A Practical Approach To Drawing

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Mark Hill, and I'm a fine artist living in Southern California. Today I'm gonna be showing you a practical approach to drawing from observation. Now, what that means is is we're literally gonna take something in front of us and translate it to a piece of paper along the way. I'm gonna give you a couple of different rules and methods that's gonna make that deconstruction process a little bit easier. So whether you've drawn before or have no experience or a lot of experience, hopefully you'll be able to take something away from this. Now I'm going to be drawing from a plaster cast something that you would typically see in a traditional art school. No, by no means have to go out and find one of these or purchase one. And you really can use anything that you have lying around the house. More importantly, find something that is going to keep you interested in drawing, and it's gonna allow you to come back to it, you know, for several hours as we move forward, the main goal of the class is to really end up with a nicely finished linear drawing. There's many many stages from start to finish with the drawing. But what we're going to be doing here is just isolating it down to just the very beginning . I find by doing that, it's a little bit easier to focus on one thing at a time, and it becomes significantly less overwhelming. And I think by doing that as well, you're more likely to stick with the drawing for the long run. If you can really just take it one chunk at a time before we get started, I'm gonna talk a little bit about my set up in the studio as well as some of the materials I'll be using throughout the drawing. And as you do them, go ahead and upload your projects. That way I can see them and even give you guys a critique, no matter where you're at. Skill wise drawing is really just a matter of just constant practice, so don't feel bad if things aren't making sense right away or aren't looking as good as you'd like them to. You just got to keep going and follow the approach because that's what I've seen, at least for me in the past, worked the most consistently thanks for watching 2. Materials: So before we get started with our project, I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about materials. These are just some basic tools that you can use to get started, and you don't necessarily have to have everything. Uh, if anything, use it. Use whatever you have on hand, don't feel the need to go out and buy a bunch of stuff that you may not end up using. But I'm going to talk about what I'll be doing. So I'm basically just using graphite pencils, Um, primarily in h lead throughout most of the drawing a swell as an HB and to H. Now I can pretty much get everything I need from those three leads. You don't need some of the softer leads like a four B or a six B. Nor do you need harder leads like a four H or six h. You can get pretty much full that are. You range out of these three leads if you were gonna model a drawing, so no need. They also use just a plastic eraser that I like to go ahead and sometimes cut into little chisel shapes so you'll see it kind of cut it a sharp angle there on, and that's just a good general eraser to eliminate some lines, and it's pretty good about not leaving any ghosted lines. Kneaded Eraser is another main tool that'll be using on these air. Great, because you can kind of shape them to a specific point and use them pretty much everywhere , and they allow you to get into really tight spaces. You could also roll them up into kind of like these really like flat Tootsie Roll shapes and kind of rub them against the drawing. And that makes that's good to kind of just lighten lines in a very large area. These little pencil erasers air also really nice for tight spaces because they allow you to not have toe worry about a big, big eraser taking out more than you wanted to. So these air really handy as well. One of the thing I like to do is I do like to sharpen my pencils in a different way, and so what I do is I just take a straight razor right here. Be careful, uh, and just trim a little bit of the wood way so that lead is exposed and then I'll take a sanding block here and just rub the pencil against the sanding block. Makes a nice fine point. And what it does is it allows me to see my lines a little bit better as I'm putting on the paper versus if I just had a short pencil tip. Sometimes the wood of the pencil can get in the way, and it's harder for me to see. So I like doing that. And, um, I've been doing that for a long time, and I enjoy it. You don't have to do that. If anything, try it. If you haven't and just do what feels comfortable outside of that, that's pretty much all the tools you really need. Um, now, if you're curious about what you know in terms of brand of pencil, um, you know, it's not important, but I really like these Tom Bo pencils, Um, and it's their monoline. Um, if anything, I just found the leads to be really consistent. So I've used those for the last several years, and the last thing I wanted to talk about was drawing paper. Now there are a ton of different kinds of paper out there that It could be a little overwhelming if you're not sure what you're looking for, or just the fact that there's too many choices. So to take a little bit of the guesswork out of it, I'm gonna go ahead and recommend this paper. Here. It's a 400 Siri's drawing paper from Strathmore that is very easy to find, whether