place and then the detail comes in. So you'll see that I'm pushing darker now with my A B on the edge. And it's quite powerful to have these medium grays and then push really dark shade in there. So make sure that you're looking at your shadows and thinking, right, can I go a little bit darker here? Will that make it more realistic? And probably the answer is yes, is keeping that gap between the darker bits and the lighter bits. And I think I go on about this all the time, but it's so important, and you can see that on line, it's working. It's starting to pop really realistically. And soon it's time for the extra bits of detail. So when you're ready, move on to your stem. Now with something like this, I like to just throw in those dark, wrinkly bits in my darker pencil and then just go over it in a light shade. And pretty much that's all we need to do. It's quite effective little method and once we've done that, we're going to start working on our leaf. So it's actually quite nice sometimes to have a part of your drawing that's in a really good state before you add the next bit. Some artists do this, they just draw everything as they mean to go on. But in this case, we have kind of done a big shape and then built it up. But some artists do literally like a millimeter squared finish that, move on to the next millimeter. So this is a bit of a compromise. It's right. Let's do one shape, finish it, and then do another shape and finish that is we're onto our leaf. Now the most important thing is trying to get that dark shadow where the leaf sits behind the pair. Make sure you have that, because we need to show that there's a glow on the pair. And that glow is shown by being surrounded by darker shades. So add that onto your leaf. And to be honest, it doesn't matter if your leaf is perfectly identical to the pair. You could just draw a classic leaf shape and it will still look great. But it does have these veiny bits, so I tend to add a medium gray behind and then I'll use my dark pencil to shade around the veins. This is a really easy technique to show that there are veins. Give that a go and see how it works. Just maybe watch how I do it and then you'll be able to apply it to yours. It's leaving the vein with the undershade and then going around the darker bits with your dark pencil to highlight it. And it's a nice way to do a leaf without being like, oh, how do I get all of the chlorophylls which some pictures do have it very stressful. Anyway, it's really starting to come together now. We could leave it here and that would still be a great pair, but I still think these things can be pushed. So let's add a shadow on the ground. It's really dark right under the pair. And we're going to add a very thin, very, very thin shadow underneath it is an oval underneath. But sometimes people draw massive circles because we know if we were stood above it, it would be a circle. However, we're stood in front of it, which means it's an oval. So draw a thin shadow underneath, make it super dark beneath the pair and then a bit lighter around it. So now it's sitting on something and we always like to see our drawings. Sound something. It's very, I don't know, it's quite important for drawings, so it's not floating, especially it's still life like this. Now the next part is one of the final touches, so we're actually adding the little speckles on the pair. These are not just loads of dashes, they're actually lots of individual circles, ovals. We have different sizes. We've got small dots, bigger dots. We've got dark ones, light ones. We've got areas where they're more condense. So you could easily ruin all the work you've done just by jabbing a bunch of dots in there. Or you could just spend a bit of time and add some extra ones that are carefully placed and considered for the size and the darkness of it. So it does make a huge difference. Now the final bit, if you want to push it even further, because like me, you're a perfectionist and it's just never done. Is it like, oh, how hard do I push this? You can grab your two H pencil. This pencil is to help make it extra extra smooth, especially if your paper is a little bit grainy like mine or your B has made this texture. It's just to help get in those little pockets and smooth everything out. The good thing about two H is it never goes super dark, so you'll not be in danger of ruining what you've done, if anything. It just brings the shades together and it makes for a super smooth piece of pear or pear. It's not a piece, it's a pear. So there we have it. Well done. On your pear. I hope you enjoyed that. And next week we're going to continue the theme on fruit. Have a good week, folks, and I'll see you for our next lesson. 18. Week 15 Open Cherry: This is this week's lesson, which is a cherry chopped a half. So I think it's week 15. It's getting a little bit more challenging because we're looking at finer detail. Seeing if we can get that juicy reflective surface. And just seeing if we can make our fruit look edible and make us hungry. And, you know, I really want that for our lesson. So grab your pencils, folks, and let's get started. Let's start with our basic outline now. The easiest part would be to start with the stem And just thinking about, is it straight, does it have a bend, and where does it bend? After that, you want to add the fruit of the cherry itself. So you can either start in the pip or you can start at the outer shell. Now there's a little bit of the skin that you can see just around the stem, and then it falls into kind of a squashed circle. So it looks a bit like an apple actually. But once you've got that, you're then going to add the pip. Or, you know, if you did the Pip first, you're going to add the skin around there and hopefully that should be our outline basically done. So it is worth just tidying it up and making sure you're happy with the shape, with the left side being the similor thickness as the right side. And you're happy with the placement of the Pip. Once you're happy with that, grab your two pencil. I seem to be using a HB. I think I lost my two B at the time. I just want you to shade in the flesh. You'll notice that I'm going quite rough. You can see my lines. I'm trying to keep my pencil lines as close together as possible, but the main purpose of this is just to get rid of the white, get the lightest shade from that section and just to cover it in a nice bit of pencil as we move along, Just shade in the fleshy bit in your two, please ignore the HB. Then we're going to add some detail after that. But first, we want to set our tones. Now what I wanted to do, the next part, was just mark out where the strongest parts of detail are in the pip. Or is my grandma right there? Is in the pip the strongest bits of detail in the pip? I think that's better. So you'll see, I'm just trying to figure out where those darkest bits are. Also, I just want to highlight where the lightest bits are. So this is probably the most important part, is figuring out your highlights. Don't stress too much about the medium bits of detail, but really, really do draw a little gait around the white bits because we know we don't want to shade around those at all. We don't want to shade in those at all. Sorry, you might have guessed that we're going to shade around those little white bits and fill it in with your two. Be once again, there's not much that we can see in our drawing at the net. So what we want to start doing is pulling out the darker sections. We're showing a difference from one level of surface to another. I'm going around the Pip where it is in the picture and I'm trying to start to push those darker shadows in. What you'll also see is there's a bit of a dark edge around the flesh itself where the skin is basically. Once I'm happy with the shadowing around the Pip, I'm just going to start to outline the edge as well, and it's all kind of working at the same time as each other. So you're bringing everything together, jumping around a little bit. But we're still aiming for that darkness. And we're trying to pull that in so that the light bits starts to get highlighted. So make sure it's definitely darker in the center. It's a little bit darker on the outside. And you just want to make sure you're pulling these gradients that are pulling towards the outside. So just keep looking at the picture, keep seeing where there's a difference in shade and you can see that there's like a lighter ring central in the flesh, in the fruity bit, so don't worry about the finer detail just yet. We're just trying to mark all the important pieces and then we can start working back on the Pip. So there's a lot of dark lines on the Pip and we want to make sure that we're looking at the shapes of this. Now sometimes I kind of stop and move around and I'm like, oh, hold on the dark bit there and want to wiggle there. If you're like, hold on China, or saying one thing and jumping around another, then my apologies. But our brains work in mysterious, wonderful ways. But if I can tell you what we're aiming for, hopefully that'll help with your own as well. So once you've set most of your shading, then you can add the details. So you'll see that I'm starting to add these little wiggly bits in the fruit, and I'm pushing that down with my seven, so I'm keeping it nice and dark. If you've got an eight, B, Perfect. I think I lost my eight as well. Can I just say I've made this video just before I went on holiday, so yeah, my room was a mess anyway. Work your way around every little vein that you see. Think about what direction it's going in. Think about those videos we've done before where we're looking at the direction of lines. Is it pointing towards 12:00 Is it has one, is it quar six? These little differences in line will really help with your drawing and bringing everything together. It's a process. It's a process of building everything up, being patient, and realizing that it actually won't look very good until the last 10% of it. Go easy on yourself because it never looks good to start with mind certainly don't just just keep working around it and pushing those darker bits darker. Now there are going to be differences in shade. There's going to be light, medium, dark, and all things in between. If you've got dark on the page, is there anywhere that's a little bit darker? Is it anywhere, you know where it's medium or slightly darker than its neighbor? These are the subtle differences that are really going to help your drawing. And you'll see that I'm pushing in these super, super dark flecks which are starting to add that texture and the dynamicness in our piece. So there's a lot of contrast that's being built up here, and our pip looks very unrealistic. So once you're kind of happy with the fruit bit, start to think about the pip itself. And I wish I'd have had a second camera on this so you could see exactly what's going on. But as I said, it was not the time for second cameras. But treat the Pip as, I don't know, as like skin or wrinkle, like lots of wrinkly bits. I know it could look like other things. Just remember it is a Pip and there's going to be lots of contrast in there. So keep looking at it and thinking, okay, where is it darker? Where is it lighter? And remember it is a ball. It's a sphere of some kind, maybe like a rugby ball, So your light tones aren't going to be kept light. They're actually going to be, you know, a gradient that helps the shape to curve around. So just pay attention to where there are pockets in the pip and the flesh as well. And just keep balancing with each other. Now don't forget to work on the stem as well. There's one light source coming from the left, so the right edge of the stem is actually much darker. It's causing a form shadow, which means it's formed on the shape rather than being cast on the floor or the object. So make sure you're getting a light side and a dark side and there's not too much detail that needs to happen in this. Just a little bit on the top. A few squiggles which I think we'll do. And then there's a little bit of shading on the skin, which you could see just at the base of the stem there. Now is the time to refine your drawing and think, is there any small bits of detail I can add? Can you see any veins? Any thin lines? Can you add any that will make the texture seem a little bit more, I don't know, juicy or whatever. But again, I wish I had that second camera because you cannot see the nice texture going on. It's very reflective. But hopefully the right hand side, the bottom right especially you can see where that's getting nice and textured. Once you're happy with all these things, go around your drawing with a two H pencil, this is going to bring all those grainy bits together. You can add more finer detail with your two H pencil because it's not going to go any darker. So do spend a few minutes now just refining the rest of your drawing and making it look so bloody good that you could literally eat it. Does it make you celebrate? That's what I want you to ask yourself. Does it make you hungry? Okay, folks, thanks so much for watching this week and yeah, I'll catch you next week for another lesson of fruit. 19. Week 15 Cherries: Hey team, if you're after something fun this week, there isn't too brain taxing. I'd definitely recommend drawing these cherries. There's a nice surface reflection on these and we're not looking at any fine detail that we need to stress about, we're just looking at shapes. Filling them in and hopefully blending the edges to make them nice and gentle but in a very small area. So grab your pencils and let's get started with this reflective cherry. What I want you to do to start is to just get this generic kind of circle shape and have one cherry sat on top of the other. So they're not to perfect circles, they just kind of sit side by side. And then you have your stem. So after you've got your very basic shape, you can start carving in the actual curves of the cherries. So just think about where the angles are, how curved they are, and try and get that classic little divid near the top. And then rub out any excess lines that you don't need. Once you've done this, you want to start to identify your highlights. You're just drawing the shapes of the light bits. Don't worry about any other detail for now. Just get those highlights in there. And then this starts to show where the light is reflecting off the cherry. Once you've done that, you can then look at the other shapes on the cherry. You can see some darker edges. And it's good practice just to get these in because you're basically saying, right, this shape is light, this one's medium, this one's dark. After that, we're going to just go for a general shade, leaving the light bits white and then just shading in around that. In a darker pencil, this is actually a two steel. I meant to say darker pressure, but it said darker pencil and I'm not going to edit that. This starts to show that your cherry is kind of coming a little bit more forward. It's becoming a little bit curved and underneath there, you're just going to add that in as well. So we're starting to see a little bit of shape in your cherries. What we want to do is actually push that curvature and start thinking about that super dark bit, which is first of all in between the cherries. It's just casting onto the right cherry where the cherries meet. And then we're going to start thinking about the details. Keep asking yourself, where is that dark edge? Is it anywhere? Is it somewhere very clear? Is it a sharp edge? Is it a light edge? Very, very quickly, you'll start to see the cherry come to life. The thing with cherries is that the skin is actually quite dark. We know them to be like a deep red, dark purple, red thing. We need to make sure that our pencil can match that value. Imagine we're taking away all the color from the picture of the cherry. And you will start to see a very dark value there. Which is great. Is very good practice actually for drawing color because we don't have it, we just have gray and black. So it is a challenge. But I want you to try and give it a go as best you can. Just remember when you're shading this, you can redefine any outlines or any edges that you want. It it's not permanent. Whenever you start drawing, you can change anything. You might see something different as you're looking closer at the details and the shapes. And that's absolutely fine. Whenever I'm drawing, I do change things quite a bit. It could be like a minor millimeter. It could be a whole shape. It could be a whole shade there. Well, sorry. The more you look, the more you see and your drawing becomes better. With this practice, hopefully you are pausing the video and you're looking at certain areas, you're spending time in them. Once you're happy with your dark a bit, we're going to work on the light a bit. So you need to make sure that your edges are not so sharp because when we drew the outline, they were fairly sharp. But we want to just soften them a little bit. So I'm using my two H here and I'm just around those edges trying to make them a little bit softer. Get a slight difference from the darkness on the edge, in towards the middle. And in some of them I will actually just shade over the light bit, just a little bit just to knock off the white. Because the white can be quite harsh often we do want to get rid of it, but just keep it as light as possible. The two H is also really good to unify your shading, especially if you've got grainy paper or your eight B is being grainy in the dark bits. This pencil helps to bring it all together and make it all look nice and uniform, nice and smooth, just like the skin on a cherry. Work your way around. Now on the rest of your drawing, just keep looking at it. Keep thinking about where you can it, how you can improve it slowly but surely your cherry. We together lesson. Very realistic. Another video. And then of course we stems. If you wanted to, you can do a little shadow as well, but I'm not going to. I'm just quite happy with the cherry as it is. And yeah, hopefully you enjoyed that. Hopefully as always, you found it useful. And keep up the good work. Keep up the practice, and you'll be an amazing artist in no time, but I'm sure you already are. 20. Week 16 Blackberry: Hey team, this is week 16 on how to improve your drawing. So this month is fruit, and today we're going to look at a Blackberry. Now this is really going to test your drawing seals because it's a very organic shape. We have lots of individual little nubbins and we need to get them in the right place. Add shading, make each little pocket look three D, and then hopefully it kind of works. Now it is worth pausing this video at each stage and kind of working on your own until you're ready to move on. So I'd recommend maybe watch the video a bit first, pause it when you do your own, and then hopefully everything will come together and you're like, holy ****, I drew a very difficult thing and I'm ******* proud of it. So off you go, Grab your pencils and let's get started. This is going to be the biggest Blackberry you have ever seen. So let's get started now. The first thing we're going to do, because this is a slightly abstract shape, is we're going to use rectangles to try and define the shape. So what I'm thinking about here is where is the widest, the highest, and the lowest point of the blackberry? And once I kind of figure that out, I can start to look at the negative space and I can start to think about all those little bubbles that are on the blackberry. Because, let's face it, when you look at this, it's like, oh my God, where do I start? There's so much going on. So what we want to do is simplify the shape as much as possible. And I usually like to do the sort of method when there is a complicated shape and I just focus on the outside. I don't stress too much on the middle, obviously. Once I've got the outside, I can then start to work my way on the inside. I've made loads of bumps as if it's a hill. And from there I can carve in the edges and start to think about those nubbins in the middle. Sorry, I love the word nubbins. There's two things to think about when you're working inside here. There is the nub in itself, but there's also the black shadow around it. I like to treat these as a shape in themselves and you'll see that it's almost like I'm drawing a random shape in amongst random shapes. So that is what I'm going for and I'm treating each nobule as a random shape. I honestly don't know what they're called, pockets or seats. I'm not sure. Hopefully the visuals will kind of make more sense than my words. But you're treating each little juicy bit as its own shape and you're thinking about the black shadow as its own shape as well. And this is going to make it way easier to draw and to think about the next stages. So work your way around this. And it's worth spending a bit of time on this, because once this is done, the hardest part is done. Trust me, this is the hardest part. And to be honest, if it's not perfect, it's really not the end of the world because you have a second chance when you get to the shading and probably a third chance as well. So it's nature, isn't it? It's not perfect. We can give ourselves a break and just kind of get these shapes looking roughly like what I have. Anyway. Once you've done that, you want to then look at your foliage. Is there any green bits on the top bit or a stem? And you just want to pop those in as well. With any light and dark differentiation differences. Right, When you're ready, the next part is shading in that black space. So remember I just spoke about trying to draw the black space as its own shape. Well, now is the time to shade this in with your eight B. So this is showing us that the dark spaces are deep crevices, even though we know it's not that deep, it's a Blackberry. Come on. It's going to be like a milli meee, a deep maximum. But the thing is, it still creates this dark shadow. So the best thing to do is to shade this in nice and dark. And that's going to start to show your little nubbins coming forward. And already you're starting to see this familiar shape of a blackberry. So we're recognizing it just by having white and very, very dark. So our brain starts to acknowledge what's going on and it's starting to see, okay, this is coming together, Let's trust the process. We trust China, hopefully. So you might want to pause the video at this point just to make sure you're up to date and then you're ready for the next part. Because there's no way anyone could have done this in 3 minutes right when you're ready and hopefully you've spent some time on that dark bit. You're just going to shade the nobules in a very light gray. So I'm just using my, it's probably my two B or my three B to be honest, but a very light pencil. I'm trying not to go too dark and I'm just getting rid of all the white bits. Because if you look at the Blackberry, even though the shiny bit, there's actually no white bits at all. So let's start to knock off that white. And again, it just helps with pushing that blackberry forward and making it look a little bit more realistic. It's starting to look better now. I think this is a good point to just remove that rectangle just to kind of get rid of any construction lines that we don't want and then we can start working into the detail. What we've done to start is we simplified the shape, we made a rectangle, then we drew the shapes of the individual pieces we shaded in the shadows. And now We are looking at the medium dark bits in the blackberry itself. So I'm just going to show an outlined version of the medium dark bits so you can see what I mean. And you're going to shade this in medium to dark gray because we're building up on the lightest shade. The lightest shade was the flat layer that we just did underneath. We're building up that three D effect and we're starting to push in the details. You can start to see just some my drawing that by adding this extra layer of contrast it's working on the Blackberry is making things look a little bit more detailed. And you can see on a couple of them at the bottom. I just thought, **** it, just go for it. And, you know, it still needs a bit of work to be honest, even on those. So this stage is just trying to add the medium layer of darkness. So not worrying too much about adding the fine detail, we're going to go back and add the darkest bits in these nubbins afterwards. But there might be some edges where at this point you think, okay, I want to add that gradient at least. And then I'm going to add the medium darkness. But each little section is different. Try and keep looking at the reference picture because every shape is different. Every shape relates to the direction of the light. If we're not following the shapes that we can see, then our eyes will know straight away that it's not realistic. It is important to keep looking at the reference picture. Yeah, hopefully you're going to see some results very, very quickly once you've done your medium grays. This is when we go back with our dark pencil and we start to look at those darker pockets on the nubbins. So just look at the edges of them. Are the edges soft or are they hard? And it will vary depending on which section you're looking at, but this is where the finer detail comes into place. We do have another section after this, but all I want you to think about is the darker, the pools of darkness on the Blackberry. And then afterwards, we get to put in those tiny little seed ends, which will be very, very easy to do. But just one more layer on your Blackberry, and this is going to be a real game changer for how it looks. So we are nearly there. You can see already on mine, the effect that it's taken, especially down at the bottom, you can see a little glow, a little dark bit, and a big pocket of light. So it's because I keep looking at the reference picture, I'm seeing light and darker shapes rather than areas on a Blackberry. So hopefully yours will look the same as well. And if not, just give it a little bit more time. These things do take time, so it is worth pausing the video, going back to it, keep looking at mine, look at the picture, and all will work. Now the final bit to do, obviously, is the stem and the leaves. And hopefully you can see light and dark and apply that fairly easily. And then the last thing you want to do is to add these little speckles of, I don't know what they are, seeds or something, but that basically brings it all together. Now I always like to go over mine with a fine tooth brush or a fine pencil in this case and just see if there's anything that I've missed, any details I can add, and anything to make this look better. So feel free to spend a bit of extra time on yours bringing all the shading together, and then hopefully you should have one juicy tasty Blackberry. 