Intro to Graphite Pencil Drawing

1. Graphite Course Trailer: hi there Today, I'm going to teach you how to draw a simple image using graphite pencils. My name is Diane. I've been teaching art for 11 years and making art my whole life. We're going to work on this image today of a tree in a field with some fences, and I hope you enjoy it. So the skills they're gonna gain in this class are drawing a simple image from a photograph applying graphite to represent different values, values, meaning lightness or darkness and creating textures using graphite pencils. This class is meant for people who have never drawn or have rarely drawn, using measuring methods for people who've drawn FREEHAND and want more accuracy. And for anybody who's been frustrated with realistic drawing and just wants to learn to get their drawing the way they want it a little bit quicker, it's not for artists who want more of a challenge or for people who have some experience with graphite pencils, help you enjoy it 2. 1.1 Intro: hi there. Today. I'm going to teach you how to draw a simple image using graphite pencils. My name is Diane. I've been teaching art for 11 years and making art my whole life. We're going to work on this image today of a tree in a field with some fences, and I hope you enjoy it. So the skills they're going to gain in this class are drawing a simple image from a photograph applying graphite to represent different values, values, meaning lightness or darkness and creating textures using graphite pencils. I hope you enjoy it. 3. 1.2 mindset intro: So before we start drawing, I'd like to get you in the right mind set for the class. It's supposed to be really fun and light, so have fun wasn't Be light. Enjoy yourself. Have a cup of tea, a glass of wine. Have your favorite music playing whatever you enjoy. Secondly, I'd like you to focus on getting your measuring and you're drawing accurate in the beginning stages of the work so that you end up with a picture that you really like. That doesn't mean it has to look exactly like the photograph. In fact, I kind of encourage a little bit of distance from exactness. But it does mean that you have to be pleased with your drawing in the drawing phase before we start adding value. So take the time in the beginning to get the measuring correct. If you have to pause the video and do it a couple times, that's completely fine. Just take the time to do it correctly in the beginning, so you'll be really happy with the finished product. Let's get started 4. 1.3 Materials: Okay, so you're going to need some pretty simple materials for this class. First you need a piece of paper with a six by eight frame drawn on it. To match the size of your reference photo. You need a good eraser. I just have a cap Parisse around my pencil. That's perfectly fine or a separate eraser is fine. You need a flat surface to draw on. I have the table, and then my my paper is taped to another hard surface and you can tape it to the table or removable hard surface or whatever you'd like. A desk or a dining room table works just fine. And, um, you need the range of graphite pencils. So I'm gonna just talk about the pencils a little bit. Graphite pencils come in a range of values, values, meaning darkness is so for example, on this pencil here, you can look at the writing on it. I'm not sure if you can see it, but it says a bunch of words. And then it says, nine be at the very end. Nine b is telling you how dark this pencil is and how soft the lead is. The B stands for black. Some pencils will have an H on them. Like this one says, to H and that stand the H stands for hard. So it's just telling you that this lead is harder and lighter than this lead is that's softer and blacker. So, um, you're the middle pencil that you confined is called on HB, and that's the equivalent of a number two pencil, which we're all familiar was as you get higher and higher in the B range to be four b six B etcetera, your pencils are going to get darker, and the lead's gonna get softer as you get higher and higher in the H Range lips. That's supposed to be a four h six h and etcetera. Your pencils will get lighter and the lead will get harder, and you want to have a range of pencils you need. At least one agent wouldn't be for this class, and the further apart in value they are the better. So if you had, say, a six h and a six p urinate age and maybe that would be fine, are you know, six agent to be, or that they don't have to equate, but you want to have at least one of each. I have four. Um, I have a to H and an HB and a four B and a nine B, which is a good range. And I'm going to show you what the's looked like on the paper. And the reason you have these is so that you can create layers and layers of graphite starting with the lightest and layering on darker, darker as you go, and then you get a really nice realistic value range out of it in the end. So this is what the two H pencil looks like. It's very light. And if you press hard on it, it will leave dents in your paper because the lead is very hard, so you don't want to press hard with it. And then I haven't HB, which is you can see, is kind of significantly darker. The four B is even darker than that, and softer. And then the nine B is the darkest one. So we're gonna go in that order and you go ahead and just use your pencils in whatever order. Um, it makes sense for you, but you're gonna start with your lightest and move up to darkest. Lastly, you'll you'll need a pencil sharpener, likely because chances are your pencils will get dull, and then this is a really handy thing to have. It's just a white piece of paper with a little hole cut in the middle of it, and we'll show you how to use this as we're using it during the class. But it's to help you figure out if your values in your picture match the values in the reference photo. Just make sure that the paper you're using is absolutely white. It's not ivory or off white, because that will make a difference in how you're able to see the value. 