online or in the arts and crafts store an art store. And it's not terribly expensive, either. The nice thing to is is that the paper has a nice smoothness to it. It's not too rough. Your pencil can erase very well from it. And if you wanted to, you could take your whole drawing from start to finish on this one sheet of paper. So this is a good, versatile paper to use for a lot of different things, and it's probably one of my favorites. Teoh, start my drawings from the initial stage. Outside of that, that's pretty much all our materials. Um, hopefully you have some of them, and you don't have to go out and buy a ton of stuff because that's the last thing I want anyone to dio so thes air. Just some suggestions. You don't have to use these, um, use what you have, and, uh, that's about it. 3. Setting Up: before we begin, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about what I'll be drawing. This is a plaster cast that you would typically see at a traditional art school or in a telly, a type school. And most of the first year, students would be spending quite a bit of time working from these before moving on to a live model. Now, you don't have to have one of these and don't feel obligated to go out and buy one. They are a great tool if you do have something like it. But more importantly, find an object that you like that will keep you interested in completing a drawing. Any sort of still life objects can be great, Aziz, long as you're interested in it. Now I'm gonna be drawing from an easel, and you don't have to have one of those toe, you know, to get started, you could use a sketchbook. You could have a basic drawing board lean against a wall, find whatever is comfortable for you. The main thing here is we wanna have our object lit with a single light source. We don't wanna have, you know, multiple light sources or any sort of ambient light lighting the object, we'd wanna have one sort of bright light that we get these really nice shadows on the object itself. They're not gonna be terribly complicated shadows or anything like that. And, uh, modeling shadows isn't necessarily what we're gonna be going over in this project. But it does add some visual interest. And even as you do your drawing, it's kind of nice toe. Have those in there. Now I have this place behind a black cloth that you can see here, but that's not necessary either. Just find a good, comfortable place toe, put your object and get it properly lit. And that's gonna be the main thing. The reason I do have an easel, though, is I like to be able to step away from my drawing board, um, at a good distance, and that allows me to judge my proportions a little bit more accurately. So depending on how you have your set up, whether it's an easel ah, drawing board or even just a sketchbook, it's a good thing to remember that you want to be able to get away from your drawing and see it from a distance. That way you can assess how the proportions air coming along as you progress. Um, other than that, that's pretty much the whole set up. Um, again, the whole point is to try and do this with very little materials in terms of either, you know, pencils or paper, but also, when you're set up to because everyone's, you know, sort of room that they have to work with could be very different sizes. Some people may have a big space, some not so much. So find a set up that's comfortable for you that you can continuously go back to. And, um, by making the space that you work in a little bit more inviting, um, it all just sort of contributes to making the drawing process a little bit smoother. 4. Beginning the Drawing: all right. So as I'm beginning my drawing here, I'm gonna establish just a few marks on the page just to help me get started. I'm gonna mark the top and bottom of roughly where I want my drawing to sit on the page. I may go in and out of these lines as I continue, but it establishes a general sense of scale for me to begin with. I'm gonna go ahead and just lightly sketch some lines to establish the sort of outer shape of the object I'm drawing. This is typically called the envelope, and it establishes an exterior silhouette to build into as you develop the drawing further . Now I'm gonna continue to sketch lightly as I developed the outer shape of the object itself. And I want to try and stay light as possible for as long as possible. That way, if I need to erase, I don't have to worry about getting these really dark lines out. One way of doing that is I'm going to be drawing by holding the pencil a lot farther back than you might be used to. But that makes it so that I can't really push down very hard and so that way I know that my lines are gonna stay light. If I were to try and draw the way I would use sort of like a writing tool or a pen or something odds are, would probably is press a lot harder and darker and be a lot harder to get those lines out if I needed to take them out. Now, as I'm establishing the outer shape, I'm going to go ahead and sort of begin the measuring process. I'm gonna be using a knitting needle here, and you can use any sort of long straight object. But what I'm doing is I'm holding that against the angles of the object that wake and try and translate them over to my paper. I'm gonna fully lock out my arm and not bending my elbow at all. That way I can measure from the object itself over to my paper and make sure that it's accurate. All double check one or two times just to make sure that I measured properly before I put a pencil mark down. So still