21. Week 17 Peach: Hey team, welcome to this week's lesson where we're going to look at how to shade a peach. Now, we have done a ball before, so I know that you can do this lesson and hopefully you'll getting to a point when you're like, hmm, do you know what, I am actually getting better, so we don't need to worry too much about drawing fur because it's insinuated with what it is. So grab your pencils and let's get started on this week's peach. So we're going to start off with a rough circle. Now remember, this is nature, It's not perfect. And if your circle ain't perfect, don't you worry, you want to try and add a wedge of a peach next to that? So imagine you're drawing the letter D, and then you have an extra edge just on the bottom there. So try and get that tilted on its side. Imagine an axis as pointing towards, say, half one on a clock. And that's really going to help you with your wedge. So the next step is to kind of define it a little bit clearer. So I've just gone along that wedged edge. It's a real tongue twister and now I'm just looking at inside the peach, so I wanted to find the care. And then I'm looking at where the yellow is meeting the peachy color. And you can see him doing that around the middle there as well. So that's kind of where the purple reaches it. It looks a little bit like a crisps pudding. And someone's put a thumb in it. So if that's what yours looks like, then congratulations. We've both nailed it. But we do need to do a fair bit of work from this point on. So the thing we don't want to do is lose our edges that we've drawn. We want them to be soft, but we've drawn them in. And I think if we shade in some pencil on top, we can very easily lose those edges. So what I'm doing is I'm staging my shading as we go down. The center is the lightest, the mid ring is medium dark, and then the outer or the bottom section is a little bit darker. It doesn't really look like a peach at this point either. It looks very abstract, actually, quite hard to tell what it is, but that's what we want. We're simplifying this shape. We're trying to just get something on the paper basically and then work from there. But it is setting us up for an easier road as we move forward. So once you've done that, you can then do a little bit of work on that wedge as well. Just the same thing of thinking about, right, is this section light, medium, or dark. All three of these elements in each piece, the full peach or the half peach, just has a little bit of difference in it as well. Once you've done that, let's add a shadow. This will just help us situate ourselves and let the peach sit on a piece of paper, and then we can start to work on the shading switch to my darker pencil, my B. I'm just working my way from the darkest point up towards the middle line. The darkest area will help to show that it's curving. I think I'm actually jumping ahead a little bit. I'm like, oh, let's just add a bit of detail but you just won't see it. The thing is, I'm trying to build up my shade layer by layer. If I'm starting to put loads of detail in now, it's going to disappear very soon. What I end up doing is just pushing it darker than I think, so that I can be honest with myself and honest with the shade as well, and make sure I'm going dark enough. Also, this darker pencil does help to add a little bit of a furry texture to the peach without having to actually do anything. So make sure you're using the edge and not the tip of your pencil that will help with the texture. Just make sure you're darkest where it touches the wedge and it is getting lighter as it heads towards the middle. So not only is that a bit, we've just been working on the darkest bit, but there's also a few little sections on the edges that need some work. They need to be pushed darker. You know, nothing should really be left untouched from this stage. So what we're doing is we're defining the edge where the peach meets the yellow, because there are some very nice glows that happens in the core of that peach. And I just want to make sure I'm highlighting that. And the way I can highlight that is by going darker around it. It's a nice little trick that we use in the drawing industry to make some of it look lighter. We actually make everything around it look darker because it's actually much harder to make things look, um, lighted by using a rubber. So actually what we should do is make everything else darker so it's starting to come together. And on the wedge you'll notice that there's a gradient from the skin towards the center. So just kind of roughly put that in. It's not very nice but, you know, marking it out. And I'm going to go back into it very shortly, and I decided to introduce the two H a little bit earlier than what I usually would do, but actually it's quite nice to see the shades kind of tie themselves together a little bit. And I'm actually able to add more texture with this pencil because it's a little bit harder so I can really get into the places I want to go. And also it will help bring the texture and the shading underneath together. By all means, if you're not ready for the two H yet, you can wait till the end because that's what we have been practicing. But you could also give it a go and see if that can help soften your edges. And you can see on mine quite clearly that it's softening the edge between one shade to another really, really nicely. So it is a great pencil for doing that. You want to keep looking at your reference picture and looking at where things are gradients, especially when it comes into the center and the core of that peach, because it's not one flat level of yellow, it's actually a few gradients heading down into the crevice. Trying to get in is quite important for the fold of this fruit. You want to keep working on this during and hopefully it's going to come together. Now just notice on the outer edge of the peach, it is darker as if it's an outline, but it's not like a solid outline. It's just a little bit darker on the outside and it comes lighter as we move in. Make sure you're doing that as it is a bit of a ball. It's very much a ball actually, so we like doing those in this class. The other thing is they just kind of appear in everybody drawing that you do. So being able to nail drawing a ball will help massively with this drawing. Okay, so let's do a little bit more work on that wedge. So I'm trying to get a little gradient from the skin to the center. But just notice I'm not going all the way into the center. I'm leaving the first layer of pencil to shine through. So it looks like it's a little bit lighter. And then I'm just redefining the edges. So this one is a nice little lesson. And of course, adding a shadow really situates it and makes it look like on a table. And you've done this beautiful still life. So well done. And yeah, I will see you next week for the next lesson. All right folks. I have a good week. 22. Week 18 Egg: Hey team, happy bank holiday Monday. I'm definitely not giving off those spring warm vibes today. Am I feel like I'm actually giving off Wednesday vibes? So we're looking at light shading today. It's something that I think a lot of people struggle with, and they also struggle with going dark as well. So we're going to look at that in a couple of weeks time. But for today, you're going to see how patient and how delicate you can be. So grab your pencils and let's get started. We're going to start with the outline. So grab your two B pencil and try to create an egg shape. Now if you think about it, eggs do have a little bit of a point on the top. It's not huge and the base is much rounder, so definitely try and get that shape if you can. Now, I'm going to start my shading and I'm just going in the direction that my hand usually sits. You'll notice if I pause for a second, how far away from the end of the pencil I am. You can even do this if you have a short pencil, but I want it to be as light as possible and as soft as possible. So basically sabotaging myself so I can't press too hard. And that's what we want. Some of you might find as soon as you put the pencil down, a big line has been created. And that's not what we want today. We want to be really soft and delicate to try and just change the position of your hand. Now, next we're going to start to push the very faint shadow that's on the egg itself. So let me just draw around the shape so you can see what it looks like. I'm basically saying to myself, inside this shape is pretty much one shade, and the left side of it is another, and the right side is another. And you could just see by these quick color samples there as well. The difference is very subtle, but it's definitely there. We want to make sure we're getting our darkest value on the egg, which is that weird shape. And we're getting the medium gray on the left and the really, really light on the right this whole time as well. My pencil is staying sharp and I'm trying to make it as smooth as possible. I'm trying not to get it too grainy, so I'm using the tip, but also the edge of the pencil as well. Now, once you've placed some of your shadow on there, and you've pushed a little bit of, the edge is darker, you see the top and the bottom is, we're going to just shade on the outside of the egg. When I'm looking at this video, I'm like, oh my goodness, that it's way too dark. But you've got to trust the process. It's basically because I've put a darker gray next to white on the edge, that it feels much darker. But really it's not as dark as it seems. So once everything's on, it's going to settle down a lot more and hopefully feel less aggressive. I guess if you can even say an egg is aggressive, I don't know. I don't think I've ever said, I don't think one has been thrown at me. Okay. So you can see very sharp pencil, very important. Now what you can do at this stage, when you're happy with the placement of all your shadows, use a two H pencil just to really refine all of that shading. This goes inside all the knuts and crannies. It gets rid of all of the texture of the paper and you'll really slowly work your way around trying to even out the tone. And this would help with leveling any shading, pushing anything that tiny is bit darker rather than going for super dark with an AB, which we've classically been doing this year. But a two H can just bring those subtleties together. Of course, the key to this drawing is trying to make sure your edge of shading really disappears into the white of the egg. So we don't really want to see it at all. I hope you enjoyed this challenge this week. They said, I do find this much more challenging than a darker shading. But it's a great exercise to practice, Enjoy a delicate shading today. And I'll see you next week for another video. 23. Week 19 White Vase: Hey team, welcome to this week's episode, which is continuing that difficult shading of a light shading. In this session, we are going to look at drawing a white vase. But how much of the vase is actually white? This is the difficulty. So again, we're only going to use our 2.2 B pencil. Let's see how we get on as usual. Let's start with the outline. It's going to be your two pencil. The main thing about this part is the symmetry. Symmetry is very, I find it quite difficult actually. Some people might find it easy. But trying to get the left side look like the right is not a simple task. So you can either do what I did, where I drew a cylinder first and then a circle underneath, or you can draw the left side, followed by the right side. So completely up to you how you approach this. Try both, See if one works, see if one doesn't, but see if you can definitely get that symmetrical image, because that's really going to help with this drawing. So once you're happy with that, we're going to start with the shading. Now stick to your two B and all you're going to do are these gradual little gradients that go from the right hand side to the left hand side. So I'm keeping it very, very light, very soft. And seeing if I can just soften the edge when I get to the left. And you can use a couple of different directions here, but the trouble is if you do go left and right like this stroke, you might end up having some harsh edges. So just be very light on pressure if you end up doing two different directions as well. But it's good practice and it's actually good practice to do this underneath the cylinder, so in the circle, because the cylinder has more light in it and the circle doesn't have any white bits at all. So when you're ready, you're just going to fill this in in a very light layer of pencil. Just get a little bit darker. On the right hand side, just start to show that you're seeing shadows. What we're essentially doing at this stage is a bit of a rehearsal, so we are just telling ourselves, all right, I can see a shadow here, just going to go a little bit darker. And that's what I think we naturally do this when we're drawing because we're quite scared of dark. So we show a little bit of the shadow and then we start to put it in. So yeah, this is what I want you to kind of go with, your instinct, I guess. Which most of you probably will have a lighter instinct, but some of you will have a darker instinct. So it's fine in that balance between the two. Once you're a little bit more comfortable and confident with where your shadows are, you want to start to push things a little bit darker. So we're just edging there. We're not going to go wild. And we're trying to keep our pencil very sharp. So you'll notice my hand keeps moving away from the artwork it is because I'm sharpening my pencil all the time. It just means for a finer point and it means you can get in all the Kitty Grey bits. I sounded real common then. Kitty Grey. That's one thing I would say with any light drawing is make sure your pencil is incredibly sharp. Once you've done the main chunk of your shading, then you can start to push the darker bits a little bit darker. So obviously, you've got the top part of the vase, the entrance bit, and then you do have this slightly darker part where the light stops hitting the cylinder. So some people call it a bed bug line, but it's quite a chunky bedbug line actually. And it just shows that there's a glow next to the handle on the right. And I'll show you in the arrows. So you've got a darker bit for the handle, a little bit of a glow next to that, and then a darker bit and then you've got the gradients. So it's just recognizing all these little things that light kind of gives us and shows us on shape. So yeah, try and get these on, but try not to leave a high light as white. This is one of the most common mistakes we make, I guess is leaving high lights white. When actually they're still in shadow, there should still be a little bit darker. So it still looks a little bit messy. I think it looks quite streaky. So once you've kind of placed your light shadows and your gradients are looking pretty sick, you want to grab your two H pencil. So hopefully, we're getting fairly familiar now with what the two H can do. And you can see instantly when I start to use it on the vase, things get a lot softer. Now, It's starting to look darker. But that's only because I'm essentially filling in the gaps that the two H pencil can get to in the paper. So if I go over this bed bug line or this slightly darker bit, then that gets darker too and the glow comes back. It's like magic. We love magic in drawing. I suppose drawing is like magic. And then what I could do is just soften the edge as well where I get the gradient. Because I want it to look like you can't see where one line stops and one disappears and the two H is so light it can do that. But the trouble is, it is quite hard to do. Be careful, try not to make it too aggressive on the paper. It can really like cut it up so sad. Anyway, you want to go around your whole drawing now with your two H pencil. And don't just rush it, I would say look for the discrepancies and wiggle your pencil in there. So really look for the gaps. Don't just throw pencil in there. For the sake of it, wiggle your pencil around and then it's just going to fill those gaps in much more nicely. That doesn't feel all right. Much more nicely nicely. Much more. Oh God. Anyway, you might just want to watch this for a second. And watching it disappear is actually quite satisfying. Not disappear, it doesn't go anywhere. Sorry, Watching this even out and smoothing out, I don't know if that's what were your word anyway, is so, so satisfying. And you can push shades a little bit darker if you think, oh, actually I have been a bit shy on this. I could go a little bit darker. So use this as like your final layer just to push everything in the place that you really want it to go. And you can get it so smooth and you can just see where you need to make things more even or make them a little bit different. Because as I'm pushing the cylinder on the top and the cylinder on the bottom, I can see that my ball isn't looking very fruity. Actually, it has become quite flat. So I just need to push that pencil in a little bit harder and build back that shade so I'm not going for that dark shade that often I do ask people to do. I'm building it up, I'm edging my way forward and I'm just slowly seeing the curvature come together. And I think you do kind of need that in this approach, especially with drawing white things and trying to draw really, really light. So I hope you enjoyed that. I really hope you got a lot from it. And yeah, I can't wait to see you in our next lesson. 24. Week 20 White Jug: Hey team, welcome to whatever week is, maybe 20 or 21. This week we're continuing that journey on our light shading because it's very difficult, very frustrating. But something we do need to be able to do. So we're going to do a white jug. This is slightly more complicated in shape because there's not really any definite edges. There's a few, but really it's all about the gradients, as well as trying to get the shape, trying to get a little bit of symmetry, and trying to get a handle on it. Anyway, grab your pencils and let's get started with this week's lesson. Okay folks. So grab your usual two pencil. This is going to start off our outline. Now the jug isn't symmetrical. So this is our first challenge, trying to get it to sit in the right way. Now I would maybe draw a rectangle around this, or I would just try and look at negative spaces, looking at the spaces around the jug. And just see if that's going to help you with your outline of the shape. Now once you've done that, we're going to head straight into the shading. So it's always best to start with the darkest part that you can see and something with a bigger space. So I'm just starting in the left corner where the spout is. And I want to go in a few different directions, so this is going to help to make the shading smooth. And I'm almost starting to add a bit of a gradient on here as well. You can see it gets lighter as it moves round to the right. This is a key element in any three D curved edges. We're going to look at the handle as well and you'll see that there's maybe a sharper curve. It's not as round as the actual area, there's a little bit darker in some spaces. Try and push that a little bit darker if you can to don't just try and treat that as a block shade. You'll see that the shadow is underneath the part the handle where your finger probably sits on and underneath the bottom as well, so the light is being cast from the top. Once you've got that in place, just add that little entrance hole where, sorry, where the milk goes in. And you want to be looking for the light part that just shows where the difference is. Now it's so light that there's not really an outline at all. So don't push too hard. But I know the temptation is to go full whack and shovel load of darkness in there. So we've got some of the shading on and it looks okay. But what happens when we add a dark background? So the dark background is going to change how our shading looks, especially when our drawing is surrounded by white. What does it do when it's surrounded by black instead? So grab your A B pencil and push this in around the jug. Now, the background is so boring, I get so bored doing it. So I do tend to rush it, but then I'm left with this super grainy sort of texture and it does kind of ruin the picture. So I'd recommend to get a layer down and just when you get a bit bored, do a corner, do a little section of it, go back to it. But it is worth just trying to make it look better than it is. Or think about it another way. If you're having a **** day and don't want to think about anything, you don't want to have the stress of doing a drawing, just do the background because it's kind of mind numbing and you don't have to think about anything else. So it could be a good stress reliever or in my case, it could be quite stressful. So as always in these drawings, we then go over them in a two H pencil. Now the thing with the background, especially a dark one, it makes the work we've done look a lot lighter. I want to find that balance and be quite careful on how much darker I push, my white shading. The two H pencil can help to bridge that gap a little bit. It's not pushing things too hard and you just want to build it up and just slowly add another layer. Keep looking at the reference picture asking yourself, is it dark enough? Is it light enough? Have I gone soft enough? Hopefully you can also see the soft little changes in edges. So is it a hard edge? Is it a soft edge? These are all the questions I'm constantly asking myself when I'm drawing something like this. So trying to find that balance. So go over your drawing in your two H pencil and really spend the time just to refine everything. And most likely you'll need to push your light shading a little bit darker because the surrounding area has well shown us how light we've gone. Why is such an illusion? So I'm hoping you experience that anyway. Otherwise, this means absolutely nothing to you. So the last thing to make this look realistic is to add a bit of a shadow. So make sure your A B pencil is sharp, go very, very thinly along the bottom and add a little glow that comes over to the left. So there we have it, a very light shaded three D jug. So world on this week, folks. I hope you enjoyed that. And I'll see you next week for another lesson. 25. Week 21 White Rose: This week is probably the most technical thing that we've done so far. Not only are we pushing our light shading even further, but the drawing element is much more challenging. Try not to give in. Try not to get frustrated and then throw it away. Get frustrated, by all means, because it's the nature of the beast, right? Things aren't always perfect and we always want to be perfect. But I want you to try and get through it, see what happens, and see if you can draw this white rose in a light shade. So grab your pencils and let's begin. Before we begin, what we want to do is simplify the shape. Is that a bit of an angle? So I just want you to draw this shape. And then you can either curve the bottom or finish off that weird pyramid thing. This is probably the most crucial part of the drawing because you do really want it to look like a flower head, don't you? You don't want it to look. I don't know what else could it look like? It could just look off. So spend a bit of time on your outline. And once you've got your pyramid or your initial shape, carve in the edges, look at the curves, look at the shapes and fill those in. After that, you're going to use your two B just to gently shade over the gray areas. So you want to leave the white bits as white as you can and you want to just add the average shade. So if you think something's a little bit darker, shade that in. If you think something's a little bit lighter, leave it alone. Yes, leave it alone. The main thing about this drawing is the edges, so it's really fine. This drawing is very fine detail and your edges could be a very small gradient or it could be a harsh edge. So what I'm doing is I'm going to take each petal and I'm just going to try and pull out some of the details. So just go one at a time thinking about those larger shapes that maybe go around the petal and then you can see these like veins or I don't know. It's like when you're iron your trousers. What are those things called, The lines down the front of your trousers? I don't know. I don't on anymore, So kind of out of touch, but you're just basically rehearsing it a little bit. You're wanting to add it on and it should start to look a little bit, three D. So the main thing is just trying to get all of these small soft gradients. Once you're ready, you're going to switch to your two H pencil. So your two H is for refining and this is going to just maybe make your subtle changes in shade a little bit stronger. Maybe it's going to pull the line a little bit darker. You should really spend your time on your two H probably the most on this drawing just because there is a fair bit of fine detail. And the one thing I don't want you to do is to push things too dark. But on this drawing, we're going to add that dark background again. And we'll do that in just a second. So it might change, everything might look way too light. And that's kind of what I want us to go through in these drawings. I want us to see what it's like to shade light, and then what happens when you shade dark around it. It's very interesting. And often I'm like, oh, I should have known. I should have known it's darker and don't go darker. And then I'm like, oh no, I'm going to go over it all over again. Anyway, your flower or the flower in general, I find it quite a difficult drawing. It's a bit like a face, I guess, because everything just lives in the middle of nowhere. There's no reference points, there's no straight lines, there's no corners. There's just this like weird bend in the leaf in the middle. So it's going to take more than 4 minutes, which is what this video is. It's going to take a little bit of time, but actually now that the video is moving on in the backgrounds on there, can you see the big change in how adding something really dark changes the gray that you've got on there already? So you might decide to go over your drawing again, see if you can push the light bits a little bit darker and also spend a bit of time in the background as well. Because it's too easy to rush it and just make it look a bit naf you've done all that work, why leave something looking a bit? So spend the time at the end of your drawing just refining it and making things a little bit clearer and a little bit smoother. This is probably one of our most technical drawings to date. So do spend time on it, and I do hope you enjoy it. I mean, I hope you enjoy all of them. But I think this is a cool one to do, so have fun with it, keep pushing. Don't be shy and just see what happens. Try and get through it in one take. Try not to throw it away and yeah, be proud of what you've done. All right folks. I'll see you next week for another lesson. 26. Week 22 Ornament: Hey team, this is the final session of May and this is a final light drawing. So maybe you're please about that, maybe you're not. Maybe you're gonna miss it. But we're going to do a weird organic vase. I don't even know if it's a vase or if you put anything in it, an ornament decoration. So grab your two B annual, two H, and let's get aside. As always folks, we want to start with our outline. So take a few minutes on this and try and check the curvature of the lines. So what I tend to do is I have a pencil or a straight line. And I try and compare it with the image to see whether my curve is in the right direction, whether it peaks at the right point. Popping your pencil vertically and horizontally does help to make sure your shape is in the right place. Once you've done that, you can just add that little edge where there's like a sharp corner and then we can start shading. Just notice how I'm holding my pencil. If you haven't done so already this month, try and make sure you're holding your pencil right at the end. What we're aiming for is just a rehearsal of where our darkest part is. But remember, because it's a light drawing, I don't want to push too hard, so I'm only limiting myself to my two B. At this stage, I'm starting to see where the shadows are, especially on the picture because we have some edges that are crisp like underneath and we have some edges that are really soft and go into a curve or a fold. So I just want to make sure that I'm happy with my placement before I do any sort of fine detail or anything that says, yet nailed it, let's go dark, and then I might regret it later. So we want to be a little bit more careful, don't forget as well, whilst you're drawing, you might see something a little bit better because you're spending a bit more time staring at it. So I just extended the bottom of my drawing and it actually fits with the proportions much better. So, to finish this stage, just try and get it as, even as you can and make it nice and smooth. Now, it's time for the magical bit, the two H. This time, we're going to try and shade on the white bit of the paper with the two H, rather than just using the two H to go over the shading we already have. So make sure it's super sharp and let's try and gently push that shading a little bit darker than white. This is going to be a real test. Not only do you have to go over the part you shaded with your two B, but I want you to make the blend with your two H. The texture is going to be different, the lightness is going to be different. You want to make sure that pretty much all of your piece, your ornament, your vase, whatever the focus is, is nice and shaded and blended. You're constantly looking about the subtle differences between value one, value two, value 2.5 If you don't know what I'm talking about with these numbers and the values, go back to one of the first lessons and you will be able to see exactly what I mean. So make sure everything is nice and even this is a perfect pencil for doing that. And if you can try to enjoy it. I love this stage. I think it's so what do you call it? I don't know, Thoughtless, You don't have to stress so much. You've done the outline, that part is usually the hardest. The shading is where the real mindfulness kicks into place. And trying to tackle something like the lightnest in this. And trying to get your shading super even. It is a challenge, but it's something that you can absolutely achieve. And you'll see on mine as the time goes on, it just looks a little bit more realistic with each passing minute. And that's because I'm not leaving anything as one shade, I'm not leaving anything flat. And I'm doing that by constantly making gradients, pushing something a little bit darker, but I'm not going full guns blazing on the darkness. That's what we're going to be doing next month. So be prepared to be excited. But for this we're just easing into, wanted to build your confidence with your light shading, trying to get as many different shades as possible. So at the end, you can just add any details that you think you've missed a little shadow on the bottom. And if you want extra brownie points, why don't you try and add a background a little bit more challenging, but I believe you can do it. So folks, that concludes our light shading. I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope you enjoyed this month 'cause it's really beneficial. And it's something that you'll learn a lot from, especially when it comes to finer drawings. So I'll see you next week, folks, for another drawing. Maybe we'll go dark, who knows. 