5. 2.1 Comp Intro: Okay, so now we're going to start with composition and basic line. Drawing composition is just a fancy word for how things were arranged on the page. So we're gonna start with learning how to measure and putting marks on the page, and then we're going to put our line drawing on, and it's gonna be great. 6. 2.2 Getting Started: Okay, So to set up your area, you want your photograph parallel to your drawing. It's important that it's parallel because we're gonna be measuring off this drawing. And if it's askew, it's going to throw off your measurements. So I have mine tape down. You could do the same. And then my paper is taped to my drawing board here. Eso also I'd like you to just look at the picture for a minute and place yourself in that scene. Feel the weight in the presence of the scene. Think about the tree. What is the tree make you think about? Is it old? Is it young? Is it full? Is it sparse? Is it lonely? Looks like morning sun is hitting. It just kind of get a sense for the presence of the tree because that's gonna inform your drawing, which is part of the really pleasurable part of this 7. 2.3 Measuring: And now we're just gonna talk about measuring, so to measure, you're going to use your pencil as a tool. And since this frame is the same size is this frame all the shapes that we're putting on to this page, you're going to be the same size is what you see here. So I'm just gonna give you a quick little tutorial on how to measure before we go into our drawing. So I'm gonna use this as the false frame there, and what I'm gonna do is use the pencil and put the tip of the pencil the very bottom of the page. This is just to measure the space, but where where the tree goes. So I'm gonna put the pencil on the very bottom of the page and my thumbnail on the very bottom of the tree. Now it's important that you're holding the pencil in a way that you can pick it up off the page So you don't want to measure like this for example, cause I can't pick the pencil up like that. So I've got that space marked with my thumbnail and me to pick it up. Move it over, put it approximately where I think it is on my page and line my pencil tip up with the bottom there. Then I'm gonna mark where my some nail is with my other finger and make a mark. It's always a good idea to go back and double check if we're going for accuracy here just to make sure that you know your finger didn't move or anything, and it looks like that's a good place. The other thing we could do is measure from the side of the page to see where it is, horizontally in the frame. So I'm going to see where that edges with the tip of the pencil and then where approximately the middle of the trees with my some nail and see if I place that correctly and I'm barely off. It really doesn't matter that much, but I may as well move it over a little bit since I took the trouble to do that. And now we know the tree is in the right place, vertically and horizontally, so that's just how we're going to go about doing the measuring here. 8. 2.4 Background: and we'll start off with the background. Typically, it's best to work back to front and do your biggest shapes, first filling in details later. So I'm gonna measure how far the top of the hill is from the bottom of the page here and move it over to my page and make a little dot. That's where the hill is. And then it's kind of hard to tell here there's some trees, but I'm going to guess that the top of the hills about right there and I'm gonna measure the other side of the page, move it over, make a dot effort of the Eraser grounds and then in the middle is really hard to see what's going on because there's a tree there, so I can kind of see the top edge there of the hill. So I guess I'll measure where that is. Just this. Have another mark. It's not really necessary. But the more marks you make, the more accurate your drawing will be. So it looks like that feels about right there, and there is a large area here where I could measure I could measure from the side like that, or from the other side, but I'm gonna try to go right for the middle just to get an idea. If I placed it right, it looks like I'm pretty far off there. So I'm just gonna move it over, keeping it the same height from the bottom of the page. Oh, I should also mention I'm using a very dark pencil to draw the nine B. But you should be using your lighter pencil your two hr, your h pencil because you don't want your outlines showing through in your final drawing. The reason I'm using a dark pencil it so you can see clearly what I'm doing here. But the at the end, we're gonna have a very light drawing. I'm just gonna go back and lightly erased the line so that they appear lighter. So now that we've got the hill shape, weaken, draw it and it could be very loose, I'm going to dip down a little bit. You can kind of invented here it is. As I said, you can't see what's actually going on there, so that's fine. And now we'll draw a line for the base of the hill so we'll measure the right side first. and it looks like that ends up right there pretty close to the bottom of the hill that I measured. And then the other side will be right here. And that's mostly just a straight line. So I'm gonna just connect loosely. I don't want to actually be straight cause it's not really straight, so I'm certainly not gonna use a ruler. Just draw a straight line as you can or want to, and that's it for the background. We're not going to draw any trees. We're gonna put those in later