just sketching the outer shape, looking for angles and just kind of going ahead and again staying light, but I want to just focus on getting some specific shape toe work into not gonna worry about the inside parts of the drawing just yet, But just get a nice exterior. Now, once I feel more or less comfortable with my exterior shape, the next thing is to start breaking it down a little farther. So now that I have a top and bottom, I'm in establish a halfway point. This is just gonna become another tool for me to use as I continue to measure and start flushing out the proportions of the drawing. Now, I don't have to necessarily. But sometimes it is. A good idea is that once I have 1/2 I may also go ahead and establish some quarters as well . So I would may in this instance go ahead and put another mark here and another mark here in that way. You know, I have something else to go off now, before I continue, I want to go ahead and check that half against my object here. So I'm gonna go ahead and take my knitting needle and place my thumb kind where I'm gonna see a halfway point now in a lot of cases you might not have a specific landmark to go off of, So take your best gas and cross reference it with your drawing and go from there. Now that I have the exterior roughly established, I'm going to start working inside. In this particular instance, I'm gonna go ahead and work towards the next closest thing, which is gonna be the outside of this ear here. The whole point is to work from outside in as you build your drawing up. You wanna work from large to small with all your shapes That way, you know, it's very easy to kind of get caught up in details, especially very early on, because details are fun and everyone likes that. But we really want to just still focus on big, simple shapes, big angles and gradually work our way towards the finer points. So I'm going to continue to develop the outside here and just roughly find, you know, the angles and everything. And once I have that established, it's gonna be a lot easier to start working further into the drawing. But I'm gonna take my time and try and, you know, get my lines as accurate as I can, and I will go back and refine a lot of them. But if I could be accurate the first time, I want to try and do that to save myself a little bit of work down the road. The whole point in these early stages is to sort of stay noncommittal. That way, if you do have to take something out, go ahead and do it right. Now is the time for that because your lines are gonna be light. And you know you have the luxury to do that now, before I get too far ahead. I did want to go ahead and take a minute to talk about the way I'm setting up the drawing. You may have noticed that as I'm putting lines down, I'm drawing very straight and very angular lines, and there's a very specific reason for that. When you draw a straight lines, it's going to give the drawing a stronger sense of structure. But it's also gonna do a few other things. In one instance, those straight lines are going to represent plane changes is something is turning in space . But what they also do is is the established points in the drawing. So as I go from one straight line to the next, I create a point and then another point. And as I continue to do that, it's going to give me a way of measuring things across the drawing as I go further. So as I'm building these straight lines, if I had to measure something from, let's say, top to bottom or side to side, I now have a very specific angle in which I could do that and I could hold up my measuring tool and check all those angles as I needed Teoh And those points are gonna act as little sort of, you know, Constellation Marks, if you will. But if I had to say, just drawing with a curved line, um, you know, and I was trying to get, let's say, a contour right from the beginning, it doesn't really give me anything to measure off of is just There's no points. It's just this really sort of organic curve, and that's really hard to kind of take any accurate measurements off of. So in these early stages, I want to go ahead and use these to my advantage, and that's gonna help me measure and hopefully make my drawing more accurate. And the nice thing is, is those really sharp lines that we have right now they're going to go ahead and start softening up as we start refining our lines in the drawing. Now, as I continue to build this out, I'm gonna go ahead and start working on some of the interior shapes. I have a rough sense of the exterior now, and I feel a little bit more confident moving forward, establishing the insides. I'll keep going with this for a long as I need to in these early stages because in the beginning you really got to spend a lot of time just measuring and you may not feel like you're putting as much down as you'd like, But as long as you're taking the time to measure and be accurate, the drawing will actually move at a very comfortable pace. I remember when I was first learning all this stuff that a lot of students were really obsessed with, drawing fast and getting as much done as fast as possible. But the more you learn, you realize that if you take your time, draw slow and measure. You're a lot more accurate. And in that sense you make less mistakes and end up drawing faster anyway, So take your time. Now, is that kind of start getting to these smaller shapes? You know, I have a rough sense of where everything is going to sit now. And so the majority of the time now is going to be double checking