27. Week 23 Lantern: Hey ten. Welcome to this week's drawing challenge, which is looking at how to draw a lantern. Now, it's quite fun. It's a little bit technical because you have to make sure the angles of your lines are the right way. Just so it has that weird like box in the sky kind of thing going up. So grab your ruler, your two B, and your eight B, because we're also going to push it really dark. And let's get stared with this drawing, you're going to start in the middle. So draw yourself pretty much a straight line that goes down. And then you want to draw two lines that come from the top and the bottom of the center. And look at what time this is. When I say what time is it? I'm going to pop a little clock on the screen and you can see the angle of the line. It's probably around 03:30 on the right hand side and 08:30 on the left hand side. So this is a really great trick when you're struggling with the angle of the lines. Make sure your angles are below the horizon line and they're both parallel with each other. If you've got one line, you want to do exactly the same angle underneath. Now, I'd like to over extend these just so I have enough space and I can start to judge the proportions. So don't worry if your lines are too long. I'd rather them be too long than too short. What you want to do is just close off those edges to make that box. Now these are not parallel, they go at a bit of an angle. Just watch out for that as well. I'd like you now just to work your way around the outline, checking the angle of the lines. I very briefly spoke about the clock theory just now. Just imagine whatever line you're doing. The start or the end is the center of the clock and you're reading the time on the hour hand. I find the easier because often we can say, okay, it's ten plus one, or five plus six. It just makes it a little bit easier to, to understand the lines basically. So feel free to pause the video or to just go from the drawing itself and ignore me. It's completely up to you, but I just want you to spend a little bit of time doing your outline and then we'll talk about the fun bit, the shading and where to go. Super dark. So this is a really dark object, but we do have light coming from the inside. I don't want us to worry too much about what's happening in the bulb, I just want us to worry about what's happening on the outside. So grab your eight B, make sure it's super sharp and let's start the best part, you've done the hard work now, the rest is super easy, so we are going to go through it with our eight B often when we're drawing, we are absolutely terrified of using a dark pencil, and I totally get it because we think it's permanent. We think we can't come back from it, but it's not true. You absolutely can come back from a dark mistake often when we're shading something in really dark and we need to rub it out, we never need to go back to white. So if you do need to rub something out, the chances are it needs to have some shade in it anyway, so don't be afraid guys. Okay, so what we're going to do is shade the right hand side, especially the metal part, really, really dark. So if you remember from our value scale, this is value ten on the left hand side, it's going to be lighter. So what I need you to do folks, is I need you to get different shades. Try your hardest not to make it just black because sometimes we get carried away and we actually forget to look at the image itself. So if you haven't done so already, look at the picture. Make sure you're checking what's dark and what's light. And you should be able to instantly see something is three D. Now what you might end up doing is shading extremely light, but promise me everything is going to be value five or above, that's over halfway on the dark scale. So work your way around the drawing. Now, pushing the dark bits dark, this is easing us into this month's testing lessons where I'm going to pull you out of your comfort zone and make you shade things how they should be. I feel like like an army militant being like you're going to do this and you're going to do that, but it's good for you, trust me. It's really important. So once you've done that for the glass and for the light, just it's too much work right now, to be honest. And I think it looks fine not shading any of the light inside of the glass. But if you want to try, by all means, give it a go. I just think today's win is at getting the shading, getting the dark bit, and getting the little bit lighter part. So folks don't worry about the glass, just get the left side lighter and the right side a little bit darker. Okay. Dem there we have it. Our first dark shading of the month. So as you can see, the left side is a little bit darker on the glass. It's a bit shiny. So it's not only the best way to shade, but it's a nice exercise just to practice. Also, another chance for us to use a ruler 'cause I know it's quite satisfying and I hope you enjoyed that. So I'll see you next week for another dark shading session. 28. Week 24 Pot Kettle Black: Hey team is Monday. Is that time of the week where we practice something new in our yearly challenge. So this week we're looking at a pot kettle black. Nothing really behind that, except it's a black kettle. So we're going to use our A B pencil. We're going to work on our symmetry and our angles, because our angles are quite difficult in this one. So grab your pencils and let's get started. This shape a little bit similar to the one we did a few weeks ago, where we break something complicated into much more simpler shapes. We could see this Kestle as a cylinder and then maybe a triangle or a pyramid. And this will help us just to construct that base. If you start with a cylinder on the top, and then you imagine a triangle going down either side. And then you've got a nice curve that connects the two edges. You've also got an oval at the top as well. And this will be the base of your Kessel. Now when you get to the handle, I want you to notice that the handle is actually parallel to the triangle base underneath. Think about the direction of that angle. And then add the little grippy bit on the top where your thumb maybe you can go. And then we'll look at the spout on the left hand side. So there's nothing parallel about the spout on the left. It's just kind of pulling away from us quite far actually, at least you don't get burnt. And then the final bit is just the handle on the top. So again, this is another cylinder. It's a small one and it's pretty much central in your kettle. Now hopefully you're getting a little bit more comfortable with your shading. So our next stage is to actually draw those strips of black that we see in our kettle, because it's going to make things way easier when we shade it. So let's do that now. This might feel very unnatural, but you're going to be drawing those dark strips on the kettle, leaving the light bits so that we know when we're ready to shade, we just go to **** in town. And I will not disappoint you, my friends, when you've done this, use your eight B pencil and shade in those dark strips, as dark as they can go. Because this is an exercise all about darkness and pushing your boundaries. Now, it should just be quite easy, quite therapeutic. And if you're ever worried about getting dark on your hand or maybe you're spreading it, pop a piece of paper underneath your hand so that you're not smudging it with your pencil. So once you've done this, it's going to look really weird. It looks like some sort of humburger or a sweet, or just something that you kind of want to eat. But what we're going to do next is blend and fill those gaps in between. So we've done this quite a few times now where we've had to blend our edges. And this should help your object look very three D very, very quickly. But you might want to use your two B to soften it. Or maybe you do your eight B and then go over it. But it should start to look a little bit more curved because you've got, you know, light dark, a little bit lighter dark. And this is the sign of a good curved object. So you might want to spend a bit of time on the shading. It is the most fun part I feel, and we spend a good amount of time on the outline, so why not enjoy it? And, you know, just go for it. This is a dark shading exercise, so you really do need to push your fears and try and get over that hurdle of going too dark. So keep working around your object, looking at those dark parts. And then when you've done that, you want to soften the grain because an AB is super grainy. And now I find it quite annoying. But obviously you kind of have to do it because that's the whole point in the drawing. We kind of do need to make things very dark and grainy anyway, What you can do instead is you can actually use a very sharp two B instead of a two H, because your two H is very, very light and sometimes it just might not get there with the darkness. So try to this time to refine your drawing and make it incredibly smooth. Voila, you have done a very dark shading. And this is going to help all the future drawings that you're going to do with me ever, all by yourself. All right team. I'll see you next week for another video. 29. Week 25 Metal Object: Hey team, week 25, we're nearly halfway there for this drawing challenge, so this one is actually a really good lesson to do. I'm going to teach you how to shade something metallic, something shiny, because it's actually way easier than it looks. So grab your eight B, your two B, and your two H. And let's get started. As always, team, we start off with our two B pencil and we want to draw the outline of our shape. Now it is a rough figure of eight shape, so hopefully that's it, fairly easy to visualize. And then you have the left side of the loop just a little bit lower than the right side. It just shows that this is twisted and it has a little bit of perspective on there. The last thing I want you to pay attention to is the parallel, if that's a word parallel aspect of the shape. As you're traveling down from that center cylinder. The lines still go parallel as they bend around. Make sure that all of your shape is parallel. Then what I want you to do is start outlining the shadows. I'd recommend to use a ruler wherever it's a straight line. Because if metal is in a tube shape, this will be straight. If the metal is curved, then the shadows will bend with the curve, vice versa. But I think just having that extra ruler really helps to make the edges crisp. And that's what we want in metal, we want crisp. Then when you're ready, you're going to use your eight B pencil. Our outline has separated the really dark and the gray and the white. And we're going to go straight in with our eight to push the blacks black. I'm sure we can all agree that those black bits are black. This is the key thing. Well, one of several key things to make sure that this looks like a shiny surface. Metallic surfaces always have a really, really dark part, and on silver that's usually black. You can see some colors sometimes, but for the sake of this drawing, this is black and white. So make sure, do me a favor. Everything that is black, you're pushing your eight B in as hard as possible. If it's not black, then you don't have to do that. But this is black, so make sure you do it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for, you're getting a bit excited. Okay, so already you're starting to see quite a nice a bit of detailing just from the black. Now we'll use our two be pencil because this is a little harder and a little lighter and we're going to shade in the gray parts. Metallic surfaces, there actually aren't that many shades in them at all. On this one there's three shades plus a little bit of gradient on the edges. You are going to use your two B just to get that medium gray and you should start to see a vaguely shiny surface which is great. That's exactly what we want. How do we turn that from like metallic to very metallic? Well, we'll do that with the detailing. There is a little bit of detailing in there. There are some gradients which you can push in with either your two H or your two B and you're just trying to see where it goes a little bit darker on the edges. I like to mix up between both of my pencils because I'm either trying to push it a bit darker, so I'll go with my two B, or I'm trying to refine it and make it incredibly soft, so I'll use my two H. Work your way around these edges. The only way there's a gradient is in the medium gray is not in the black because you can't get any blacker than that. And there's nothing in the Y except a couple of little strips. So now is the time to do all the refinement. Just really taking your time in it, getting the texture as smooth as possible, and making it look like it's an incredibly shiny surface. And you'll see it happen really quickly. So obviously with anything that's sitting on a table or a surface, it needs a bit of a shadow. So the next part is just trying to add a shadow underneath the main part of that object. And it should look pretty damn good. Well done, team. That was hopefully easier than you thought. And I hope to see you again next week for our next lesson in dark shading. Have a good one team. 30. Week 26 Dark Vase: Week 26, My friends, how good is that week? 26. That is literally halfway there. Wow, that's a lot of work. So well done. If you've got this far or if you just started, you have 26 lessons that you can work through to improve your drawing skills. I honestly feel like it's quite an achievement. So let me tell you what we're doing today. First of all, it's the last vase we're going to do this year. Still, life can be a little bit boring, but it teaches you so much. So I do apologize that we have done quite a few, but it's really good for our training, for observation, and our patience. And I've probably pushed your patients quite a lot recently, but this one should hopefully bring a lot of skills together. We should be looking at curved edges. We should be able to shade from a hard edge into a soft edge and really blend those shadows. And we should be shading incredibly dark. So grab your pencils and let's get started. Because we're looking for still life again and the classic jug and ball has to come up. I'm sorry, I know it's really annoying, but it's just so good for you. So with our outlines, I want you to look for symmetry in the vase. Either use a line that goes all the way through it or just try and do it really nice. This is a little bit more challenging than the previous vases we've done because they've had cylinders and circles. So this one you're really looking for the left to being the same as the right. Once you've done that, you're going to add the shadow line that goes around the ball and around the vase. If I draw a line on the actual picture, you'll see quite clearly that the left side is in light and the right side is in dark. So hopefully that's quite helpful for you. Now we're going to go onto the fun bit straight away. So the darkest thing on this picture is either the block underneath the ball, the darker shadow of the ball, or the block underneath the vase. I thought it's maybe a little bit easier to do the block underneath the ball. It's also on the left side and I'm right handed. So if I do the thing furthest away from me, it's going to prevent that smudging. That gets really annoying. So make sure you're using your eight B pencil and try and push in as dark as you can go. You might find it really streaky. So feel free to kind of go back with your two B just to get a harder pencil to get in that grain because it can be very frustrating. And you'll see that I'm spending a little bit of time on this just to make it a bit more. Even now it is quite boring. I'm not going to lie doing a big dark square. So if you need to give yourself breaks or move on a little bit, then by all means do that. But this does have to be dark and as streak free as you can. Once you've done that, you're going to do the same thing in the dark side of the vase. So everything on the right hand side is at least a value six on the value scale. And hopefully everyone remembers what a value scale is. And if you don't, then click back on one of the videos and figure it out. Don't figure out. That's lazy of me. This is all in dark, so you want to make sure the base layer is not too light because then it won't look round. And we've done all this work for no reason. So make sure your shade that is nice and dark, again, if it's looking grainy or to textured, go back over it with your two B. And that'll help just to smoothen out those annoying bits of lead all over. Then of course, you have to do the same with the ball and do watch out for that smudging my knuckle just about Mrs. the vase. But very soon I'm going to show you a trick to prevent the smudging. Anyway, so the final bit of dark is the bit of wood under the vase. And then obviously you've got that shadow next to the vase to, so once you're happy with the smoothness and you've got all the dark bits in place, that's when we can start adding the details. So it should look like a very, very basic flat drawing so far, but it just starts to look a little bit round because we do have a high contrast of light and dark. So now we're really going to test ourselves. We've had loads of practice this year on making something from a hard edge into a soft edge. So you've got that really strong dark on all of the edges, on your shapes now. And we're going to try and blend them so that they well so that you can't see the edge anymore. And if you need to refresh it, do look back at one of our first episodes on how to blend edges. Not only are we blending the edges from the shadow to the light, but we also have to push the darkest side of the vase. I really want to say darkest side of the moon, but there's no real reason why I should say that. So you'll see now in my vase that I have a really dark right hand side. And now I'm blending the edge to the left. So my blending pencil is going to be my two B and then I'm going to follow it with a two he later. But for now my main focus is trying to get the curvature really smooth. And this is a difference between a round edge and the flat edge like the square. So make sure that you do leave a little bit of white for the highlight, because that's what this image is giving us and what we need. And it should start to give the effect of it being curved. So spend your time on it. Make sure the grain again is nice and soft. So it's not something you can really rush, especially if you draw it as big as me. A bit annoying. But we move on. We live. And it's actually going to be a way bigger achievement because we've done something very difficult. So bravo, future us anyway, Carry on and see if you can start to add some detail on the table as well, and see if there's anything you've missed. Now, a nice trick I like to do is to prevent any smudging on my hand. I actually lay a piece of paper down on the drawing. That way it stops me from, well, smudging it on my hand, getting dirty, and also ruining the picture, because there's nothing worse than doing all this work and then getting a pencil everywhere. So grab yourself a scrap piece of paper, it doesn't matter what it is, and just place it on top. This is going to be essential for your background, which is literally everywhere. So very long again. But well this is doing is teaching us patience and it actually will help your drawing to become more three D. The key in this part is to make sure that your background is darker than the light, especially on the carpet and the light side of the vase and the ball. It needs to be darker. So this is something that you'll take your time on and you might have had a stressful day and you're like, oh, I'm going to do my background because you don't really need to think that much about it. You just need to get it on, try and get it smooth, and just make sure it's not too flat. So keep working on that. And hopefully, you should have a very amazing drawing that you're incredibly proud of. Don't forget, you can change the direction of your pencil to make the lines disappear. That always helps. But other than that, I do hope you enjoy that, and I hope you're proud of what you've done. And I'll see you next week for another video when we do something way more interesting then. Vase is, whoa, we're there. 31. Week 27 Lily: Hey team, welcome to Week 27. This month, we are looking at something very final. We're going to be drawing lots of flowers. It's summertime, we've had let it bloom June nom, May, and there have been flowers everywhere. Honestly, I've never seen so many flowers in my life, so why not draw them? And today we're going to be looking at probably the most simplest of flowers, because the middle bit is nice and easy. A lot of flowers, as I've been researching, have quite complicated centers, so I'm trying to avoid it for as long as possible. But just now, at some point we will have to draw them. I'm sorry. Anyway, grab your pencils and let's get started. We'll make life easy for ourselves and we'll draw a rectangle which will help us to see where the outliner should go. We're looking for the widest part of this flower, the tallest and the lowest. And that always helps us with any drawing that we do. Often, artists will simplify a shape. And rectangle or square is just the easiest thing to draw. This way, it tells you where to stop, it tells you how high to go and hopefully it sets you want a good way to start your drawing. Once you've done that, you're then going to go for your outline and you're going to look for your negative space. The space between the rectangle and the actual flower itself. We should be fairly familiar with this now. I think I use this technique quite a lot. If you're not so familiar, then head back to some of those early videos and hopefully they will help you. You're probably wondering why I've left the picture on color. Well, I'm going to take the color away now. So let me show you what's happened. So I just want to briefly show you the two pictures side by side. When we take the color away. What do you first notice about the shade? For me is the fact that the yellow stamen, potentially it just disappears. So even though we can see it as a yellow and a white essentially behind it, when you take the color away, it's the same value. So we've got to be a little bit careful, or we can play some tricks just to make sure that stamen stands out a little bit more. So that being said, let's go on over to the shading now and you're going to use your two be to start and work on getting that gradient from the center. We want it to be very soft because this is an extremely soft round of flower and we want to make sure it's darker towards the middle where that stamen is. And it becomes lighter so that the edge basically just disappears as it falls over the edge of that curve. When we've done that, you're going to just do a little bit of darker shading around the edge. Again, try not to push so hard and trying to see if you can get that gradient in a much smaller space. So you're making those edges just disappear like magic. We should be pretty good at magic by now. And I know that at least one of you are thinking, I haven't improved at all, I can't do magic. Well, I disagree. I bet you have. I bet you've actually learned quite a lot. Work on your base layer and try and get a little bit of pencil on everything and you'll start to see the curvature and the depth inside that flower as soon as you push that darker. Now when you're ready, you're going to grab your two H pencil and you're going to go over, well, the whole layer of it. So you can even go over the edge where it falls from dark to light, just like I am here. And that is slightly easier just to soften that edge, but just making sure that you're getting that in. And just remember, folks, you've been staring at this for a long time, so all you're going to see are the textures unevenness and anything that annoyed you. Whereas what anyone else will see will be like, my God, that's so smooth. Well done. So you will use your eight B. You can use it right in the center and you can use it on the stem. And then you're going to go back to your two B and you're going to start doing the background. So this needs to be even. I mean, you could try and do the flowers in the background, but no, not for me, not today. So I just decided to do a very even background. And this is quite important because it will just help your shades really stand out. So I'm bouncing between my two B and my two H. And I'm actually not using my eight B because I don't want to go too dark. I mean, I could that would still look quite nice, but I just wanted to just have these two pencils and keep it fairly light, but just to knock off that background. So spend the rest of the time just evening things out and seeing if you can push any edges a little bit dark. This is what I always say. You know what I'm about to say? You could probably quote me word for word, but just to put you back to the stem. So I did shade in a little bit, but I didn't knock it as dark as it should be. And I actually think this looks a little bit better, so you can do what you want. We're starting to have a little bit of our artistic license, which means we can skip some stuff and add some stuff in because you know we're prose now, so yeah, you can shade it darker or keep it light. So I hope you enjoyed that folks. This is a fun one. I think they're all fun, but this one in particular is stepping it up a bit in our realism and just our everyday objects. So have fun with it. Take it as slow as you need and I'll see you next week for another sesh. 32. Week 28 Freehand Flower: Hey team, this is a week 28, and today we're drawing another very light flower, which I don't know if I've ever seen before, but it's a really good one to try. The difference with this one is we're not going to do any sort of structure or guide to help us draw it. We're going to try and draw it freehand without any measurements, any construct lines. And seeing how we get on with a flower that essentially swirls around each other. Each petal sits on top of the other. So the difficult thing in this is trying to make sure that your petals are very similar sizes as they rotate around the center. And they end with all five petals, like a star in an even ish kind of size and manner. So grab your two B and let's get started. Okay, We're getting pretty good at drawing now, folks. So instead of us having a guide to draw our petals, I actually want us to draw it free hand so we don't have any grids, we don't have any construction lines where literally are going to go petal by petal and seeing how one overlaps the other. This is a bit of a spiral as a flower. Luckily, in the center, there is no high pollen thing, it's all about the shading and the shape. All I want you to do is try and get the five petal leaves by overlapping them, doing a long line on one side and a short line on the other. And then doing your next petal, you're going to be looking for the flower being fairly equal when it comes to individual petals. And make sure it's not a