with the pencils, but we don't have to draw in outline for them. In fact, it's bad to draw in outline for them cause you'll see an outline and you don't want to see that. You just want to see leaves later. So now we'll go to the tree itself. We're going to that same measuring we did in the example. Why? Measuring how far off the ground it is? Excuse me. How far off the bottom of the frame and how far away from the side. I'm trying to get right in the middle of the trunk there and right up to the edge of the page. and I'm a little further over to the left. I need to be a little further over to the left. And now that I've got where that is, I'm gonna measure. Let's see, I'm gonna try to follow the main trunk. So it's obvious that this is kind of the main trunk, but here it splits into a few pieces. I'm gonna follow this branch. I'm just choosing that branch and as a foundation, and that will pun intended branch off from there. So I'm going to see how far away from the bottom Mark, I just made the tip of that branches. I'm not going all the way out to these teeny little twigs. I'm just going out to where the tip of the branch ends and you can choose if you want to stop there or you can go a little further, a little shorter. Or maybe you want to stop at the elbow. The important thing is you have a definitive point that you're measuring to that you know where it is. So I'm gonna choose the tip of this this thicker branch, and that is the length and I'm noticing it's leaning a little bit to the right. So I'm gonna keep that in my mind and make it lean a little bit to the right. But that's just a guess for how it's leaning. I'm going to check that in a minute. I do know the length by measuring the length. So now we're gonna talk about a different kind of measuring, which is angle measuring. I'm gonna see if that's leading the right way. What I'm going to do is use my pencil again. But this time I'm using the length of the pencil and I'm putting it through the middle of the tree where my first dot is, and through the tip of that branch, when my last thought is that's the angle between those two dots to check it against my paper. I'm going to keep my elbow very straight and as seamlessly as I can. I'm gonna lean back and very slowly move my pencil over and lined up with my dots and I'm a little off. It looks like I need to make it lean more to the right. Oh, not by very much, but enough to move it. So that's where the new dots gonna be. I can still see my old dots. I'm gonna just double check that the length is still the same. Yep, it is. So now I know that the length is correct and the angle is correct. 9. 2.5 Tree Outline: And now that I've got that, I'm going to draw, Let's see, I guess we'll do the base of the tree. You can kind of do start doing it in different orders. So I'm gonna see how long the bases from here to about here, where I think it ends. It turns into a shadow at some point, but we'll just put the basic length down, and I'm gonna center it over that center mark because I know that's where the middle buzz. So now I'm gonna put a few marks between the beginning and end point. It's nice to have the beginning and end point down first as a foundation and then kind of fill in between rather than trying to get all the way up here piece by piece. Because if you do that and then figure out Oh, my angle was wrong in the first place, then you have to go back and do it all over again. So I'm going to go to this first elbow cause it just curves up and see where that is. How long that is. That is this long on. I'm guessing that the angle is right there, but I'm gonna check it. The other thing about angles is it's always a good idea, just like measuring distances to double check. Um, that looks right, but I'm going to do it again. Angles air particularly finicky to measure because our breath and a heartbeat kind of tend to throw them off. Plus, if you had any caffeine and are a little jittery, it's going to make it. It may. It may serve you off, too, so the more you double check, the better. Another way you can double check an angle is by checking the distance so I can check from here to the side of the page and see if that's right and it's not. It looks like I could move it in a little bit. The other great thing about this particular picture is it's a tree. So if your angles a little offer, your branch doesn't then quite as much. It really doesn't matter. It's going to be believable because trees are extremely forgiving. So let's put the elbow there and that I'm going to see where this other elbow is from. The 1st 1 It's that long. I'm gonna check the angle. Yep, that works. So now I'm I've got kind of a connect the dots thing going and I can draw my first shape. So I'm just going to try to be as accurate as I can, but not worry too much about it because I have done the foundation will work to make this a pretty believable replication of the street. So it's gonna go up just past the hill and then after the hill, it starts bending into that elbow. Then I'm going to just do this one line and then come back and finish the sickness into the next elbow and into the last elbow. And I feel like I need this too wide here. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and check the sickness of the trunk to see Yeah, that's OK. That's fine at the base. But once we get up past the hill, it gets much center very quickly, and it turns into this kind of sin branch. So we'll do something like that. So at this point, I'd like to mention just to allay any sense of overwhelmed you may have, we're not actually gonna draw every single branch here. We're going to draw a few of the main branches and then start filling in with the variety of pencils. So you will do a bunch of twigs and dabs and dots and other branches, but we're not gonna measure every single one. We're just measuring a few of those kind of to get a skeleton of the tree, and then we're gonna fill in freehand. So there's your first branch. Um, we can kind of pick which ones we want to do. I definitely want to do the two on the side cause those actus a frame for the tree and I'll probably do this one, too, and that might be all. We'll see how it looks when we're done with that. So I'm going to do this one. This branch comes off of the trunk at this height. That's the bottom of the branch, and it's thick enough to where I'm going to measure the width of it. Most of these we won't be measuring the width, but it's kind of a larger base there, and then the very tip of it, I'm gonna go all the way out to there, kind of where these two little last pieces come off. See how far out that is on guessing. Let's see. I'm looking at how far it is from the edge of the page and at the angle and taking a guess that its about right there and I'm gonna check the angle. That's pretty close, but let me check the distance to and see how those two measure. Okay, that works. And then there's a couple Ben's or joints or elbows there. So I'm going to see how far this one is this 1st 1 and just looking at where it is from the Hill line that I drew. It's a little It's a little above that, probably right there. We'll check the angle between the beginning of the branch and where I just put my dot. That's pretty close when they see the distance. So I'm a little off there, are moving in, and then the distance between this one and the next joint, and the next one goes up a little bit, probably not that high. Check the angle there in the distance and adjust that. So as I mentioned, trees are very forgiving. So, um, if you have any discrepancy in your measuring from the photograph, it's really not gonna matter that much but you can use. This is a really valuable exercise toe. Learn how to measure accurately and drawing. And then it's gonna go up something like that in this sort of appears to curve off of the main trunk. And then Teoh something like this get much thinner, kind of disappearing into a single twig right there. So one good rule of some to follow with trees. If you're inventing a little bit as you go, is that the base of a trunk or the base of a branch is always gonna be thicker where it touches and it gets thinner as it goes out. So no matter what you're doing, if you're doing the tiniest twig or the biggest brands, you want to start sick and get thinner. Now we'll do this next one. Over here. The base of the branch is about that high off of the base of the trunk and the length of it or so. Actually, I want to go further out than that. I'm going to go. I don't know which one of those to to follow. I guess I'll follow this curvy one. It's a little more inspiring to me. So the length of that is about is that long? And in terms of angle, I'm gonna guess it's right there looking at the direction as well as the distance from the mountain. And then I'm just going to see how far away that is from the side of the page. Yeah, that words. And then we have I guess this one's a really rounded elbow, but I'm still going to measure approximately where that it is, cause that'll help to tell me where the branch turns. It will be. I'm guessing about there. See? Check the distance. Incidentally, it doesn't matter if you check the distance or the angle first. As long as you check both of them. You know, that works. And then where it splits off here, going to go down. You see, if I got okay, that'll be fine. Distance. I will be fine. Okay, so now we can draw that one. So that's going to come off a little wobbly. Go up, touch my first dot down to my second, and then this is really fun. It's gonna kind of curl up and do this hook, sing over to the left down, and then we'll finish off getting a little sicker as we go. So I've got three main branch in the middle of one on each side, and I am going to do this one because that's a pretty significant chunk there. So where that starts from, the base of the tree is that high and how long it is. I'm just gonna pick one of these. I think I'll pick the street or one this time. Lengths is this long, and it gets kind of close to the top of the page there. So I'm guessing it ends up about right there. Checked angle, little off there. It doesn't matter that much. What? We may as well go for accuracy and then the distance I'm way off there, so I'm gonna move it over, and that doesn't make sense with the angle. So I'm gonna gentle check that something went awry there. Oh, yeah. I must have missed measure the angle the first time because now it makes it no work. Okay, so that that's fine, then there there's kind of this tangle here. There seems to be just one elbow, one major elbow it is. Do that again. So my pencil lead is pointing towards the elbow. Because it's easier to make a mark that way, I guess. Right there. Go. Looks fine. Distance that looks a little off. No, barely. Well, we'll move it over, and from there I mean it. Just go ahead and draw the shape so we'll go up. I'm going to ignore this little Not sure right now. It looks like occurs over to the right and then kind of up into the elbow, Uh, over and off. And I made a bit of, ah, elbow. There was out intending to just make that curved. And then the thickness we're going to start about the same thickness. Is that bottom one and just wind our way up as we go? All right. So you can continue doing this with any number of branches you want. If you are really into accuracy and you want to draw all of those thick branches, go right ahead. I'm going to stop here for the point of example so that you can see how to fill them in later. Kind of eyeballing it, if that's how you'd like to do it. And since we've already done this much, you know enough to continue on your own if you like. So if that's the case, go ahead and pause the video and fill in the any other branches you wanna put in. And when you're done, we can restart and we'll do the fence. 