all my measurements, looking for smaller shapes to place in the drawing that are gonna allow me toe measure against other things. And really, from then on, it's gonna be a more about just refining the drawing, cleaning up little areas as I go. So I'll start taking my eraser and start trimming things down. Um, double checking. You know, my measurements. Probably several times. Uh, and then just looking for smaller shapes that are going to kind of give the drawing, um, you know, a little bit more accurate of a look toe. What? I'm what I'm actually seeing in front of me. You can see here, though, that for the most part, I've managed to keep everything fairly light. So if for whatever reason, I had to take something out, uh, it's not gonna be that big of a problem. And, you know, I'm not gonna lie. You know, I'm definitely already made some mistakes, and I've taken little things out here and there. Um, that's just the nature of drawing. You know, I wish my I was 100% accurate all of the time, but it just isn't so, uh, don't worry about if you have to take out big chunks of a drawing or anything like that. It's just part of the process continuing on. I'm gonna focus on some of the smaller interior shapes as well. Let's start drawing some of the shadows. Now, even though in this project I'm not gonna be going over shading or modeling of any kind, I'm still gonna put the shadows in there anyway, because they can give the drawing and nice sense of form by themselves. And they also create another thing for me to measure off of, which is always gonna be a benefit. As we continue forward. This doesn't mean that I'm gonna put in arbitrary detail or anything like that. But by establishing some of the smaller shapes, it gives me a better sense of how the drawing is shaping up. One last thing I wanted to mention before we finish this segment was the actual time it takes to do one of these. Now, even though we're watching a condensed version happen right now, doing one of these block ins should take several hours, depending on your skill level. And if anything, I just, you know, continue to say is to take your time measure and be careful and realize that this is the hardest part of a drawing. You know, you're establishing the basic proportions and the placement, and it's not easy and it takes a lot of practice, and it's something you just continually practice even as you get better. So definitely give yourself plenty of time and patience to do this, and we'll be moving on to the next step as we move forward. 5. Refining the Drawing: So at this particular stage, I feel somewhat comfortable with what I have established so far in the drawing. At this point, I'm going to be focusing on just really kind of small little things. So I'm gonna be adjusting angles, trying to clean up my line, work a bit, using my eraser a lot to go ahead and just come and get the drawing to just, you know, sort of a higher degree of resolution. So any excess lines that aren't really helping the drawing or anything like that I'm gonna try and take him out and really try and clean the drawing up. So that way I get a better sense of where it's headed before I move forward. And I'll stay in this stage for quite a while, Really, until I'm I'm getting to that point where I feel like the drawings finished. So it's a lot of revising, so you can see as I'm kind of moving along here. I'm basically drawing on top of some of the lines that I've already established, and that way I'm going to go ahead and just be a little bit more clear with with what I'm describing. So those rough lines that I began with. They're now going to get, you know, established a little bit farther, um, and just cleaned up in general. The nice thing is, though, is if we were careful in the beginning and we kind of, you know, we spent our time measuring and doing all the hard work. This stage can be fairly easy because we're just making little small adjustments here. There. That's not to say that, you know, there still might not be some mistakes in the drawing on, and that's okay, But if there are, you know I can at least get a better sense of where they might be because I have The whole thing established, I would say, is if you do find yourself, you know, either noticing mistakes or of any kind is go ahead and actually leave them in for now. Go and make the corrections that you want, Teoh. And by doing that, you're actually able to see the corrections that you're making. The one problem is, if is, if you do a race, everything sort of prematurely and you want to make a change. It's hard to see what changes you're actually making. If if you go ahead and take out the first thing that was wrong in the beginning, so I would encourage you, as you kind of maybe see little things here. There's leave those mistakes in. At first, go ahead and put in your new lines. And then afterward, once you feel good about the corrections, go ahead and take out the old stuff that you don't need any more. So I'm just going ahead in putting in just again small, little, uh, line changes reaffirming some other lines. Maybe a little bit more clearly. Um, if I was, maybe, you know, if they weren't is defined before. I'm gonna go ahead and do that now and you know, again, it's just it's just small little changes. And we're trying to go away from that early stage of just getting all the shapes established to now, being a little bit more committed and trying to really nail down any small changes that might occur in the forms. And I'll be going back