square flower, it's a circle. Take your time on this, get your outline, and you're going to feel very bloody proud of yourself afterwards. Next, you're going to add these little foldy bits. So just on the left hand side there's a little bit of an overlap, so you just pop those in and then we're going to start our shading. We do get into it fairly quickly, but you might spend a bit more time in your outline and it is worth spending that extra time. Make sure you're happy with how it twists with the shading. We're going to try and knock off a lot of the white, and we're going to use our two B pencil. So we're just taking it nice and gentle, not going too dark because it is a white flower, but white still has shades. So we just want to gently put a little bit of shading on there, just all over, and then we're going to start to push the dark a bit. So this bit should be fairly straightforward and quite stress free, hopefully. So you just want to try and get it as even as possible. You might be tempted to smudge, please don't. We're trained so hard not to smudge. So yeah, just just do what you can. Put everything in practice, what you've learned. You should have your super smooth base now it's time to push things a little bit darker. Hopefully you've avoided any distraction of detail often, we just want to do that straight away. But this is a much more effective way of drawing. Grab your eight B, and let's start noticing where the detail is, but don't make it too dark. The darkest part of this flower is in the middle because that's where the leaves are heading towards and that's where we have the deepest part of the bend. They all go into the middle, but also you've got those little folds on the edges. What you're looking for on this drawing is where the darkness comes out with a leaf, the petal, and where it falls into lightness. You have to keep looking at the image on this one. You can't avoid it. You need to see the subtle differences and curve for each petal and you're seeing where the light source is. It's actually coming from the left hand side. Which means there will be shadows cast on the right hand side and there will be lighter bits on the left hand side. Take each petal as it comes and look for those gradients. So there's hardly any harsh edges here. There's only sharp edges on literally the outline of the flower, but also on those mini folds on the edges of the petals. Now, a little tip on your outline. Actually, some of you might have press really hard on your outline. I would recommend just to use your rubber and dab it out if you can see it on this drawing. We don't want to see too much of an outline because it can become quite distracting and almost like a cartoon. But if there is shading there, if there is a shadow there, you can blend outline in with the rest of the detail work along your petals Now, trying to get the details in the curves and then we'll add the center in just a second. We're looking at that yellow part. Now, yellow is a very light color and it's only just darker than the white. But remember, we had that artistic license from our last lesson. We are actually going to push this a bit darker because I think it looks a lot more interesting in high contrast is way more interesting to our eyes. So we're going to gently go around the circle and just avoiding those little half folds and you'll notice more intense in the dead center of the flower. And it's a nice gradient towards the white. Just after that, we want to make sure that we're softening our edges, then also just having another look at any of the detail on the petals. As we put more pencil on the paper, you're going to start noticing that the first petal you're doing is actually a lot lighter when it's surrounded by dark, rather than when you put that first bit of pencil on there. Because when you start with pencil, it looks really dark. It's just surrounded by white. But actually we need to make sure it is dark enough. This is the time to really play around with tone on this drawing. Keep going around, trying to see where it's darker. And usually it's definitely coming from the center. And then as it bends around it comes to a really light patch. So don't forget, after you've done your detail with your B head on, head on over, start using your two H to really refine the drawing. Get rid of that grainy effect, those streaky parts. And just use that two H to really get in the nuts and crannies and it's going to look bloody lovely. Okay folks, I hope you enjoyed that and I'll see you next week for another flower. 33. Week 30 Lilly: Hey team, welcome to week 31 of our fundamental yearly drawing challenge. I don't really know what it is anymore, I just know we are learning. So this week on our flowers, we're going to do a lily. And we're going to do it slightly differently in terms of shading and in terms of how we start it. So we're going to use a bit of a skeleton simple form method, which sounds super Ponzi, but it will make sense when we start the drawing. So grab your pencils and let's get started. So it's quite a complicated file with this one. It's layered and it has petals go in, in loads of different directions. Now, we've tried a few different ways to draw this before. We've tried doing rectangles. We've tried just drawing it free hand. But this time I want you to imagine each petal has a skeleton. And all you want to do is think about the spine of each petal. So the center point, ideally. And then what you're going to do is add these lines going in the directions that the petal is facing, followed by the outline of the petal. So it's a really good way for you to situate where your petals are and to have some sort of structure to add to. If you're doing this in life drawing, you would imagine the bone, for example, going through the carve and then you can add the meat on top of that. So in this case it's the vein. Go for the middle of the petal, which I guess doesn't really exist but it doesn't leaves. And then you're adding the structure around that. So it's a really good and interesting method to try for this flower. So tidy it up and remove your spine lines. It feels weird saying that now, but this just helps you to clear it away and focus on getting the lines as good as they can be. Now, I have no idea why my camera, it keeps moving around because it was on a very stable device. And my apologies for the sea sickness you might about to be encountering. Okay, once you've got that, you do want to add this weird fold that's right in the middle of the leaf. And they kind of bend with the leaf as well, so you're looking at where they start to taper off, or maybe where there's a slight bend in them, and then you're going to add that to your petals. Once you've done that, the fun bit begins. So you start building up the layers just with simple lines. You use your two to start, and then you'll add your eight. So you might want to do three layers. Think the two B does the light layer underneath and well then it can go a little bit darker. And then you want to add your eight where there's really dark of shade. This will happen really quickly and it is a really fun way to shade, but you want to go easy on it. So trying to be heavy handed, try and keep some of the lines so you can see them as well, because I think that adds to the texture of the petal, especially when you can see these grooves in each individual petal. Your task at this point is to work your way around each petal. Think to be a light layer. To start, you can either do one petal at a time or you can go round in sections. If you know, for this whole round, every single petal you're going to go light. That can be almost like a rehearsal stage. And then you can go over it again, push it a little bit darker, and then go over the whole thing for a third time, getting those eight B nuggets in there. So it's up to you how you approach this. Whether you do individual petals or you go around the whole thing as light layer, medium layer, dark layer, right to the end. Now once you've done that, it looks a bit weird without any detail in the middle. So what we want to do is try and get this circle of stamens. I think there's six. Would they be stamens or stigmas? I don't know. I feel like both parts of the flower are in this one, so you want to get those in. And instead of doing light tubes that come from the dark orange bits, I actually just went for black cheating, I don't know. But that should really start to bring things together. And then the final thing you can do is use your two H just to go over all the individual petals because we don't have that much white. Even though it's a white flower, it doesn't mean that it is, you know, just left wine. We've gone through this in so many occasions but your two H you want to keep it the same method so you're just doing these stripes and you're coming out of those dark parts. And it will also help just to blend any harsh lines that you've got to go over the whole thing. Now with your two H, again, looking at pressure is something light is something dark. Don't just shade it all with the same pencil. You want to make sure that you are adding the texture and the lines and alternating on how much you press for your petal. Okay, team. Well done on this week because it's slightly different and it is actually really challenging. So I hope you enjoyed that, and I hope to see you again next week for another lesson is the week there. You won. Wow. Well done you. 34. Week 29 Tricky Flower: A team. Welcome to this week's drawing challenge. This is our third flower for our weekly task. This is definitely the most complicated, but we are going to draw a grid around it, or at least a square. This is something, you should probably spend 15 to 20 minutes on minimum. But if you're enjoying it, you'll find that that time goes really quickly. And hopefully you're bringing in all the skills that we've learned throughout the year. Grab your pencils and let's get started to start. This drawing is much more complicated than the previous ones we've done, so I don't want us to go freehand. I actually want us to try and draw rectangles around it. So we've done this before. It just means you're looking for the tallest part of the flower, the widest part and the lowest part. And this is really going to help in quite a complicated drawing like this. Another thing you'll want to do when you start drawing your outlines is thinking about the negative space. This rectangle around the flower will help you to approach it in a different way. The negative space is the space that is not the flower. So it's going to be super helpful for drawing the outline because it is complicated. And look, if you end up drawing an extra petal because you got a bit lost, that's absolutely fine, so long as it's kind of bending the right way or it's a similar shape to the one next to it, then it will look just fine. Once you are happy with your negative space and you're happy with the outline, we're going to start the shading. You'll start with your two B and you're just going to look for the little pockets of color. This is all over the flower, it's all over the edge. And it comes from the center as well. So we're going to treat that as a shade and the lightest part of the petal. We're just going to leave that for now. Or maybe when it's a bit darker, you will add a little bit of shading for something like this. That's complicated. I get really bored going one petal at a time, and often I do jump around. So if you see that happening, that's because I was like, oh, I need to move on, but it will come back to it. So if you find that you want to try one petal and then jump around to another, then by all means that might be quite good. If not, you can just go one petal at a time. Just make sure you're looking at each individual petal more than you're drawing it. Because if you're guessing as you go round is actually just, well, it's not really going to work. We'll be able to tell as a viewer that you just got lazy and you know, we don't want that. You put so much effort into the outline. Now is a really good time to actually put some background on. The petals are extremely light, so having a bit of a background will help to push them forward and stretch that contrast from dark to light. So why not do something that's not too tricky and popularle background on because this is a light drawing a dark background will go a long way. And I think it's a good idea to do this. We're fairly early in this stage because we want to see the contrast on our petals. So if we get a medium gray background on there, then we can really see how good or how bad a drawing is. And when I say bad, I never mean bad because there's no such thing as a bad drawing. It just means it needs a little bit of work. So it's a good idea to get the background on there and then work on the underneath petal. Now I do think this one is a little bit easier, but I think if you start with a harder one on the top, you will find the easier one much easier because it's like going into the military, right? You do all these crazy fitness things and then you come out and you're like, oh my God, I'm so unfit. And then you go to a gym and you're like, wow, I didn't even notice how fit I was. And that's like being an artist, you don't realize how good you are until you try something that's a bit easier that you would have originally found very difficult. Now this drawing is very chaotic, so I think it looks better with a smoother background. So you'll use your two H to smoothen the background. I think that'll look really good. And make sure you're sharpening your corners so it's a very crisp petal. It's a very fine line between each shape. So make sure that your edges are nice and sharp. Your two H will just help that. And then you can go over the center points, or the dark points of your petals with your A B. This is going to help to push that contrast and just bring all of those final pieces together. So spend a little bit of time just working your way around and a well ******* done, big pound on the back mate because this is tricky. So there we have a very, very complicated flower and I hope you're proud of it. And let's see what we can do for next week. All right. Team, have a good one and I'll see you next time. 35. Week 31 Baruge Ear: Hey Tim. We're going to start a new month this week. We've done a lot of studying, we've done a lot of botanicals, shading exercises, drawing exercises. So now I want us to work on the way that we measure. And in order for us to do that, I want to look at Charles Bog now. He is one of the most amazing people to learn from. A lot of itilier schools will have a whole term or even a year dedicated to studying Bogs method. So what we're going to do is obviously a very condensed method, but we're still going to look at some of the stuff that he drew and look at the principles that he teaches. So to start off this week, we're going to be looking at measuring, how to use a construct and how to get something exactly the same size from the picture to your actual drawing. So grab your pencils and let's get started for the first time in this yearly series, I'm actually drawing from a printout, which is a very nice tree, I must admit. Now, the first thing we want to do in this drawing is choose your ear. I'm choosing the top right hand side and I'm figuring out the orientation. This is what Charles Barr calls a construct line. And that is a line of guidance that will help us to create our drawing. Now the next part is all about measuring the distance from the construct line to the actual picture. Now because the line is at an angle, we need to find a horizontal and a vertical point. So imagine you're plotting a point on a map. You're trying to find the latitude and the longitude. I think that's right. We can also go from our angled line, but it's a little bit more challenging, so go easy on yourself and just see what you can do. The next step is to see how long it is. Not only am I checking the angle, but I'm also measuring it with my pencil. A good way to measure it is by using the very far bit of the pencil for the start of the line. Then your thumb as a guide for where that line ends. Whether you're looking to measure a gap or the length of a line, you can use this exact method to help you. What you're going to be doing for the first part of this drawing is checking where everything sits. Basically transferring it over from the picture to your drawing. You get the measurement and you bring it across. Now you can also pretend that there's a box around your ear. Just like we have the grid method, where you check vertically and horizontally where it becomes difficult on the angular line. You might want to figure out where the point is from the ceiling or from the ground, and then measure out from the angular line to plot your points. Sounds a little bit complicated, but I think once you start, you'll be, oh, yes, I know what she means. Now you're also figuring out a way that works for you, so long as you're checking where the points are both along from the angular line and then you're trying to find a second point of reference to plot it with, then that will be super helpful. Now, I definitely recommend you use two pencils, one to measure and one to just do a little.it feels really weird because I'm not left handed, I don't have the best left hand. You'll probably be like hold up. This feels really weird and it should because you know you're not drawing with it. All you're trying to do is get your second pencil in that little gap where your thumb is a little dart. And it just helps you to make sure your measurements are right so you don't have to measure every single line. But I would recommend to check a lot of the points. So if you want to draw a lot of it freehand, go to your reference picture, measure it, and then check it against your, see if it's the exact same measurement as you move across. It's a really good exercise for learning accuracy. And at some point we will look at trying to make something bigger than its picture. But for now, all we're working on this week is trying to get the measurement of this ear perfect. Now the measuring is done, the hard part is over. All we need to do now is convert it into a slightly more realistic version of itself. So go around the drawing now, softening the edges. Check in the reference picture to see where the lines vary a little bit. And then add just some block shading to make it come to life. From this point when you're happy and you've made all the adjustments and amendments you need, I want you to go over the line looking at the ear below it. The ear below is much more realistic. It has curved edges. Not these angular sections that bark starts us off with. It's actually much rounder. So I want you to keep looking at the reference picture and going over your lines, otherwise known as contours, and try make it nice and smooth. This is the transition that barg does. He starts off with very geometric, simple shapes and then he builds into the realism after there, which is a really, really good approach for a lot of different drawings. So spend your time softening your edges. And then our final section will just be adding a little bit of shading in the shadows. So it's not going to look like a real, real ear. It's going to look like a very good cartoon ear, but it's very, very accurate. So well done. I hope you enjoyed that because we're really getting into some fabulous drawing work now. And hopefully I'll see you next week for another. 36. Week 32 Bargue Leg Stage 1: Hey team, welcome to this week's drawing challenge. Now, for the first time ever since this year, we are going to split this drawing into two weeks because it's quite time consuming, but I honestly think it's worth it. So we're looking into Charles bag a little bit bigger, and we're going to draw a leg using the measuring stick to make sure everything is exactly where it should be. Now we've practiced this last week with the eye. And we're going to do it again with something much bigger and probably with a lot more pressure on it because it's a really big shape. So you'll need to print out the drawing this week because you need to measure directly from the paper. So see if you've got any friends that have a printer or whether you can sneak one out at work, print out, that is. Let's begin. So grab your pencils and let's get started to hold the stick. You want to kind of pinch the end And use your thumb as a guide to show you where the line stops. And then you'll pinch it with all your fingers and try to make sure it doesn't slip out your hand. Now when you've got to grips with how to hold it, you'll take the first measurement of that vertical line on your picture. Then you're going to grip it very, very tight and transfer it across to your paper. So it might slip, it might wobble. But try really hard to do this. And if you need to switch hands, maybe measure it with your right hand. Make it mark with your left hand. Feel free to do so as well. Once you've done that, you'll figure out the length of the line towards that center where it crosses. And then you'll measure the right side, take that across, and then the left side, take that across. And try and draw a straight line using your stick. And you should have the exact measurements of the cross that's on the picture of the leg. Now this is what we call the construction line. This is the anchor that we always refer to when we're measuring from it. So from now on, you're only going to be measuring from your cross from the center to the outside, from the horizontal line to up to down. And then that's going to help you with your drawing. So bear that in mind as we move forward with the measuring stage. Once you've got that, you're going to really take your time. You're going to transfer the marks where they cross this axis. So anything that cuts through the line you just drawn, you're going to measure and you're going to work your way up the vertical line. Sometimes you might get a bit bored if you're anything like me. And you might be like, oh, why don't I just take one of the wings and measure the distance there. But you also might be very logical and very smart and just work your way up. You'll see it's quite time consuming, but it just means it's going to be a super, super accurate drawing because you've measured it. So really it can't go wrong. Just make sure that your measurements are accurate. If you need to double check, maybe you go back to it again and measure it again, then that is absolutely fine. In fact, I encourage that behavior. You might be wondering if you get confused by all of these dashes, and if you just looked it at a glance, then yes, you would be quite confused. But when you come to doing the outline, actually, it makes a lot of sense. You start with the bottom line and then you draw the next one. And then you're like, oh, okay, oh, I know where I am. Now what I would also encourage is for us to get the measurements for any turn of angle. So you'll see that for the base, for example, I am just getting the left and the right. And then I'm actually joining these lines up. So you see I'm building my way up there. I'm just taking baby steps and getting the measurements and then crawling my way up the picture. My camera is about to run out of battery, so I accidentally skipped the foot part. But you'll see exactly my process for the next part. You can see that I'm finding the horizontal measurement from the vertical line, and then I'm finding the vertical measurement from the horizontal line. Every time there's a change in direction and it might be a subtle change, I'm measuring down and I'm measuring across. Maybe just watch for a second to understand fully what I'm talking about and you can see all the examples for every single point. I'm going back to my construction lines which are this big cross in the middle. It's a really great method and it's something that we have looked at before, but we've looked at it in different ways. This is combining quite a few skills that we have previously been working on. Follow your way around the drawing, Now keep measuring. And that is going to create an awesome, accurate outline. And it's also going to help you to draw the angles of each section in the right way. Otherwise we'll just guess them. And they'll be going everywhere and making up a portions very, very wrong. So very, very good job on stage one folks that should have taken you a fair bit of time just to get your outline. And then next week I'm going to show you how to shade it beautifully. Or if you want to do it this week, by all means you can. But imagine you might have stuff to do, or maybe you've got time to do it, which I absolutely love. All right folks. I'll see you next week for stage two of this drawing. 37. Week 33 Bargue Leg 2: Hello team. Welcome to the second part of our bog leg this week. So we've done the outline and we've measured that probably so accurately that if you placed tracing paper on top and then had a look on the original picture, it will be exactly the same. So well done on your outline. Now this week we're going to try and add the shading so it's incredibly soft and delicate. So what I want you to do is be aware of any textures that you might accidentally add to the drawing and make sure your pencils are sharp. That's really important to get a really smooth surface. So grab your pencils and let's get started. Before we do anything, we need to turn this kind of in that chick shape into more of a natural being. So the first thing I want you to do on this drawing is go around the edges and look at any of the curved softness. I don't know if that's a real word, but we'll roll it. The softness of the leg. So let's make it more natural, let's make it more organic and just try to see where the edges aren't so much of a straight line meet straight line. It's a very smooth transition and we go around and we tidy up the edges and make it look more like a human leg rather than a robot. Then what we're going to do is just add that shadow in the middle, which shows the calf definition. So we like that a lot. And then also any of the shadows that you can see on the drawing. Okay, the hardest part is done. You've soften the edges so it looks more like a foot rather than a hoover. And we're now going to do the really fun bit. Well, I think this is probably the best part of the drawing, so what we're going to do now is work on our shading. Now, bear in mind the shading doesn't go all the way across the thigh, it's actually just in small bits. So there's going to be a lot of control that you'll have to do to make it work. So grab your B to start and let's begin. I'd recommend for you to think about how thick the black bit is first, so you're just edging your way around and trying to figure out how thick it is from the outline to the inner part of the calve. So you'll go around the bones and the shin and try and think, okay, there's a couple of extra shapes in there, so I just want to start edging my way out and making that a little bit thicker. It's going to take a bit of time and it won't look perfectly soft straight away. So please, please be patient with yourself and understand that this is a process and hopefully you're at that stage now. Anyway, knowing that if you trust the process, things will work out. I think you've got two options here. You can go around the whole thing and do the black. Or you can do section by section and try to do the black and the blended edge. So what I mean by that is you're using your art pencil to literally just draw the black bit. And just like we did in one of our earlier videos, I think maybe less than one or even two. We learned how to soften the edge from a hard edge into a soft edge. So your eight B is going to be used for the black, and your two B is going to be used just for that blending. We're not quite ready for our two H just yet because we really want to nail the placement of all the shading. So spend your time on this. This part should be incredibly enjoyable. It should be like you can zone out and you want to be, I was going to say delicate, but at the same time you want to be really aggressive with those blacks. So it's a real push and pull of shading in this one. There's really small details, there's big details and you've got to try and balance both of them. So this is where you really start to learn. It's where everything we've learned is in play. And you're always still thinking about direction of lines, how dark it is, the length of the gradient, and what type of edge we've got. So really enjoy this process and I honestly can't wait to see it. So when you get to a stage like mine, we're like, yeah, I thin, I've got everything in place, but it just needs a bit of a tidy up. And also just to soften the ends, this is when your two H can come in. So take it bit by bit. You see, I'm just literally working an inch at a time. And for those of you that might be American, do you use inches still? I actually don't know. I know inches is back dated, but for some reason we all still use it in the UK. But try not to do massive gestures and try not to just shade everywhere with it as well. Because sometimes people have the tendency to just go wild with the two H and put the same pressure everywhere. But actually it's there to vary in tone as well as soften the edges. Now mine's a little bit shiny. And also I just want to cut this part out because I want you to see the dramatic difference a two H can actually make. So I'm going to pause it there and everybody look up for a moment and look. Did you just see the knee and how soft it is? So I'm going to put the before and after actually, because I think it's really important to see the impact that this pencil has on the drawing. So keep going with it, keep going around, keep softening everything, and yours is going to come together as soft as mine as well. Okay, are we ready in 321? Here we go. Look at the difference in texture, the two as annoying as it is as a pencil. It's so good for finishing touches. So first of all well ******* done team. There we go, team. There's our first full bog drawing. We've got the shading, we've got the accurate outline, and we've got this amazing masterpiece to be super proud of. So we're going to carry on with this theme for the rest of the month. So enjoy that celebrate. But yeah, well done. And I'll see you next week for another session. 38. Week 34 Bargue Foot 1: Hey team. Hopefully everyone is buzzing after our leg. In last week's lesson, we're going to up it a little bit this time, and we're going to try and do a foot. So feet are notoriously difficult and challenging, and this one is actually underneath the foot. But I want to show you that by using the barg method, you can actually draw one as well. So first of all, we're going to follow the system of measuring. But it's a little bit more challenging this time because we have the vertical axis, but we don't have the horizontal. So we're going to try and figure out a way to get our points and measure them both across from our junction line and also down and up from wherever. So let me show you how we're going to do it this week. So just like before, you want to measure the height of your line, now try and make sure it's straight because it's just much easier to draw. And then you want to measure down the line, figuring out where the lines of the foot cross that construction. That's the word construction. How? Stop saying junction. Once you've got the easy measurements, we then need to start plotting any sort of corner or turn of line. It's easy to go across from the line and figure out how far it is from our construction point, but how do you figure out how high or low it is? One way is by trying to imagine, or you could even create a line from the top and measure down from that. Or if you don't want to measure from the imaginary top line, you can always measure from a corner that you've already got the accuracy off. You can measure down from there, figure out how long it is and use that as a way to measure down, because your measuring across is way easier. So you've got to think of smart and easy ways that makes sense to you to be able to plot your points. So this whole session, and I think it should take a long time actually, is to keep measuring from the center line and finding ways to measure vertically. So it will take you a good amount of time. It's a complicated shape, we have complicated angles. So really slow it down and don't feel like you have to go at my hyper up speed because that's unrealistic. This probably took me about 20 minutes to measure and plot. Try and aim to have that available for yourself. And you feel free to kind of take little breaks, come back to it, But right, how can I get that across? Because there is a lot of moving around this picture, there's a lot of lines to consider and angles to check. So you want to make sure you are well measuring as many points as you can. Some of them you can do by eye. But if you do do it by eye, do do it there we go again, then definitely check. And if you are getting some consistently on point, then you're like, yeah, do you know what, I trust myself a little bit more. So that's always a nice feeling actually. When you've done it by eye, you've checked it and you've got it bang on. You're like, yes. Now when you've got a good amount on, you might start finding that some things don't quite line up and it could just be because you've measured it slightly incorrectly or I don't know. Yeah, that will be the issue to be fair. You've measured it slightly off. So another way you can check is to figure out the angle. So you can use your stick or your pencil and you want to pop it on the angle that you're trying to draw. That way it'll just show you what direction that line is going in. And then you can just drag that across onto your own drawing and see if that's correct. So I'm going to do it now. And you see when I drag it across, it's just slightly slightly off. So that means I need to make a change. This is a great way to check your lines again because you've got the way to measure it, that's a great way to check. But you've also got the angles that they're going in. There might be quite a few amendments which is great. It means that we're learning, it means that we're pushing ourselves. If you find this super easy, then we really need to up our game, my end. But it shouldn't be super stressful. Follow the process and your drawing will come together very quickly. Okay, team. So we're going to break this up into two stages. Once again, in our next stage, we're going to look at the shading because this one is a little bit more challenging than our, our previous leg. So I hope your brain isn't fried too much after that measuring exercise, because we might need a little bit more brain power for next week's shading version where we do actually have to make quite a few amendments to this. So I'll see you next week for another lesson. 39. Week 35 Bargue Foot 2: Hey folks, how is your foot? Hopefully it wasn't too hard. But I do think it was one of those drawings that will definitely test your patience. And it's about to do that even more. So this is brilliant training for our yearly project. This time we're going to refine the edges because at the minute it's very angular and that's not really what a foot looks like. And then we're going to add the shadings. So the shading is quite technical in this one because there's a few soft wrinkles going on and a few really hard edges. So that's great, but we need to be a little bit more delicate in some places and a little bit firmer in others. Grab your pencils and let's start on the shading stage of our foot. Now our drawing looks okay. It definitely does look like a foot, but we need to soften a lot of the edges. Now your outline that you have is a rough guide to where all your curves and your edges should be. So don't be afraid to, you know, really carve away at it. Imagine your foot at this stage is a piece of marble. And your chiseling away to make the toes nice and round, to make the ankle much softer, and to just, in general, improve the drawing a lot more. This part of the drawing does involve a lot of observation. Make sure you're looking at the print out and make sure you are taking your time on it and just taking each line as it comes. Now another challenge we have at this stage is to draw the outline of the shadows. We didn't have as much detail where the shadows were as our leg. Instead, we really have to figure this out by ourselves, which is great. It means we get to be challenged, we get to be pushed, and we get to improve our drawing skills. Now you can apply a method that suits you. Maybe you want to measure how far the shadows go. You want to see the curve, and you can check that by the angle of your pencil. But it will take a little bit of time just to get the shadows in the right place. Now, once you've done that, you're going to go for some block shading. So anything that's in shadow is incredibly dark. It doesn't mean all of your shadows are black, it means they are very, very close to black. Because if you look closely at the foot, there is a little bit of detail where the toes cross over or where the toes touch the, I don't know what you call that, underneath the toes of the ball off your foot. Maybe you can just see a little bit of darkness to differentiate that they really do go in deep. If you wanted to be a little bit cautious, you might just shade it in like a medium to dark gray. And then once you're happy with how it looks, then you start pushing it in with your eight B, where it's black. Make sure you shade it black. Don't be afraid of it. Don't be shy. Don't make it value two or three on the scale. Make it value ten. Your edges may need changing or they will need changing eventually. But you can give yourself a bit of a buffer, shade it a little bit shorter than what you think the edges, because it just gives you a bit of peace of mind. And if you need to make any changes you can without damaging the paper, but really go into town on this darkness. We should have a lot of confidence now in how dark we can shade. Really just go for it. For anything that's a little bit lighter, you can go at it with an air of caution, but still make sure it has that dark value attached to it. Now when you come to any really light shading, you to be for this and have it as a bit of a rehearsal place, a bit of shading in. Don't worry about the edge so much just yet, but we'll just use to soften the edges to get some of those wrinkles on the base. I nearly said palm, palm of the foot. I guess so does make sense. But do we have a word for underneath the foot? The So the soul I think is the soul, Yes. Use your two B just to gently place some detail on the sole of the foot. Then you want to introduce your two H. This is when we really slow down the drawing. As we know by now, it really refines a drawing. It gets rid of any white bits in a dark patch or any grainy bits in a light patch you want to send. Well, you want to try and use your two H as an accurate tool rather than something that just scribbles on top of everything. You're considering every small piece of detail. Now, the edge, is it a small or is it a large gradient? The texture in the dark bit. Are there any little pockets that need to be wiggled out? Just wiggle that pocket out. Don't worry about not, Don't worry, sorry. Don't just shove your two H on there because you think, oh, two H time wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. Because you can tell a careful drawing from a drawing that has just been thrown on there. You see how much time I've spent on this little area, the difference it makes. It looks incredibly realistic. Now because I'm focusing, I'm seeing is it a sharp edge next to the toe? Is it a soft edge on the shadow which curves around the toe? Really enjoy this time, really, really improve your observational skills and focus. Look at the drawing. We look at the picture of the drawing way more than you look at your own drawing. That's what makes a difference between a good drawing and a really good drawing. When it comes to those incredibly light bits, just remember the position of your hand is what will make it light. So try and be really soft on those areas because you don't want to push those too hard and make it stand out way too much. We made it team, we made it to the end of our drawing. Look at that, that is a very accurate foot and that's something you should be incredibly proud of. Not only is it a foot, which is very hard, but it's a side of the foot w we don't usually see. And we've also had to construct a lot of the lines ourselves. We've had to figure out where to put things. So it's a hopefully, a real sense of achievement. Now next month we are going to look at something completely different. But for now, embrace what you've done and pop it on your fridge and say yeah, hi, ******* Drew that. All right team. Well done and I'll see you next week for another video. 40. Week 36 Planes: Hey team, welcome to this week's drawing class, where we're going to break away from our bark drawing. And we're going to look at a technique which we're going to start to apply to some features of the face. This week we're looking at planes and before we do any work on our gorgeous features, we need to just make sure we understand what it means using planes when looking at drawing basically means that you're a sculpture and you've been given a block of granite and you're carving your way into it. So when we're looking at an object, you want to work from the big shapes down into the small shape. So it's all about simplifying a shape, carving into it, and then adding the details. So it sounds quite complicated, but the more we practice and when we look at the fundamentals today, this is going to build up and hopefully improve our understanding of what we're talking about. So grab your pencils and let's get started to understand planes. We're going to take a cylinder, break it down into a geometric form, and then build it up so that it becomes curved and perfectly round and symmetrical. First of all, you want to construct your geometric shape. You're imagining that you're taking slices of this cylinder off. And you're starting with your middle plane. Your two neighboring planes which get smaller, and then two neighboring planes which are even smaller than that. Once we have that, you start to already feel a bit of curvature on the cylinder. So we can just round those edges because that's nice and easy. And then we're going to start on the shading. Let's think about where our light source is. I'm going to have my light source facing center on. Which means my fourth plane and my fifth plane get gradually darker. The central plane is the lightest. And then the first and the second plane are mimic in the other side. This gives a real sense that something is becoming curved. This is just representing nature. It's showing you that light is falling off the object and it's getting darker as we go round the object. So once you've done that, you can then just blend your edges and we're real prone out blending our edges. And this will change the illusion of a geometric shape into a curved, smooth surface. So it's a very brief summary of how to look at planes and how to break something that's round down into geometric shape. Let's now apply this to a previous drawing that we've done to see if it actually helps us, because we're familiar with it. And just see how we get on with breaking a slightly more recognizable object into a plane version. Let's give it a go. A good telltale sign is looking for a change of light. So when I'm looking at this mushroom, the darkest part is kind of in the center. So we've got a central plane, and then you've got a left wing and a right wing. So it's not a cylinder, which means I can't see as many planes on the top, but I can see more planes underneath. So I'm looking for a slight pivot in direction because I know underneath is circular, so we're going to make it full of triangles. And then we're going to have the base, which for me is kind of split into two. Again, the light changes. We have a lighter bit at the top and a darker bit at the bottom. Now, I could break the stem of the mushroom up into more pieces, but I decided not to. And I instead just decided to go ahead with the shading at this point because there's not much detail going on underneath. So once you've decided your planes, it's time to do shading. Each plane will have its own shade and you usually shade this in evenly, so you won't add any detail at the start. You'll just think, okay, this plane is dark, the next plane is a bit lighter, the next plane is really light, and that's how you get your curvature because you've broken the object up into shadows. And especially with something curved, usually you can do this. It might seem a little bit challenging, but it's actually very efficient way to draw. Once you're happy with your planes being shaded in, then you can add the details so you can round the edges. You can look at any dark bits, any gradients, any really fine detail in there. And then your artwork will hopefully come to life very, very quickly. So it's an interesting method. It is very, very useful in some situations, but you do have to get your head around it. It's a very logical method, this planes version. So it depends how your brain works as to whether you're going to sit with it well or not. Give it a go and let's try a couple more drawings to see if it works. Because the more you try it, the more you'll understand why you're making these marks and how you're getting to the end result. So, best of luck this week, and I hope it's something that you do enjoy or something that you've never tried before. And hopefully we'll improve this in the weeks to come. Thanks folks, and I'll see you next week for another session. 41. Week 37 Nose Planes: Hey team, how are we feeling after last week's planes, it was a little bit challenging and we really have to think about why we're making these decisions, which I do think steps up our game a little bit. Instead of kind of copying what I'm doing, I'm trying to make you make decisions that are right for you. And hopefully something that you really understand as well. So this week we're going to really step up our game and we're going to apply the idea of using planes to a nose. Now the most important thing that I want you to do is keep things simple at the start. Simplify your shape into three or four different planes, and then add a few more, but then go into your shading, then go into the details. So we want to keep it as simple as possible for as long as possible, and we will still get really good results. So grab your pencils and let's get started. So let's take this nose, let's simplify it into four different planes. You first got the bridge of the nose, which travels down the top and it kind of gets a little bit wider near the base, near the ball of it. Then you've got the two wings either side followed by the shadow underneath, so everything that's a little bit darker underneath will be the fourth plane. Next we're just going to add a little bit more detail on this. We'll think about the shape of the nostril because we've got a bit of a shadow on there. And also the underneath nostril followed by the shadow, not forgetting, of course, the monobrow between the eyebrows. That's as far as I would take it in terms of putting planes on this nose, it doesn't really need that much more than this. We've got the turn of the nose, we've got the ball, the wings and the nostrils as well. Now is time to shade in those chunks of planes, just in very simple lights and medium to dark shading. Before we add any detail, just look at the image and ask yourself, is the wing darker or lighter than the brow of the nose? It's a little bit darker. Is the under part of the nose or the nostrils, is that lighter or darker than the wing? A bit darker than the wings. So we know that we could push that a bit darker as well. We're setting the values in the planes to make sure that we're starting to see a slightly three D effect. Even in just the simplest of forms like this, you can start to imagine that this is a triangular shape coming forward. And that's helping us to see it because we have the planes, we've got the value set and it just starts to help with the three D effect. Once you've done that, you're going to start to blend the edges a bit. Because the nose isn't geometric, it is actually very round, very smooth. So we want to soften the edges and push values darker where they need to be. This is the fourth stage of our drawing. We're starting to refine the detail, refine the edges, and just get bit more of a realistic approach to the nose. As soon as you get your nostrils in the dark pit black holes of the nostrils, you'll see that your shading is actually incredibly light. Please go incredibly dark on the nostril holes. Well, everything will just settle from there or it won't. And you know that you need to do a bit more work, but we all know that nostril holes are deadly black. Shade those in first, then work your way around. The remaining part of the drawing is just taking your time on it and refining the edges, trying not to get rid of your light sources. So you know the wings of your nostrils, they're not white, but they're also not the same color as the wings. So there's a lot of back and forth here trying to play around with shade. Keep looking at the image and keep softening those edges, trying to find the darker patches and the lighter patches. And eventually you will end up with a nose that is popping and you're like, holy ****, I can't believe I've drawn a nose. Well, some people hate noses. I actually love drawing noses for me, this is a real enjoyable experience and I hope after this exercise it's a little bit more enjoyable for you as well. All right, team. That is it, we have done it. Or maybe you're about to spend a bit more time in it. I'm not sure. But this is a really fun exercise. I think I say this about all of the drawings I'm giving you. Maybe I'm biased, but now I do hope you enjoy that. I hope it kind of makes a bit more sense now that we've applied planes to a more complicated object. And we'll do the same next week, we'll try something else and see if we can just keep applying it and keep understanding why we're making these decisions and how easily a three D object can appear. So enjoy yourselves. Best of luck and don't forget to show me if you want or if you need any pointers. I'm happy to help and I'll see you next week for another lesson. 42. Week 38 Eye Planes: Welcome to this week's drawing lesson. Now, the past two weeks, we've been looking at planes. And we applied it to a mushroom and a nose. So this week we're going to look at how to use it. Drawing an eye eyes are a little bit more challenging and there might be some more planes than the nose. So let's see how it works in a more circular round object. So grab your pencils and let's get started. First of all, let's look at the eye we're going to draw now, eyes are really complex. You've basically got a ball in a socket. And then you've got a brow bone and a nose coming out as well. So we need to break that down into the most simplest shapes that we can. So I've gone and tried a little overdrawing just to see if I can break down the shapes and understand it clearly. Because things are round, you can't just break them down into two or three shapes. What I wanted to do was find a central plane and a left plane and a right plane. And you can see that it split up into three. We've got the central section, we've got the left section and the right section. Even though I'm just using trapeze shapes and rectangles and straight lines, you start to see that it is looking more and more three D just by these lines. Obviously, I have drawn the outline of the eyeball. The eyeball, the eye itself and the top of the eyelid. And that just helps to situate it in a more realistic position. Let's start to draw this on our paper. Start with the shape of the eye itself and the eyelid, and from there, you can start to think about your planes. Is the underpart of the eyebrow, does that spread out bigger than the eye itself? What about the shape of the The bag? The eye bag underneath the eyebrow. It feels so bad. And think about the direction that each change of direction is going in. One way that you can help yourself is to look at the shading in each section and ask yourself, is there a point when it changes from one color to another? For example, if you take right in the crease of the nose and the eyebrow, that section is darker. Next to that, it's much lighter because this is closer to the light source. And then on the far left, it's a medium sort of shade. So that's another section as well. If I take away the color, the saturation, and just show you the black and white version, you'll see that it already starts to give it some shape. It starts to give it some realism. And all you need to do after that is to add the details. So all they want us to focus on this week is to get our planes to understand them and then to shade in your average tones. So just take your time on this. I know I say this every week, Take your time on it, enjoy it. But honestly, this will start to help you to think in a very, very different way. You're thinking like a sculptor. Now you've got a big piece of granite and you're chiseling away and you're going to refine the edges. And we'll do that together next week. For now, just do your planes, get your average shades and try and get it looking kind of three D and kind of round just by using geometric shapes. All right then team. I hope you enjoyed this week and I'll see you next week for stage two of drawing an eye using planes. 43. Week 39 Eye Planes 2: Hey team rake is week 39 and we are really stepping up our game. So last week we drew the eye using planes. So we were looking at how to make something curved round, very complicated into a geometric form where you've kind of taken the slices out of the roundness and created a very nice shape. So this week we're going to add all the details and make it look like an actual Y. So it might be worth just watching the video to see how it's done. Because I'm not going into all the details of how to do lashes and eyebrows, but instead I'm blending a lot of the edges and pushing the shading really, really dark. We will look at an eye more detail in the next few weeks. However, today I just want to focus on turning something from planes and geometry into a nice curved surface that looks like an eye. So do your best, see what you can do. And don't worry if it's not perfect, because this is really difficult. So grab your pencils and let's get started. The first thing we want to do is start to soften our edges. You'll see on my eye it's just a little bit too angular. So I'm just going to go over some of the edges, not all of them a little bit darker, to make it nice and round. And I'll do the same on the lid as well. I can also add a bit of detail on the eyebrow just to get it looking more like human hair, but I'm not quite doing the detail, I'm just placing the main features. Once you're happy with that, you want to start pushing your shading in. You'll mix between your two B and your eight B pencil. We practiced a lot on our gradients, now hopefully you're feeling a lot more comfortable with it and you're not making your soft, fleshy textures too strong and too harsh in the pencil. You're making those gradients nice and subtle from dark to light, without having any hard edges where they don't need to be. This part of our drawing will take a lot longer because you're going to be looking at your image for a longer period of time. Hopefully you're looking at it more than your drawing because if you don't know what you're drawing, it won't look the same. You want to make sure that you're thinking about those original values that you set on the left plane and the right plane, both darker because they're facing away from the light source. As you move around, think about what was my average value underneath. So going back to that original sketch that we had with the sections being either light, medium, or dark, or in between, that will help you to push your shading as far as it needs to go. So you're going to be working around. And then once you've set your values and you're much happier with it, then you can start adding a few details. It honestly is these little details like the eyelashes and the eyebrow that will make your eye change from a cartoon to something realistic. Now I know I haven't really gone into a huge amount of detail with the finishing touches of the eye, because to be honest, it's a whole big lesson in itself. And I will approach this later on in the year because this month is all about planes and trying to make something look a bit more organic and curved using those geometric shapes. So don't worry, we will look into it and we will see how we can make your eye look even more, three D. But hopefully by watching my demonstration, you are able to pick up on the change and how it looks and kind of the steps that we need to take to get there. So this doesn't have to be perfect. This I, it's just a means for us to practice drawing in a different way, looking at it from a different angle, and hopefully getting fairly similar results. Okay, team, so that's the y. And I hope this is one of those drawings where you're like, yeah, I draw an eye. Now, just as a quick reminder, we started this challenge as a yearly challenge to just draw our portrait at the beginning of the year and see what we can do. The aim is to follow these videos and at the end of the year, or the end of the course to draw your portrait again and see if there's any difference. So I really encourage you to follow each lesson and give it a go. Just spend ten, 15 minutes on it a week. You know, it's really not much time and it's something you can fit in and hopefully you can really see the results. So in the final part of the year, October, November, December, we're going to be drawing much more relevant things. We're going to be looking at the face in detail. And I'm really excited to see your progression. So I will see you next week for another lesson. 