and forth just between pencil and eraser and just cleaning up as I put in new information, taking out some of the old information and I'm gonna be going over the whole drawing doing that. So I would just, you know, generally, you know, work in the areas that I feel like I need some attention. But ultimately the the whole drawings. And I kind of received that sort of treatment as they get closer and closer to finishing areas off completely and just trimming little down, kind of want to avoid having some of my lines. Maybe be a little bit too thick here, so again was kind of just double check things just reaffirmed that. And so one thing I will do here as well as I'll kind of start using my eraser a little bit more here and drawing a little bit less. So I'll kind of shape my eraser toe like a little point and just allow me to get into tight spaces. That way, I'm not taking out big chunks, or I'll take one of these plastic erasers and actually just kind of cut it up to in the little pieces. That way, I have, like these little chisel shaped that allow me to just clean just small areas, and so I'll just kind of skim sort of my outer lines and just trim up little tiny spaces, and I'll go ahead and do that just about everywhere through the drawing. And the whole idea here is I want to just get down to this one really nice, refined, single line. And that way there's very little ambiguity about what information I'm describing, Um, and just try and make it really, really clean. So because the nice thing here is the cleaner Aiken, get this initial stage in my drawing. Wherever I decided to go after that in terms of if I wanted to model it or do anything like that, I have a nice sort of foundation to build off of. So I'm just gonna clean the drawing as best as I can again, just kind of trimming a little more. What ends up happening is I kind of spend more time erasing things and taking information out or cleaning it up. So I'm not actually using my pencil is much. And I'm not adding information so much is just resolving what's already there can just kind of cleaning up lines, making them a little bit more committed. And when im going and doing this, I kind of like toe, you know, I will kind of switch over to more like a writing tool style of drawing. And that's only that. Aiken sort of make sure that my lines stay really sharp and crisp, and that way everything is very clearly delineated. So I may often go back and forth and sharpen my pencil a little bit more frequently at this stage. That way, I know I'm getting a very, very clean line, so just making small adjustments, little angle changes and whatever you decided to draw for this project, you're going to reach a point where you're just focusing on these little tiny things in the drawing and, you know, spend as much time as you need to so that there's just everything reads just really clearly . So there's no mistaking that you know, the information that you're trying to describe. You know exactly what it is, and all the right things that need to be there are there. And you don't have any sort of, uh, needless detail or anything like that, but just the absolute necessary items that are going to really describe what you're trying to draw can. So I have, like my my pencils really sharp here and I'm just trying to zero in on little tiny areas and making sure that my lines are, you know, our really fine and not too thick, but just really specific and distinct on that way. I can go ahead and clean up what I need to with the racer as I continue on, um, and again just do that everywhere throughout the drawing, at this point in the drawing. I'm not really looking at my cast as much anymore. And I'm just trying to really focus in on my drawing and what I have on the paper and just again finalizing lines, going back and revising shapes if I need to. And more importantly to is that any area that I see, Um, if I have these really glaring thick lines anywhere, they're not very specific. So I want to try and fix those as best I can, cause if I have these thick lines, then it means that well, now I have an edge, and then so there's a beginning side and as an inside to that really thick line, and I want to try and take those out as much as I can, so I really just want a really razor sharp line that I feel confident about before moving on with the rest of the drawing. So I just focus in on on little small shapes. And, um, again, just kind of cleaning up and this park and take, you know, quite a while as well. So you want to, you know, spend a good amount of time resolving everything. The nice thing is, though, is as you kind of keep moving forward with this, you'll reach that point in the drawing where you just kind of know that, You know, I've done everything I can. I've removed any excess and, you know, now I have a very finish line drawing. And so at this stage is kind of where you can decide what you want to do with it. If you want to continue working on the same paper, if you want to transfer it, you know, to another clean sheet of paper and maybe maybe a nicer paper or anything like that, and then decide kind of how you want to finish the drawing. So but you will reach that point and, uh, and you kind of become more or less done with this block in stage 6. Finishing Up: So at this point in the drawing, I'm gonna just be going over little tiny areas, double checking everything once again. And we've really come to the point where I'm kind of about, you know, ready to wrap this thing up. Now, there might