44. Week 40 Freehand Ear: He team. Welcome to what I believe is week 40. We only have 12 lessons left this year. I want to stop looking at certain techniques and just start to draw things. See if we can start to apply everything we've learned on things that we need to get better at. I thought a good thing this week could be looking at an ear. I'm going to contain it in a bit of a square just to help me figure out the portions. But from then on we're just going to go for it and I'll talk you through the process as we go grab your pencils and let's get started. Let's start with the rectangle. And all you want to do is use this as a single grid trying to figure out the widest, the highest, and the lowest point of the ear. You're then going to draw the points where the ear folds, as well as the areas of the shadow. So these are things that we've practiced quite a lot in our journey so far. Next we want to shade in the shadows. So this is a bit of a rehearsal. It's going to feel like you're shading really dark, but it's actually not true because you're surrounded by light, which means you need to actually push your shades darker. But for now, we're just going to pop it in and we're going to start to build up our shading. This is quite an intuitive way to draw and to shade. I really want you to spend a lot of time on this. Do your rehearsal stage. Get your shades on there, push your shadows darker, and then start to add your hair. This way you will quickly see that your ear is surrounded by dark. And then you can start to see that actually the shade that you did first needs to be a little bit darker. This is quite different to how I actually teach you usually. But I want you to start seeing what it's like to do what you naturally do. I do it too, I don't quite reach the shade I meant to reach at the beginning, so I have to go over it two or three times to make sure it go dark enough. So let's see what happens on this first stage when we put the base layer on, surround the ear and dark and see how much darker it should go. We're not really honoring the values that the ear is because we're jumping around trying to see where things are a bit darker and a bit lighter. So it's a bit of a process and it makes you really look at the image a lot more. It makes you think about all the relationships between the shades. And when you add a bit of the hair, you see it's a very simple block, shading and a few hair directions. You can see that my ear is actually really, really light. I essentially end up going over the whole thing again, which is what I try not to teach my students to do. And this is an example as to when it happens. So try your own version and see if your intuition kind of leads you to shade over it again. And see what you need to push to make sure you're not leaving any areas white. It's just a quick video this week, but the drawing isn't necessarily a quick one for you. For me, I find the shapes fairly simple. But I just want you to start testing yourself and see how you react to something that's overly curved, very subtly shaded. It's going to be a good gauge to see where you're at for this journey. All right team, I'll see you next week for another lesson. 45. Week 41 Boot: Hey team, welcome to Week 41 of our drawing challenge. This week we're going to try a little bit of what they call foreshortening. And we're also going to try and go straight for it without having to think too much about theory or strategy on how we can add it On our paper, a little brief introduction on foreshortening. It's the idea of something being closer to you and it's actually really big. And something being further away and feeling really small. If we look at my hand compared to my face, you'll see a huge difference in size. Foreshortening is making sure you have the balance between perspective, which is something closer to you and something further away. So we're going to try it on a shot today. Another challenge that we have is making sure that our shading is nice and dark. We're going to draw a black boot, so make sure whatever you do, your black boot is very, very black. Okay, grab your pencils and let's get started. So obviously team for this one, we want to start off with the outline. Now we have foreshortening going on. So it could be a bit of a curveball because you have to recognize that the heel is closer to us, therefore, it is much, much bigger. And that means the toes of the shoe are much further away. If you are struggling with the proportions of that, feel free to add these red lines I'm just adding now. And you should hopefully be able to get your sizing in there now. It is much more difficult to go against something that doesn't feel right, but trust the process, draw these red lines on, and you'll get it in a very, very good position, I'd say. Once you're happy with the overall shape, try and get some of the big shapes on there that show very dark edges. So that means something that looks black, you can draw around it and then just shade it in straight away. Just remember, if you make a mistake in a dark area, it's probably never going to be left white. So you can always rub it out and try it again. The only time we'd be worried about pushing too dark is if we know it needs to be white underneath. But with something like this, a black shoe, we know everything is going to be pretty dark, even the highlights. So once you've drawn your outlines, you're going to start pushing your dark shades with your 08:00 A.M. Just remember team, we have been practicing our shading all year and I've been asking you to push hard and shade really dark. Drawing is all about light and dark. So in this session, if you've drawn the outline of your dark shadows, push it in dark straight away. Don't wait, don't build up the layers. Just be confident and go for it. It's going to give you great results really quickly. You'll see on mine already, it starts to pop. And it is because I'm just looking for those black sections. I'm ignoring anything with the mid shade for now until I'm happy we're getting all those black sections on. Then you want to look for those slightly lighter sections so you can see the difference between your black and your really dark gray. The trouble is, you don't want to leave it too light like this because it just doesn't look right. You want to really look at how close it is to black and try and add the details. Now when you are looking at a lighter area, or perhaps you're thinking, hmm, it feels a little bit too light. Remember that's the time to introduce your two H. Your two T should be a little bit more slower pace. You should be focusing on any little pockets of gray that are poking out, and that's what's going to bring all of your details together. So now's the time to work on your shading with your two H if you haven't already. And really bring everything together and you'll see very quickly the shiny lever effect and the lovely contrast of light and dark. So there we have a team. It might take you a bit longer this week because there is a lot of shading detail in there and you have to map out all of those little places for the dark shadows to go. But it's a really fun exercise and really good for our training. So well done. And I'll see you next week for another S. 46. Week 42 Pumpkin: Hey team, welcome to this week's drawing challenge, where we look at how to draw a pumpkin using not really any techniques at all. So we're really trying to push ourselves and see how our shading ability and our drawing ability has progressed. Also, it's October, so we have to do something a little bit topical and I thought this would be a great way for us to see where we're at. Grab your pencils and let's get started. The most natural way for me to approach this drawing was to look at each individual section in the pumpkin. This way I could determine whether it was a thin section, a thin section, and where the start of the line stopped and finished. Once I did that, I then thought, mm, well, there's a lot of clear light reflections on there. What if I separate my pumpkin into light, medium, and dark? And this is what we've been training for, for moments when we see something organically shaped and curious and decide where do we start, what can we think about? We can think of a basic structure, we can separate the light sources, and then we can start to add our base shade. You hopefully should remember that any light shading is done with your two B, Any dark shading is done with your eight B. For now, just place the average values using your two B and or if you're feeling really confident, you can go for your eight B for your dark shadows. From now on, start the shading. And let's see how it very quickly progresses. Literally just shade in these sections, light, medium, and dark. And if you're struggling to see the difference between one chunky bit and another, then you can obviously push that middle line in a bit darker. Now obviously what I'm showing you is a colored picture and we are shading that in black and white. So if you download the attachment on Patrion, you'll be able to download the black and white version. So it's already made for you and easy to see. Otherwise you can just challenge yourself and see if you can think about what the shades mean in black and white. I will do a session on this of translating color to the gray scale using your brain. But for now, I just want to see how you deal with it because it ain't easy. But when you practice enough, you are able to do it without having to change anything. I did it just from the colored picture. And you can see as I'm progressing my shading, it's way too light. If you see them side by side, you'll probably shower in China that's not dark enough, which is great because that's what I've been telling you guys this whole time, Go darker. And here I am being a bad example and not going dark enough, too soon. But because we're drawing organically and just straight from the picture, we're not doing any fancy methods. It does mean that, you know, it's a bit nicer to ease into it. You know, step into the shading. Don't push it too dark because you're like, have I done it right? But then once you're happy with where all the shades are, you can then push the darkness in. What's really going to help is using that two H after you've set the values. Because your two H will just fill in all those white gaps of the paper and it will push your shades naturally darker. So go over the whole thing you know to hate, you'll smooth in the texture as well. And then to make your whites look even whiter, you need to add a very, very faint layer of background. Mainly for the lights at the back of the pumpkin, because this will just show you that actually it is highlight, It's white and a little bit of gray behind that will help to push that forward. So well done this week. Thank you for watching to the end and I'll see you next week for another lesson. 47. Week 43 Bat Cat: Hey team, welcome to this week's drawing challenge, where we try and draw a bat cat. Yes, I found an image and I really liked the top of it and I thought, well, it's kind of Halloween season, so why not draw something a little bit spooky? Now, it's not super technical, but it is quite challenging. The shading is very, very easy. But I really wanted us to try something that is not typically easy to draw. So grab your pencils and let's get started. This could be one of the most difficult outlines that we've tried, because we've got curves at an angle and then we have nothing really symmetrical on the other side. So instead, I want you to think about each point of the wing and where that connects on the right side of the wing as well. So if I pop these lines on, you can just see what we need to look out for. The point on the left is on the same horizontal plane as a point on the right. So have a look at that with the left wing and then just kind of follow the negative space. You're looking at that space between the wing and the face of the cat. You're working around the cat's ear. And then there's negative space between the left wing and the right wing again, just look at these horizontal lines and see if they can help you at all trying to construct that wing on the right. The next step is to move down the body. Try and get that curve that's in the chest and then add the legs and of course a little tiny feet. Once you've done that, it's fairly easy. From here we want to use our eight B pencil and just color it in basically color in at the center of the cat. And then we'll color in a little bit of the bottom of the wing, but we have a bit of detail moving up to the top once the outline is done, which is the most stressful part. The rest of it should be fairly easy. When you're working up the wing, just check where the translucent areas are. It's a gradient from the edges, so making sure that you have a nice thick bone structure in black. And then you have a nice gradient coming from the corners so that the inside of the wing, or each segment of the wing, is a little bit lighter and looks really delicate, as if you could pierce it with your finger. And of course the last bit is just to add a few hairy bits on the fur. And you just need a sharp at AB and just get some lies poking out of the edges of the body. So I hope that wasn't too stressful. And also it is on topic for this month and what's about to happen. So next week we're going to do something slightly different but really, really fun. So grab some colors next week, and I'll see you there. Have a great week, folks. 48. Week 44 Day Of The Dead: You have got to try this week's drawing challenge. It's nearly Halloween, so I thought we could do something really fun and kind of on the lighter side of Halloween. So we're going to be drawing a Day of the Dead Mask. Now this challenge is all about symmetry, really. But if you mess up, it's not the end of the world, because we're going to hide it with color and dark outlines and it's going to look sick. So grab your pencil and the colors of your choice. You could use pencil crayons, you could use paint. I'm going to use acrylic paint pens because they are just like holding a pencil, but it produces a really thick color. So use whatever you want and let's get started. The fun thing about this exercise is you can literally design it however you want, so you don't have to follow mine. You can do anything. Now, I've started with a basic portrait structure where I've outlined at the top of the eyebrows, the bottom of the nose, the chin, and the top of the head. And you can see from here that I'll be able to construct my drawing fairly quickly because I'm looking for symmetry from the left and the right. And I'm looking to just add some very basic features. The easiest thing is to draw two circles for eyes, An upside down love heart for the nose, and then some teeth that go on a straight line. So I kind of looks like I'm drawing a sandwich, but adding lots of, um, I don't know, teeth shapes in it. From there, you want to look at drawing your skull, because then you'll know how much detail you can put in. And also, you want to spend a few moments just to try and get this symmetrical. So you'll see that the chin is like an upside down triangle. Then you have two straight lines going up either side, followed by two circular things, which are the cheekbones. It kind of looks like a boop from the side. And then obviously you have the skull, which is like a football on top of the boops. So that's how you make your skull. So as you move around, you can add any design that you want. You can add circles, triangles, stars, or you can copy mine if you want. I am going to add extra designs that previous artists have used. Because when we're learning how to draw, it's great to get inspiration from other people. So you'll be able to download that on Patriot and find inspiration that you like. Once you're happy with your pencil outline, you can do the best bit. This is so fun just to color in because with pencil drawing we don't often get the chance to play. It's especially with realism, we're always striving to be perfect and be accurate. And try and get our measurements looking really exact so that we can recognize what we're drawing. But for this, we can just have fun with it. So choose whatever color you want. It doesn't have to be bright, it doesn't have to be dull. You can play around with it, or you can make a color palette that you're happy with. Maybe you select just Halloween colors, or maybe you select the colors that make you happy. And once you've done that, you will go over the thing, the thing, you'll go over your drawing in black. So I change my pen because I don't always want to have a thick black line, but I do want to outline everything in black. So I changed my pen from a paint pen to a biro and that looks just as good on the finer details. So this week was really fun. I really enjoyed it, and I think you might enjoy it too if you're anything like me. So happy Halloween. I hope, I really hope you enjoyed this one actually. Because it is fun, it is playful, and it's something that I don't often encourage people to do so. Yeah, Harry, great week, and I'll see you next week for the start of our portraits. Fully from the eyes to the nose, to the mouth, to the sul, just like today, but way better. 49. Week 45 Portrait Stage 1: Team, we have got eight weeks left till the end of our drawing challenge. And it's going to get a little bit more serious. Now, I'm going to show you how to start your portrait. So this month we're going to look at drawing another person's portrait, not our own. And I'm going to show you how to construct it in a nice, easy way. So let's have a look at the steps. Step one is to measure your face. Every single face can be broken up into rules of thirds. That means we have 123 sections. The first section is from the bottom of your chin to underneath your nose. So I'll show you with a pencil. The next section is underneath your nose to your eyebrows. And the final section is your eyebrows to your hair line. Now some people have fringes, so does make it a little bit more challenging. But the reason why rules of third is super important is because usually typically two thirds are similar sizes and one third is either bigger or smaller. And that means we have a recognizable feature. So you might have walked past someone in the street and thought, a, they have quite small forehead, or you might have noticed that they have a slightly bigger nose. That means we're already subconsciously doing these divisions in our heads. We're noticing that something is a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller than the other two thirds. Take a minute now, look at my face and measure it and see which feature you think is smaller or bigger than the other two. Hopefully you got it. You guessed that my bottom third is bigger than the other two. Let me show you. We've got my forehead, my nose, they're pretty much the same. And then my chin, you can see that there's a little bit over hanging there, so it means I have a big mouth. So let's apply this theory to a picture. And we're going to start constructing it. And over the weeks we are going to build on this picture and draw ourselves a portrait sick. Oh, kay team. So we have the lovely car at Dell Vine in this picture and we're going to measure her face. So remembering the rules of thirds, we've got one to three. And to be honest, it doesn't matter which one's number one, which one's number two. But I always tend to measure the chin because there's nothing obscuring it, there's no fringes, there's no bits of hair in the way or, you know, Mickey Mouse hair line. Using this, I always use this part as my anchor. Now, before I measure it, I want you to try and measure it yourself. Try and check from under the chin to the nose, the nose to the eyebrows, and the eyebrows to the forehead. Which two are similar sizes and which one is slightly bigger or slightly smaller than the other two? Okay, so let's check now. Just notice how I hold my pencil. I've got this weird grip and I'm able to move this around. I use the top of the pencil as the first part to measure, and then I use my thumb because that is closer to me on this side, I'm over here. And then I've got my one unit, so I take that up to the second section and it's just at the top of the eyebrows there. So they're fairly similar. And then I compare that to the forehead, and again, that's a little bit bigger. The forehead really sits on this line here. Plus this was a little bit higher. So I'm going to compare it in a different way. So I'm going to take the measurement from the top of the forehead to the middle of the eyebrows there. Compare that downwards and you see the big difference in that. And then move that down here, and the big difference there. So I know that the forehead is the biggest. So what I need to do now then is figure out my own proportions. Now I can measure this and take this across exactly. So for the sake of our first portrait, let's do that. So I'm going to get my one measurement, my chin measurement, my bottom third. I'm going to take that across and I'm going to get that measurement there. So I'll just extend those lines a little bit to make them nice and clear. And then I'll take my second measurement. I'm going in between the eyebrows and underneath the nose. Get that on there. I can extend that a bit as well. And then let's get this forehead. Get the top, okay, that is the forehead. These I'll carry a Dellvin's measurements. Another way I can check, just to make sure I've moved that across exactly, is to get a pencil long enough to cover her face. I'm going to get this pencil, pop that on her hair line, and then get my thumb down at the bottom and take that across. It's pretty it's a little bit smaller in that case. I'm just going to measure it again because measuring it twice and checking is not a bad thing at all. That is there. That one's fine. The second one? That one's fine. It's just at the top there. And then her hair line there. We go to that one. Okay. I'll just extend that. Just tidy up my lines at the moment I have the exact measurements of her face. And this is going to help me in so many ways when I start to draw the details of her portrait. Now let's get the width of the face. Now the width will be shown by taking your anchor measurement. We're always referring to the bottom third, the chin, and we're going to compare that to the width this way. What you want to do is see, take that measurement, which is very hard on a camera, and then I pull that across. I'm looking for the furthest or widest part of my face. From my center line to the part where I run straight down my face. And you can see that there's a little bit of a gap there. So that means that the half width, my full face, this half is smaller than the length of my chin. Let's measure that on hers. What I want to do is get that measurement of the chin. And then I want to rotate it so you can either measure the right or the left. To be honest, you should always check it for both sides because she might be twisted and it might look slightly different. I just want to put my thumb in the center of her face. Why don't we go from the center of her eyebrows and then let's check the width going down her temple actually does go further than this measurement. And it's the same size when it's right at the top of her nose. In that case, I'm going to take this measurement of mine, which should be exactly the same as a picture. I've missed a bit. I'm actually going to put my center line on there. Then I want to go further than the width, and when it comes to the top of the nose, it's roughly the same length. Let's just box that in actually on one side because this tells me everything in this grid will be the face. Nothing should leave the face whatsoever. Good practice. Let's measure the left side as well. Bit difficult from that angle. I'm going to use my finger as the guide and then take that across this side. It's basically the same because we have hair coming out there. In that case, I'm just going to do that, whereas the right side is in shadow. So it's a little bit more challenging. I'll check that again in just a second. Okay, let's get this measure, let's get this measurement again. The chin, and then we'll move that across. It probably is hair coming on down there in that case. Trim that down there. We have it. It doesn't look like much, but what we've done is we've measured it exactly right. We've measured the thirds. And we've put them on our paper, and we've figured out the width of the piece. In next week's lesson, we're going to start to add the features and looking at the shadows and the shading. Well, we might wait for the shading this week. Practice your measuring, see if you can get the rules of thirds, get them accurate. And we're going to give ourselves a really good start with this portrait. Okay team, I'll see you next week for our next stage of our portrait. 50. Week 46 Portrait Stage 2: Hat team, welcome to stage two of our portrait. So what we did last week was we measured all the proportions. We got our rules of third, and we figured out how big they are on the person. Then we translated that onto our paper. And now we have a grid that will help us to draw the rest of our portrait perfectly. So what we want to look at today is the outline of the face, the outline of some of the details and the shadows, so that next week we can start to shade. So grab your pencils and let's get started. Okay, So I'm fairly happy with the grid, not like a perfectly neat rectangle, which is absolutely fine, because all I want to do is use this as a way to draw the rest of my face. I'm remembering that inside the top we have the forehead. Then inside here we have the eyebrows, and the eyes and the bottom of the nose. And then inside here we have the mouth. What I can do is just draw a few lines to represent the middle of the mouth and the middle of the pupils. Let's measure that and try and figure that out. Grab a pencil to measure. I'm going to start at the bottom. If I pop my pencil on the nose, then grab my thumb and find the middle of the mouth, I can transfer that across. And there we have the middle of the mouth. A lot of times when you're doing this, you're like, this doesn't feel right. But if you've measured it, you have to trust the system and you will get there. The eyes are always tricky because there's no real anchor for the eyebrows. You could have measured the top, but I'd like to go from the middle. In that case, I'll take my pencil across, get my measurement for the iris, which is very tricky to move over there. We have it, this looks like a face. Maybe I'm just being a bit imaginative here, but we now have a place for the eyes and the mouth, and we just have to trust that everything fits within these sections. So what I want to do now is just start to get some of the bone structure. It might not be perfect, which is fine, but at least I can just get some way of making this look more like a face rather than a rectangle. I'm going to start in the bottom third. If I go across, remembering that my box basically is down here, it comes from this edge, then I can see that there's a lot of negative space there, roughly. I'm just going to pop a little marker here. Try and think of the direction of that line. If I pop my pencil in there, you can see that it goes in this direction. Then for the chin, the jaw, sorry. That will go across there. Could use as a rule that's handy. Then we want to soft, softly join that, as well as joining on the chin. We'll go across here and then check this angle. So actually the right side of the face looks a little bit rounder. Could be a too far across, but let's see. Okay, then if I move up, so everything's edging towards there. And then over on this side, that seems crazy. All right, let me maybe bring that across a bit. Fab, And then I want to go up to here and start in the hair line. This, does it go in a bit? I don't know. It does go out a bit, actually. And then around here it joins a bit too soon. So maybe let's bring that down. And it's a bit of a vague hair line anyway, so I'm not going to stress too much about that and then bring that down here. Definitely done Bit weird to a brain, I'll Do you see how rough I'm being? I'm not stress too much about perfection. All I'm doing is trying to get something on there that looks kind of okay. From here, what I want to do is start to draw the features. I think the nose is always a good place to start. Usually this is within the center, especially if the face is pointing towards you. The septum and the monobro, don't know if I can call that. Should be on the same plane because they're both touching the face at the same point. All I'm going to do is just start to think about the shape of the black nostrils in there. Then if I go to the right left side, bring that across the bring this. Out a little bit and then bring that out. I'm trying to just outline the nose. I think that's actually way too wide. And I can see that. Because if I compare, like the right side of the face to the nose, it's way too big. I actually let me measure this. I'm taking the size of the cheek and then putting that across. You see the nose is significantly smaller. It's either that I've drawn my cheek not wide enough, which I don't think is true because of the negative space there. Or I've done my nose too wide. It's probably that one. I'm going to start again. Bring that. Why am I using my three B keep get mixed up with which pencil I'm measuring with, Which one I'm drawing with. Okay. It feels a little bit better. The thing is you're probably, you're going to put something on and then measure it and then just change things all the time, which I think is the best way to learn. Do it first and then see what you think. You'll learn so much more by checking, changing, and not being afraid to redo things. I'm going up the nose here and into the eyebrow because this is a dark shadow, actually, that's going to end up being a block shade anyway. You can go up to the eyebrow. The eyebrow blends in with the eye, so I'm not going to bother drawing the bottom. Instead, I want to draw this shadow that comes up here. Then that goes into the hair. It looks very weird. It shouldn't look like cadlavine at all for a while. That's actually not straight. Let me go. We're looking for the simplest version of her. Okay, so let's get the top of the eyelid. I can see that, but it disappears into there. Then the top of the eye, always checking the top of the eye versus the bottom of the eye. The bottom of the eye isn't the same shape. This pupil line, the straight line that goes through it shows you two different lines. It shows you the curve that goes above and the curve that goes underneath there, very different. A lot of people draw these weird almond shapes. They're not quite an eye bear That in mind when you are drawing the left side is much more difficult because we don't have any markers. But what we do have is the edge of the nose, if the edge in the nose had a straight line going up here, you can see that the tear duct is aligned with it. And that's not quite the same on this side but it is on the right side. I know from here there's my tear duct. Then I can go up from there and check the angle of this line. Go across the check the line underneath. When you're drawing your eyes, they aren't as big as what you imagine. The actual eye itself is quite small. And the reason why they look so big is because of make up or eyelashes, the rim of the eyelid and the eyebrow. When you're drawing your eye, make sure you don't draw it too big or else it looks weird and scary. It might feel small, but that's probably accurate. So I get the rough shape of the eye. I'm always checking the distance between the eyelid and the eyebrow. And then let's get some lips on here. So there's a bit of a shadow, actually, that comes down here. And then we maybe a little bit higher because the mouth is open. This is the middle part of the mouth. But we have a gap. So I need to decide whether my gap is above or below my line. The bottom lip has a curve going down, then that needs to be closer then that needs to go down from there. That's okay. Then let's pop eyes in. You don't see the full circle. There's always some of the circle that's chopped off. And then we could pop the iris. And reflection is and reflection fab. For my final part, I just want to draw some of the shadows we've got underneath lid here. I'm just looking for the darkest shadows and I'm trying to see how far they are away from the nose, the shadow under the chin. Then there's a bit of a shadow over here. There's a shadow in the, and there's a shadow under her eye. And then I've got that, Da, da, da, da. Let's just add an ear on to. The ear is slightly above the nose, so there's a nose ears here. I can come out the grid, that's fine. And then on this side it's the same. And then she has some hair, well, let's just get like some of that on there as well. So I feel like, I do want to pull that in a little bit. Okay, right. So at this stage we have created a monster. It doesn't look like a delvin, and it shouldn't. But it should be accurate. So what you can do at this stage is you can check your measurements, you check against the artwork, and then compare it against your own and see whether they are in the right place. The next week we're going to look at our shading and it's going to look really, really good. So be patient with yourself. Trust the system and let's just see what happens. All right team, see you next week. 51. Week 47 Portrait Stage 3: So this is our third week on the portrait. We've done the measuring, we've done the outline. Now we're going to add some detail. All they want us to do this week is think about block sections of shading. I don't want us to worry about the finer detail. I want us to look at the dark shadows. I wanted to look at the mid shadows and leave the light ones there. This is going to help us to refine our drawing. If anything is slightly off, because no doubt there will be things not quite in the right place. It's going to start to look alive in next week's session. We will at that fine detail to make everything look stunning, grab your pencils and let's get started. Okay, everything in these lines that I have drawn around are my dark shadows. I need to use my A B pencil and I'm not going to push them too dark, but I am going to shade them in medium gray. Because that means if I do need to change anything, it's not going to scar the paper too much. But it also means I'm not going to cheat and be too scared to do any shadows you see. I'm not being rough or permanent. I just want to get it in and then have a look at it. I'm just going to speed this up. I think we can all agree that it doesn't really look like at all, But I'm not worried because I'm pleased with my measurements, I'm pleased that I've got the shadows. It's all about the progression from here. What I want to do now is start to really feel more confident about the placement of my features. I'm going to work into it now. I'm probably going to start with adding some of the medium shades, leaving the light ones, and then just start to look at the features a bit more closely. I'll just grab my B and then I'm just looking for any shading that's in between light and dark. She does have pale skin, which means we might be tempted to leave it quite white. But even on people who have pale complexions, they often don't have much white showing. What I want to do is just try and get a lot of that white covered or at least just leave a little bit of a highlight rather than the whole thing. I'm probably shading value two, maybe value three around it, but just on the head can leave a bit of light there. And then I just want to work down to the eye, we want to highlight where the brow is. Just going to use my razor rubber. Get rid of that straight line. Then into the eye, we have a bit of shading. Forgot to shade in the eye bag. I'll use my two B for that one. Then there's some shading down the nose. Then that comes into the laughing line, which hers is not very deep at all. Lucky puppy. Well, maybe this was taken when she was very young then. Let's go down into the cheekbone. I'm constantly looking at the picture, constantly referring back to it, push a little bit more of that cheek bone in the face is at the bottom, near the chin in general because the light source is from the top left, it will just naturally get darker as the face curves away. And then we have a little bit of detail on the tash. I hope you enjoy my official description of the face. Then all of this is actually bit dark. We can throw some shading in the eyes but leave the highlights. We don't want to put any shading in that it's very difficult to remove as well. I want you to accidentally go into the highlight, Please don't go into the high light. Then there's a bit of shading down the nose, something that goes around a high light. Here we go. Then let's just add a little bit into the hair. I'm looking at block shading in the hair. I'm not worried about any detail. Probably a bit darker at the top, so maybe I'll just get some dark shading. I am kind of going in the direction of some of the hair as well, so gives it good base. Okay, good. Now she pop a neck on others, give her a little neck, can only help, right? We help to make her chin pop. So let's do it. Okay, team, we're at a really good point with our portrait. We have got our measuring, we've got our base shading. And next week we're going to look at how to merge it altogether. Get the really fine tuned portrait that we're after. Please bear in mind that portraits take some time and patience and effort, and there's a lot of preparation that goes into them. If you're frustrated at this stage, because it doesn't quite look how you expected, go easy on yourself, because I always think portraits look like cartoons for a good 90% of the time. And it's the final 10% when you're like, this actually looks good. In the next session, I'm going to show you how to make your portrait look even better. See you next week. 52. Week 48 Portrait Stage 4: He team. Welcome to this week's episode of the portrait. So we're looking at stage four. Grab your pencils and let's get started. Okay, cool. So the first thing I notice today is how light my dark actually is. I'm just going to start with my A, B. Just start to push that in even more because when I first did it, it always feels like you're going dark when you start on a white piece of paper. But as soon as you add more shades in there, you're dark. Looks really light. If I can make sure I'm pushing more shadows a bit more, I'm just edging towards the dark. Sounds quite creepy, you know what I mean? I'm just trying to get these shadows back to what I originally thought I was doing. By adding this dark layer that's already pushing the three D aspect of the drawing. It's going to start to push the realism, the curvature and make my face look a little bit more realistic. First of all, I have to shave my pencil, look at that. Might quite sharp, It is not. Needs a little bit re freshen up there. That's such a nice pencil. Okay, I'm just going to add a little bit of detail around the face. So I'm just looking for those dark patches still seeing if I can add them in. I'm really looking at the line direction. I'm not going by what I've drawn. I keep looking at the picture and then going back to the drawing about 70% of the time and then 30% of the time, even though it looks like I'm drawing consistently, I am looking and just just wiggling my pencil in that area. I can just add a little bit of that dark eyeliner. Not wearing eyeliner. I'm not doing the detail of the eyelashes, but I am just recognizing that there's a dark section there. Then I want to get the eye around there. Let's go on the right hand side as well. There we go. This eye is really interesting actually because we've got the dark edge of the iris. But then when you look in the white of the eye on the right hand side, you've actually got this in shadow. I'm going to shade that in. Not completely. It is a little bit lighter underneath then that goes out into here and then I'll just really identify the eyelid looks quite creepy. Okay, then let's do this side of the iris then the tear duct is in shadow. Get let's do a little bit of work on the eye. You'll see that there is a cast shadow on the top of the eyes. Is much darker at the top and lies at the bottom. Even though she has really light eyes, even eyes with a light color, like a blue or green, will always have some shading in it. The top of the eye, where the eyelid is, will always be much darker because it's casting a shadow down to the iris. Make sure pupils are nicer black. And then this shape actually blends into the shape, goes down into here. Push the iris in for now. That will do for the iris itself. Let's look at the eyelids and around the eye. Remember this is a spherical shape. I want to say orbital. I think it's the orbital, that's where the ice is in the eye. Orbital socket. That's orbital socket. Now, the eyelid on the right hand side, this is that's not quite in shadow. The right hand side is, so we can push the right hand side. Then as we get to the top of the eye, that's going to be lighter. Then as we move down, I can see a slightly darker patch here and then a slight darker patch down there. Whenever you're looking at any section on the face, you have to ask yourself, is it darker or lighter than where I just was? If you ask yourself that question, you'll always be able to identify the shadows, whether they are dark enough, and that's what's going to help your face to look three D. I'm working my way around now to what we call the eye bag. It's just the skin going around the eyeball that is darker on the right hand side. Now, all of this. In shadow, solid black, so I'm not going to be afraid to go dark. I want to make sure the rim on the lid isn't too big. Quite small. Nice. Then I'm just going to shade the rim of the lid in a little bit. Okay. Then I'll go down here just trying to soften the edge so I could use my two B for this bit. But the right hand side is all in shadow. I do think using my P is best. Now, just watch me go down this cheek. Right. I want to blend this in. I'm not going in the direction of the shadow just yet, because I'm trying to get that curvature. I want the middle of this section to be lightest. But actually, the more I look at it, it's still going to be darker than the left hand side. This side of the cheek will be darker than this side. I just want to shade that all in. I might use my two to get the grain a little bit smoother because B is really soft. The two B would just help soften that grain, make sure it's nice and sharp. Good, then what I want to do is shade with the direction of the line. I'm trying to blend this edge in a small space. It's just a half a centimeter here. Just trying to blend that in all along there. It's all about pressure. If I press hard, I'm going to get some really strong lines. If I too light, nothing's going to happen. I see a lot of people pressing really light. Nothing happens for ages. I'm like, oh, just wasting your time, like don't be afraid to make a mistake. Always push a little bit harder. Then I just want to make sure this shadow is super, super dark. Because again, it is in black. I need to push that as dark as I can go. I've basically done a rehearsal stage. I'm all right, this is where the shadow is. And then I'm like, okay, I'm ready to do it now. I'm ready to shade it in, but it can't be quite nerve racking. Let's push that cheek in. Okay. First of all, I want to work on the nose a little bit just to keep working around that cheek. First of all, I'm looking for this little shadow that comes out with the bottom of the nose. Then it has a bit of a soft edge, so I'll follow that direction of the line. Very small blend on that side. Then this whole part of the cubes bow, I think that's what some people call the top of the mouth. There's probably a technical term which I don't remember, blend in, trying not to make it look like a mustache, a home. And you'll do that by making sure that the right side is soft and it's blended in. And then it goes into the shadow under here. Again, the end is really soft, then that's really soft. Then here this is a much D. Then. Well, let's look in this shadow that I'd already drawn earlier, I'm just going to push that nose in. There's a little glow between the nostril and the shadow on the nose. Make sure you keep that little glow because that shows the viewer that there's a hole inside this little mountain on the face, little nose hole. Just make sure the glow isn't too light. Pop that shadow on there. Then I'm just moving up a little bit just to blend this nose wing in. Again, I'm going in the direction of the line. I can see that just under the eye could be a little bit darker. Blend in a little bit there as well. This is far too light now, we can just pop a little bit of shading in there. Nice is really starting to pop forward. Okay, Then just on these little very small blend here, I just want to make sure the top of the nose has a bit of shade down there. The mono bro, this is always a tiny bit darker than the rest, but it's not really dark because if you make it too dark, it will literally look like a mono brow moving up into the forehead. And then if I start going around to the side of the head, mainly trying to get rid of all that texture had just now, but also just add a very light layer of shading. And then let's just look at this shape. This shadow here comes into the middle of the pupil, which is there was really far away. I can bring that shadow out here. And then just start to make that gradient go across there. And it goes all the way down to the eyebrow iconic eyebrows. Should I say we want to make sure we do them well? Where does the eyebrow light come up to? Just beyond here. Probably got that in the right place. Could Okay. I think actually the head, the hair line is a bit more round, which is fine because the hair is going to be black on this side. Anyway, my pencil tried to break, let's see if I can use the lead before it breaks completely color in the ear, it's gone. The ear shows there is a small glow between the cheek and the ear. That means the ear needs to be completely black. The hair can be black. But then this glow that I've left, it's still really dark. It's probably number nine on the value scale. Okay. Sweet. Let's add a few of the eyebrow hairs, so I'm just going to use a sharp to, I want to really think about the direction of the hairs you see. They're just poking out at the top there. And then I don't want them to be perfect because eyebrows are not perfect. Some of the hairs will come from above. I can leave a little gaps in there as well because it'll just show a little bit of the highlight. I can add a few thinner has, just going across a few on fab. What I want to do now, and I will speed this up, I want to go over with my two just to really refine any edges crisp. Anything up if there's any texture that looks quite grainy this one, as well as the two H which we will end on, but this one will just help to even out the surface without scratching the paper. Just go over this now. Include the chin as well. We haven't done any work on the lips. Maybe we could do that next week because this side was quite big. We're just going to work on the right side of the face today. Try and soften the edges and try and get it to a place where like, you know what, it is starting to come together. Keep working on it. It does take a long time. If you try to do this in 10 minutes, then I'd be quite interested to see it. But this give you a treat for the week. Give yourself half an hour every other day or something. And just say, I'm going to work on my drawing today. Feel free to pause the video and relook at it. Watch how I hold my pencil, how I approach, the shading, what J I'm after, shapes I'm looking at in the shadows. So we'll get in there one more week and then our face will be Don Zed. It's looking quite good. Okay, so we've done a lot of work today. We've worked in the dark areas specifically, and it looks really, really good. So our challenge next week is to look back in the highlight, see if we can get some soft shading in there and really bring our drawing to life. Well done this week, it's quite a challenging one, but I'm sure you've done very well. All right team. I'll see you next week for the final stage of this wonderful portrait. 53. Week 49 Portrait Stage 5: A team. Welcome to the final stage of our drawing. This is the fifth week we're spending on it. Which means this will probably be the best drawing that you've done in this whole year, the year that you've spent with me. In this session, we are going to look at how to apply the hair, how to finish the mouth. So this is going to be such an amazing portrait, ready for our final month, which is December. And trying to complete that journey from the beginning of the year when you've followed each video each week. So well, ******* down by the way. All right folks, grab your pencils and let's get started. Okay. Let's just do a little bit of work on their. There's not much of it, but what's the word? It moves quite a lot. Let me to draw that, I wanted to see where the lowest part of the hair was. There's a lot of wispiness in the hair. First of all, I want to do the easy things, which is the dark edges. We've done a lot of the right hand side on the hair. You don't have to draw every single one, especially if you just got like a random glow or highlight on one of the hairs. What we want to do is get the base of it. If you see like a medium shade, you want to get the base shade first. Like the edges back here are darker. I might just work in some chunks so that when I use my eraser, it's just going to be a bit easier to rub out, then this is a chunk and then we blend that in. Let's do some hair up here. I'm happy with the forehead height because I measured that earlier. Let's do some in the direction of the hair then. If you see any big chunks in the hair, big chunks of black, pop them in because it will help. I do find the hair the most boring part. It's not really interesting, you have to do it. You have to do the hair. There's some big chunks over here. I love it. When the hair is just really dark or like super straight, then you really don't have to stress so much. Okay? All of this is fairly dark, so we can go for a medium tone. Then these up here. Now I'm getting to a point where I want to start adding some directional hairs. So think about the movement, where are those hairs curving towards? It is starting to look really good and I just pop ear in actually just to balance out the face because that's really showing itself up. Just going to pop a little bit of shading in. You don't do much, to be honest. It's not what's going on over here. Just to make sure it is not too big, I just chop that off to use my two underneath here. And then there's a little bit, balances it off. And I'm just going to finally get rid of this grid. Forgot about that, to be honest. Okay, Fab, you actually might be very happy with this. I'm really happy with it. But for those of you that want to push it a little bit further, I'm going to do a bit more work on the hair. I'm using my two B, you see this flicky motion? I'm not coloring it in and I'm just trying to get in the direction of the hairs. I'm leaving some areas that it looks like we've got some white hair. I just want to look at each section, just see where the direction of the hair goes. Some of them cross underneath, some of them go to the right, some of them bend to the left. Just keep looking at the picture and seeing where the hair goes. And then you want to do the same from the base. Flick. Flick. Say I think she does have blond hair in this, it looks fairly blond because the highlights are very light. I also want to make sure I'm leaving enough of the streak. I'll just use my razor rubber, and this pencil rubber is so handy for this. Just try and push in some of these strands that go over there. But also I want to make sure that there's like a band here that's very light that's reflecting the light on her face. I just want to make sure that that band is nice and light. Then what you can do to do some lines are just hair like rather than shadow. Just use your two. Just go over those sections. Just add some more hair without making it. Super dark, so nice and hair. Okay. And then I want to blend this in because otherwise you end up having very blunt hair lines. So I'm actually going down towards the skin. There's a few hairs that go down as well. So we can just add a few of those really lightly. I can't see many. Then finally I'll go into the hair. Just pull out some sections so I'll find an edge. Then I'll just do some my triangular hair bits as if they're shadows. Just get them going up in there. I will be looking at some bits of hair in great detail, just a few of them just to see where we can add some darkness and show that the hair is going in a different directions. What else have we got? I think it's still on this strand. We've got another big chunky bit of hair there. Short one you see there. It looks like it's really overlapped, which is exactly what we're after. We got some taller bits of hair back over there there as well. Nice. And then this goes under there. Here's a couple of small ones then if there's an edge here, we can have some hair come out of the edges. A lot of triangles, really long triangles in the hair. Be brave. Oh, this is a blonde hair, so I'm up there, just got some good whisky bits. Let's do one out here. Let's go one across there. Brave with it. Be brave with it. Why not? This is one of our first portraits of the year. Really push yourself. See what you're comfortable with. Can you do one going down there? Wow. Well, that was a bit too brave to be get some thinner ones, one going out like that. There's a nice little shape here on there. The main thing is that if you are going to add these rogue ones do have a look as well. I don't wing all the hairs because if you don't know what shape you're trying to put on, then that's when you could run into trouble. And I've run into a bit of trouble because I can't reach my hair that much, but I'll just do a few. Okay, bang in. Let's just do a little bit of work on the mouth. And then pretty there for the wrinkles, I'd like to add that main one in the middle is always one. Pretty much in the middle. Then I'll just add a few like curves that bend either side. I'll use my two B for the next part, you basically want to leave these little highlights on some of them. This lip actually gets darker as we move across because obviously the face is curved. Use my B just to push that in. Then on the left side, this always like to soft a bit around there. Just blend that center in. Good. Then I'll just add some lines going up that pretty much will do. Just deciding how far you want to take it, you can literally spend hours and hours on these drawings, which is nice. It's a really good thing about it's nice to just switch off and do some drawing, but the more time you spend on it, the better it will be. That's like anything you do and I'm just going to ad a little bit of shading on this neck to make it feel like it's, it's more of a head on a neck. I could just try to blend this ever slightly. Okay, good. So what I'm going to do now folks, if you're on patrion, you will see how the next stage will look. If not, if you're on new tube, then I'm afraid you'll have to go to Patrion to do the rest. But what you want to do for this stage is use your two and just try and soften any texture. I will show this video on Patri, otherwise I think you should be very, very happy with what you've done. Well done, This is a challenging portrait. And to be honest, portraits are very, very hard, but you learned so much from them, So I am really proud that you've stuck to the end, and I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope you keep drawing portraits and follow our next portrait tutorial, which will be ourselves, because that was the challenge that we set at the beginning of the year. So get your portrait ready and I'll show you next week how to start it. See you later, folks. 