be some little things that jump out at me here and there, and I might continue to make small adjustments. But at this stage in the drawing, I've kind of, you know, I'm snit picking little tiny things. And what I would do at this point is I would start thinking about where I'm going to go to next. So in that case, um, am I going to continue on this particular piece of paper and start filling in shadows? Am I gonna transfer the drawing to a different sheet of paper or a different kind of paper ? Or even if I was gonna do a painting of this, you know, am I gonna transfer it to canvas? So those are the kinds of questions that I'm asking myself once I get to this stage in the drawing Now, depending on where your rat skill wise, um, you know this in it of itself is a very good exercise to practise. And this is how I begin any sort of long project, whether it's going to be, ah, portrait of figure, even of it's a drawing or a painting of any kind. This is how we begin everything. So, um, I'm really at this point, you know, we've solved all the problems in the drawing. And so the idea is is that if we've done all our work and double checked everything and measured that when we go to move on to the next stage, we sort of eliminated one, you know, sort of one thing to think about, meaning when I go on to start modeling my drawing. I'm not thinking about proportions as much anymore. I'm not thinking about measuring as much. Um, that's what I hope to sort of accomplish when I do these Ah, block in drawings like this. In that way, when I do decide Teoh go and model the rest of the drawing, I can focus strictly on that in That's about it. And so it becomes this sort of idea where we're slowly breaking the drawing down into very specific stages. And it just happens that this beginning stage is probably one of the more difficult ones to dio. And this is where everyone kind of gets a little flustered or where things start to go wrong. And that's okay. Um, if anything, you want to struggle through this phase because this is where all the measuring and all the work gets done, Um, as fun as it is to kind of move on and start shading, Um, if we miss a proportion or a measurement and then we kind of begin to start adding some tone and shade, it doesn't really matter, because the all of that would be sort of for nothing, because we have too many drawing errors with the beginning stage like this. So at this point, whatever you decided to work on for your project, whether it's still life for another kind of object of some kind, this is sort of our end goal here. We just have a very simple linear drawing. But everything's clearly defined and all the necessary information is there ready for the next stage? No, My goal with this class's is to basically approach the drawing process one stage at a time . That way it becomes a little bit more manageable in a lot less overwhelming. And you don't have to think about all these things at once when it comes to just proportion and measuring and then shadow and values and forms. And so, by isolating the steps, this way, we can focus on one thing at a time. The main thing I want to stress, though, is that this part of the drawing should take you a bit of time. So definitely don't try and rush this step. Because if you do so then as you kind of start to make progress, it's actually gonna slow you down quite a bit because you're gonna have to most likely go back and make corrections, and that becomes difficult in and of itself. So really spend a smudge time as you need. Ah, measuring, checking your proportions, double checking everything. Um, and you know, just just give it a lot of extra attention, um, in the beginning, and it's going to save you a lot of time as you go ahead and transition into start to doing shadows and ah, you know, modeling and things like that. Um, and I really can't stress that enough. I know in the past. When I was first starting, I had a lot of drawings that I just had to scrap because I rushed too soon to get to Ah, shading and stuff like that. And I didn't spend enough time on my construction, and I didn't measure enough, and, uh, you know, that's that's part of the learning process. But, um, you know, So go ahead and, uh, really spend a lot of time on this particular part of the drawing and learn to enjoy this part because as hard as it is, it is worth spending the time on, and so to finish up, I just wanted to show you guys some of my personal work, and this is kind of what this is leading to. So now, as I did these drawings, um, they are basically just finished finished drawings that I did when I was in school, and I started them the exact same way I've been showing you here. And when I was doing the construction for these, they all kind of started in this nice linear sense. And then I gradually built upon them. And even though that these air a little bit more complicated than what we've drawn today, Um, again, all the rules apply. So if it's a more complicated cast like this, or even if it's ah, portrait or a figure at some point, um, all the same construction principles we've been talking about apply to everything. So hopefully all this made sense to you, and you enjoyed kind of learning this particular approach and keep practicing and please share your drawings. That way I can give you a critique on him again. Thanks for taking the time toe. Check this out. And hopefully you enjoyed it. And you can reach out to me here if you'd like. And hopefully I will be seeing some of your work. Take care.