54. Week 50 Self Portrait Stage 1: Okay team. It's the final few weeks of our yearly drawing challenge. And I actually cannot believe I've been doing videos for 50, 50 weeks. This is the 50th week. In this session, we are going to do our own self portrait. Remember, we started the year with the self portrait just to see where it was. And then we followed the videos to see if each week we can improve your drawing skills just by drawing, by looking at loads of different techniques. In this one, I want you to have a picture of yourself printed. It's way easier to draw printed because then you get to measure it and get really involved. For this session, we're only going to measure where the features are because it deserves time, even though it's the most boring part. But it deserves time. We need to do, choose a picture that you like. It could be a good one, could be a bad one. Smile, don't smile. Teeth are very hard, but I've chosen a picture that was taken by the lovely Nyle. Maybe look great, I'm going to use that one, but it does have teeth. Grab your pencils and let's get inside. The first thing we need to do, obviously, is figure out our orientation. This is my portrait and I am tilting my head over to the right and side. My chin is pointing left and my head is pointing right. I need to get that angle. I can literally transfer if I want or can say to myself, if I had a clock going around here at the bottom, what would the time be if that's 12:00 and that's 03:00 We're probably looking at 12:45 Any of you who are architects, you might be thinking, well, what is the angle of this? I honestly don't know. I am going to try and just transfer it over now. Obviously, you might move it in the transfer so I can just check. Remember I'm going from the middle of the eyebrows to the middle of the chin. If I put that there and there, then try and keep that fairly still. There we go. That angle is pretty much bang. I'm just going to over extend this line because it's better to have too long then too short. Now with the rule of third, remember we go from the top of the hair line to the eyebrows, eyebrows to the nose, and the nose to the chin. It is tilted, so we have to be perpendicular to this orientation line. If I take the easiest angle, it's going to be between the eyebrows and transfer that across. We should be able to see if this is perpendicular or not. You'll see very easily if that line was straight. We have a big wide angle here and a smaller angle there. We need to make sure it's perpendicular to here. What I'm going to do now is just measure my third. I always like to start at the chin. I get my thumb to go right there under that. And then I use this part of the pencil, not the arch, because that's less accurate. I go for where the arch touches the side of the wood, and then I say, okay, this is my chin. I go over here, I make this mark, make sure I'm happy with the distance between the chin and the bottom of the paper, obviously because the face is twisted a little bit. We have a bigger side here and a smaller side there. I make sure that I'm putting this in a good place to the next thing I want to do is get the chin. I put my nail here where it's at the bottom of the nose and I put this roughly in the middle of the eyebrow. Then I want to take that across, do that little line. Then finally, I want to go from the middle of the eyebrow roughly to the hairline. If this was going round, we would be about here, Let me that. Okay. Then what I want to do is get these lines over, extend them. It might feel weird because we're like, oh, we usually see people face on, which is true, I'm seeing this face on, but I've turned my head, so that means these lines are perpendicular. Let me just get the rough angle and then transfer across and see if that is the same angle. Okay, good. So I can just tie that up. Okay, this is portions of my face so far. The final thing I'm going to do is figure out the width of the face. I will do that by taking the bottom of the chin measurement. This one is the most accurate because there's an obvious line where the chin ends in an obvious line where the nose starts. Once I figured out the middle to figure out the height, I'm going to rotate from the nose, actually from the tip of the nose and see whether it is on this pencils that is here. If I take that across, actually I'll put that there, but I can also double check that my measurements are right if I get this measurement down there. Rotate. That actually it's probably just there for those of you who have done the previous drawing, you'll know that a small change in measurement can actually be quite catastrophic for your drawing. It's good to always double triple check. Okay, I'm going to go for the left side. I'll take this measurement and then I'll turn that around again. I'm going for the middle of the tip there. Then we have the one and a fifth, probably. It's roughly there. I'll go back and take this measurement, and then we'll go one place by pencil. There's a holder, one and a fifth. This should dictate where my cheek is there on the horizontal line. I'm just going to make a very rough sketch of my chin just to give it a little bit of something to sit on. Okay, there we go. Then let's go from the eyebrows to the edge here. So we want to figure out what it is horizontally as well. Again, always go back to my anchor and then find roughly the middle of the eyebrows. We are roundabout there. What would that be? Just under a quarter there. Get this measurement. This is the eyebrows that goes there. Then that goes out a tiny bit down, tiny bit back to the chin. As a way to dramatize the only subtle, subtle subtle curve, there we go, Fab. Then I can see the next bit just by eye because the hair obviously is going around here. Then I can actually just figure out where the hair is that is here. Everything's roughly in here that I've measured so far. Take that measurement, make sure it doesn't change in transit. Then it's roughly there. My hair is going to be there. Then where does it there? And then let's go for the left side. Okay, What am I doing? I'm going for the middle here. There's 1.6 maybe. Okay, then we go 1.6 Okay, cool. I'm just going to attach to that. Then I'm just going to round this off because it's just a rough shading at the minute. Always look so weird at this stage. That's what you want. We want it to not even really look like a face, but it is accurately measured. Let's now try and find the eyes and the mouth. Maybe we'll get a little glimpse of it looking like a face. Okay, The next thing I want to do at this stage is just figure out where my irises are. Then the mouth, who? A picture where I'm smiling and I have teeth. It's fine. It's fine. It's going to be good practice. You don't have to choose a picture with teeth. Okay. So actually I'm getting this measurement and then I'm popping it in there. And then I'm just saying, okay, how far down is the iris? Iris to Iris's roughly there. And then check that, check that, and I've got the mark put, then the top. Okay, It's roughly there. Then, you know, for the mouth, I'm actually going to get the top that's really small, then I'm going to go for the bottom finally in that white bit, the mouth is huge. It should all be in there. So I'm just going to go by, say we've got the top lip that should be bigger and then we have the teeth, let's just extend that just to make sure when we're drawing it's not going to be too flat. Then there we have it. There we have the measurement of the portrait. Okay, well done. Not the most interesting part of a portrait. Also, not the only method that we can do, But I want us to apply this method because that's what we practiced last month and it's something we're a bit more familiar with. It is also a bit more accurate in how we can draw our portraits. Well done and persevering this week. Next time we are going to apply all the shapes and then we're going to start our base layer of shading. Really excited to start that, because then we finally have something that looks like a face. Well done, and I'll see you next week for our penotimate session. 55. Week 51 Self Portrait Stage 2: Okay team, this is week two of your self portrait. This week I want us to focus on drawing the outline of our features, measuring it, and making sure we're happy with the placement. And then we're going to do a wash of gray over the whole thing so that it's not white. Because even though I have white skin, I actually don't have that much pure white on my face. Grab a pencils and let's get started from last week. We measured the rule of thirds, so the forehead, the middle, the bottom. We figured out where the irises are and where the mouth is. We can use our guide to figure out where to put our eyes. Now, as soon as we've been measuring sight size, that means we're taking the measurement and we're transferring it easily across there. We can do the same with the eye, If I just familiarize myself with the width of the face. If I go from here to here, just double check that this is the same size as this, perfect. Then I can figure out where my eye is. It might actually work backwards. I'm going to go for the inside of the eye because obviously you've got the skin that folds out and then you've got the skin that folds in. I'm going to go for the bit that folds in, get that measurement, pop that here, then that will be where it folds in. Now, it might not be on the same position as the iris, because obviously these can move. I'm just going to make this a little bit longer, then I'm going to get the width of the eye, if I take that and then go here, that is the size of the eye. Now often your eyes should fit in the middle gap. The mono brow, The same amounts of this one, actually just a little bit bigger the gap. If I take this measurement, go here, and then it's a tiny bit bigger. Let's say this other eye starts there. If I take this measurement from here to there, then that should be where the other eye ends. It feels very weird because obviously you've got this massive piece of cheek, but my head is twisted. I have to trust the system and see what happens. Okay, let's do the same wire measuring. Let's do the same for the mouth. If I try to familiarize myself with the center, which goes from the chin to the eyebrows that's there. Then I can measure from this mouth, here we go, Middle of the mouth there and the left side. That will be a different size because the face is twisted. Let's get that here. Okay, we really do have a big mouth. Don't fab. Then let's get the nose again. Familiarize myself with the middle because this is in the middle of this line. The nose is actually moved slightly to the right because we have the twist in the face. I'm sick of saying the twist in the face, but because the nose comes forward, it is a little bit more twisted. Okay, then I can just check that if this is my central line, I can check this to see whether the edge of the nose is that distance from the eye that looks huge. Probably just that wrong there. So I think that feels a bit better. Then let's check this edge parallel to that orientation line. That one is pretty much in the corner. Okay. Maybe slightly off of both of those, but okay, good, That feels good. Now I'm going to just draw the outline and do this on yours as well. Just think about if this is the line that goes for our pupils, what can I see underneath? Can I see more of the eye underneath? Or if I pop that on top, can I see more of the eye on top? That looks so creepy. Keep doing this and keep checking as you're going. You've got your measurements, you know they should fit inside here perfectly well. I just need to make sure I've got the right spaces from the top and the bottom. It will take some time. I'm just going to speed this up, but I will talk over it as well. Now with the, I think I might have said this in our last session, but we always tend to overdraw the eyes because for anyone that wears makeup, we make our eyes look bigger. We put eyeliner, we put scar. And it gives the illusion of these huge, huge eyes. When we are drawing, we tend to draw them so big. And then at the end you're like, what's wrong with my drawing? And it's because you've done these gigantic alien eyes. Which I am guilty for as well. I've done that. Just watch out for the size. And then try and check where your lines curve. Gosh, this looks absolutely terrifying. The thing is, I have learned a hard way, that you just have to trust the system. You have to go through the bad stage in order to make it work. If yours looks like this creepy rag doll from 1990s TV show, then you're doing it right. Look, trust the system. China, trust the system. All right, let's just add a bit of stuff around it just to get rid of like the freakiness of it. If you have hair, just start drawing like that big shape we go. We don't want to worry about shading too much at this stage because it's boring. Well, the hair shading is boring, But I've got straight hair, so hopefully it won't be too crazy. I did add a few curls that day. Okay, good. All right. Even like, is this really going to turn out like me trust, trust the system. Trust the system. Before I commit to anything else, I, well, I'm going to take a couple of measurements just to double check the size. I'm going to go from the chin to the hair line. It's obviously, it's a little bit trickier because quite a bit shed. I'm just trying to get that on the same line. I think that's around there. Let me go from the hair line here. Okay. So that's a tiny bit off. To be honest, I do feel like either this is too big or this is too small, it might just extend that a little bit. That feels a little bit better. Otherwise, my face just looks quite squashed. Okay. Now I look like a five year old version of myself. Okay, then let's across the top lip, Let's check that side across the top lip, that is perfect. Actually, the top lip a little bit straighter. That's going to need a lot of work. All right. Let me take from the irises, the width from the hair line. Iris. Okay. So that's from the hair line that goes hair line. Iris G, hair line. Irish. Perfect. All right. Let me check from the right edge to the left eye. Right edge. Okay. Right edge to the left eye. We have just about missed that quite a lot. Let me double check that. Always double check. Triple check if you can. To the left. To the skin skin. All right. Okay. Yeah, it's not out. Okay. Okay. Maybe that's it. Make sure you double checked your measurements. I think this is playing up a bit because I've probably gone too flat and actually that line goes up. So let me just change this and then that will give me a bit more space for the, for the chin. I feel a little bit, a bit more realistic. So there's the corner of the mouth is big enough. Then down here, that's in the right list. Let me check in the middle of the iris that a little bit in there. Yeah, that's a bit better. Okay, I'm just going to leave those creep teeth and I'll just check. So that ends just inside the ah, inside the iris. Would that be better? Let me check the width of this. Okay, Maybe that can move ever so slightly. Okay, cool gosh, I really need to measure, right? So I am going to remove my guidelines. Please do the same on yours, and then we're going to start with our base layer. At this stage, the more you look, the more you see. Things will change and adapt as you're tweaking in line or looking at it a little bit. That's what happens when we work from big to small. Things are always changing. My drawing right now isn't permanent. It's going to change quite a lot. Before I get to the end and I'm already starting to see some things are really out of place, which I actually won't realize until way later on in these videos. Let's continue. Okay, so let's start on the shading. So what I want to do first of all, is I actually want to get rid of all of the white. So I'm just going to throw down a very simple shade. The only thing that's white on my white face are some highlights on the lips, the teeth, and the iris. That's the only thing I'm going to avoid on yours. Just see if there's any actual white things. And just avoid those. But everything else can be at least a shade two or three, I would imagine. I've not even seen it. And I'm just dictating what the tones are on your drawing. All right. Just to make it nice and even I'm going to go in a second direction as well. Okay, cool. I've got that on. What I'm actually going to do this time is also add a dark layer for the hair, because I want to start to set the tones and to see the skin as it should be. I'm going to grab my dark pencil. I'm just going to throw some on there. Let's start with the neck. I know that this is going to be the thing is if I want to rub this out, nothing near it is white. If I do mess up, it's really not a problem because I can erase it, and then I try to pop it back in. Let's speed this up. Do the same on yours. It's going to look much better than this creepy thing that we have in front of us. That's it for this stage. Next week we're going to be looking at how to refine the shading even more. And it's still things that you can apply to your drawing, even though it's my face and my drawing. I'll see you next week for the final class of this year. Can you believe it? What the hell well done? And I'll see you next week for the final session. 56. Week 52 Self Portrait 3: Folks, this is the final week. This is the final week that we've been working all year for. In this session, I'm going to show you how to start your shading in detail. I'm going to fast forward a lot of it because we're drawing different pictures. You won't be drawing what I'm drawing, but you might be able to learn from what I'm doing. Grab your pencils. Let's get started and just see how we can finish our year off with a bag. This picture isn't super dynamic in terms of lighting. We have a bit of shadowing under here and around the eye a bit in that eye. Then obviously we've got these two and the lips and iris itself. What I attempted to do is just start to whatever darker shading we have. I am using my B because I know it's not going to be shy in being, is it too dark? If you have a darker pencil, even if you're nervous about it, the pencil will hopefully do a bit of the work for you as I'm going through this redefining the lines, actually looking at them much closer and then just seeing what happens as I was going to say micromanage, micro, observe the details. I'll start with the eyes and just really softly start to add that in so I can't get a very light shade with my B. As I'm adding that, I can see that my eyebrows actually here is much lower. Let's get that in. Get a little general shade in the eyebrow, then let's redefine this eye. I'm not pushing too hard on the outline of the eye because I don't want the whole thing to have a really harsh black lines. Not all of it has eyeliner on. I want to make sure there's enough space for the actual eyeliner and the skin, so I can just draw the eyeliner on. But I don't tend to go all the way down to the tear duct. The eye liner does have to be very black compared to the tear duct. Then classic look at the end and I'm going to leave the eyelashes for later on but for now the lid is much stronger then there is shading in here. Then let's just go back to the tear duct, open that up again, really look at the angle of these lines. How much do they curve darker they, how thicker they go. Leaves a little gap because you can actually see underneath there. And then let's get my Iris. Let's get the people. This part should hopefully help it look less creepy. If it doesn't, maybe I've just got a creepy face. I like to think. I don't. Sometimes it can look creepy. Okay. Stop talking about yourself as a creep China, then let's make sure this high light is left white because it's quite small. I don't need to add a huge amount of detail, but I do want to shade it going in towards the. And then I'm just going to add like a few good and then it does have a bit of ground beneath, but not too much. Should probably use my Tb for the white. Let's get a little bit of grain there just to show that it's round. Okay, good. That looks way nicer than this. Creepy. Okay, Push that a bit darker. All right. I'm going to work my way across because it gives me another chance to double check the measurement. So I think about, okay, there's a shadow. There's a light bit, dark bit, light bit, dark bit, light bit. Got it. So have a look on your face and see if you have the light bit. Dark a bit. Light bit. It should just help you to get some placement on there as well. Especially because there's not really anything in between the eyeballs. Nothing like that anchors you. It's just shading that changes really softly. So it's super, super subtle elephant in the room. I know something's wrong with this, you know something's wrong with it. I actually don't realize until next video. Actually the head is way too big for the hair. Just ignore those features for now and we're going to discover them together a little while. So once you've done your eyes, I want you to spend a bit of time just adding some details on your skin. So really think about where the shading changes, where it's a subtle difference between, you know, value two, value three. And that's going to start to make your face pop. Remembering all these techniques that we've looked at really slowing it down and focusing on all those minor details. And then we will look at the mouth together and I'll show you how to do the teeth. Now it's your turn. I'm going to speed up my drawing so that you don't have to listen to me talk to myself. I want you to give yourself a lot of time. Try and draw your features, your nose, your eyes After this better version, I'm going to show you how to approach the teeth if you have them. If not, you're at a really good stage just to sit and focus, put some music on, put some trash TV on, and focus on a drawing. You'll just notice that I'm pushing the darker things much darker. And in the mouth, I've just done a very light shade for the lips, but I'm also doing a bit of darkness in the corners. Because as you can see by my smile, and this happens for everybody smiles. The corners are the darkest. But it does feel quite scary because you're starting to commit to the teeth. Let's do it. Let's adds and dark it, okay? Teeth are terrifying, my friends. They are absolutely terrifying. We don't want to make them too dark because that's when they look scary. But we do need to show a high contrast between the teeth and the lips to make them look white. If you look at the picture, they're actually not white at all. They have tiny little flecks of white. But really, really not much. My first priority is to make sure that the lips are dark enough. It just gives me another chance to make sure I'm happy with the shape of the lips. I can see that I need to make it a little bit more space the teeth, so I'll just open them up and then that looks better already. Let me make sure these go darker in the corners then that's definitely a little bit darker. There's a bit of a high light, but then you should be nice and round. A little creases like a liping. That will do for now. I'm going to bring in my eight just yet. Just yet. Going to go back to the two B, Let's figure out how far along this dark patch comes. It is actually quite wide. I'll mark that off, just my two. And then let's just shade that in a little bit more. Then the next is quite dark. It's darker at the bottom and lighter at the top. I'm showing that that is set backwards. The next to that is lighter, but I just need to make sure that the curve is good and then I've probably gone too dark on that line. In between, I'm looking for where my shadow is. My shadow is on the left, my high light is on the right. Okay. That will do that. Then the next one, the tooth comes all the way down, it goes up here. My high light is on the right. So let me make sure, rub that out. Let me go. The shadow comes from the left. Now the front teeth, we're looking at values 12, possibly three, but really not much at all. Let's get this down there. My next to that needs to be a bit longer than what I originally drew it as go down there. So the bottom part can be darker. I'll need my eight B to go in that absolute black shadow. Then my two B just to make that nice and blended. That's probably too dark. Actually, lighten that up and make sure the right hand side is the lightest. Okay, we have a bit of gum in between these two, which means there's a bit of gum, but there's also a little highlight. I'll just leave a bit of white. And then on the next gums darker than the leave of white. Okay, Tiny, tiny outline there. All right, that'll do. Let's move to the next tooth again. It's a little bit longer then maybe bring that down a tiny bit for the gum shade that in. I can see there needs to be a bit more contrast with the top lip. I'll use my B, make that bit darker. That actually it really helps with the whites of the teeth. And I can see that the bottom teeth are all darker than the lip looking okay. I think this tooth just needs to open up, So let's round off, there's nice round corners. These are filed especially for in visiline. However much that cost need to make sure that you draw exactly the same on your paper. Okay, get that gum. Right tooth just looks a little bit too rectangular. File it upwards sometimes drawing the next part on it helps to give you a bit of perspective. Let's just do a little bit of these gums and then the next tooth. So actually you open up a bit more better can get the eight B in there. That feels nice, it's coming together. It's only like a millimeter change in whatever you are. It makes a huge difference. Like these teeth were too bad, but they just weren't my teeth. This is why doing the big shapes then coming back to it help give you a bit of fresh eyes almost to see where the errors are and it makes it easier to fix. Make sure underneath all these left teeth they've got these tiny little black bits. And then fang on 23. So this one should be darker. One that sets back the lip will come out shadow, say that side actually. Then one has a few highlights. Okay, That's pretty good. I can see a few highlights. I can see that this is round, it goes darker as we move back darker, as we move back, the lines in between aren't too aggressive. That's the key part with the teeth, is make sure that the outline doesn't stand out too much. There will be a small shadow, but it won't be a harsh outline. See how you get on with your teeth. 57. 31: Okay, team. So for those of you on Patriot, you get to see the finished product. First of all, I realize that my head is way too big, so I just want to tighten that down a little bit and then just work on the shading around the face. I just want to make sure it's not totally flat, so I need to add a bit of darkness around the features. And then I'm going to work a lot into the hair, so make sure I've got strands, I've got highlights, and I've got that annoying bandana. I should have shouldn't have drawn something with a bandana, but somehow we get it on. Then I just want to work on the hair, make sure the shading is looking nice. Do a quick measurement to end. And there, there we have it. I'm pretty pleased with it, the hare's quite annoyed. But I think that'll do. I think that is fine. All right, team, thank you so so much for following me on this journey. I hope the extra bit of video helped just to see how you could make yours that extra bit more realistic from the previous one. Congratulations and thank you so much for following me on this 52 week course to improve your drawing skills and help you feel more confident. If you want to send your artwork, please feel free to send it to me. I'm very excited to see that. And if I don't hear from you, I can't wait to see you in the next year. Well done, team and I'll catch.