10. 2.6 Fence Posts: So now we're going to move on to the fence posts or the fence. We're going to the posts first, so we'll start with the left, most one measuring from the bottom of the page, and it's definitely to the left of the tree. So I'm guessing it's right here. And then I'm gonna measure from the side of the page, and I'm just gonna measure to approximately the middle of the fence post. But you can do one side or the other as long as you're consistent with your measurements. Looks like the middle's right there. So I'll just leave that dog because that'll be the left side. Now I'm going to see how thick it is is that sick? And I'm also just going to check the distance from the top of the fence post to the side of the page and compare it to the bottom because it appears to me to be pretty perfectly straight. But if it's leaning at all, I can't detect it when I feel like trying to measure the angle wouldn't be accurate enough . I think that's fine, so it is pretty straight up and down, so I'm going to take the left edge. Move it down, make a dot. So that's where him going, Teoh. And then I'm just gonna draw a rectangle. A little bit of a wonky rectangle, not super straight. I'm kind of wobbling a little, cause it's a old fence post. I don't want it to be perfectly geometrical, and we'll do the same thing for these other ones over here. So the height of that one is this toll. It looks like it's about halfway between the tree on the side of the page. So I'm gonna put it here guessing, and then I'm going to see that's about right. We need to move over to the left, a little thickness this wide, and I'll do the same thing with the angle. Here are not well, Yeah, the angle. I'm just measuring the top of the fence post compared to the bottom to see if they are about the same. And they are, so it really is very perpendicular to the bottom of the page. And then this last one. There's grass here, so you can't really tell if it goes off the bottom of the page or not. But let's just make it do that it'll be a little easier and we're gonna cover it with grass anyway. So the height of that one is that a toll and distance from the side of the page a little further out. And then the wits and I'm including both delighted side and the planks. Excuse me, the lighted side and the shadowy side Ellen Angle. This one's really close to the side of the page, so it's easier to tell is the same. So there's your basic shape for those, Um, now I'm going to go in and just adjust them a little bit. So this one. Tilt it down at the top, and I'm gonna add that shadow line, which is closer to the right than the left and just go straight down the shaft. As of the post, I'll race the top a little bit there, and then this one. The lighting is kind of ambiguous. There's definitely light on the right side, and it's kind of hard to see if there's a top edge. But it definitely I'm sorry if you can see the flat playing in the top it, but it definitely is a little bit of an angle, so just get out of diagonal there and the last one the same kind of thing. But it's tilting down to the right, which I already did kind of in the first shape. So I'll just make that a little more noticeable in a race. And now we'll do the boards between the posts. So this 1st 1 the lengths is this long, and it starts right at the edge of the post a little ways down from the top. You think I need to go lower, but let me check it. No, I don't. Okay, that's an illusion. Ongoing. Just connect. And now it's up to you. If you want to measure the sickness you can, you can kind of take a little bit of what they call artistic license here, which is where you basically make stuff up. Um, or you could measure it to see the thickness. So measure that 1st 1 to see the thickness, and then I'm not going to do the other ones. But I will measure where they are because that's a little more difficult to guess at. So the height of this one is right here angle. That's another way of measuring it. Besides the distance you can measure the angle are we can be close to double check. Yes, that works and has a little bit showing on the bottom there, but not much. So it's a thicker board than that Top one is and actually know that I'm looking at it. I should make this top one a little wider in the middle. And then it seems to taper as it gets closer to the fence post. And then over here, Um, I actually don't need to measure that at the top because it starts so close to the top, I can just see it, but I'm gonna measure how far down this post this one is. So I know where I'm going. It's about there, here. And I said I wasn't gonna measure the width of these. But I feel like I change my mind and miserable call They are. Sometimes it feels like more of a pain to measure than to just freehand draw. It seems more fun to freehand draw, but it can lead to frustration. If you take the second to measure, then you don't really have to do it again. You don't have to erase and redraw so much. It's a lot more straightforward. So now I'm measuring the space between those two boards, as well as the whips and connect in the last one. I really did need to measure that, since it's so close to the bottom and this one disappears behind the grass. But you can estimate where it's gonna go based on the direction of that line right there and that what I'm going to guess on the whip, that looks like it's about something like that. And then these next ones just go off the page and they're starting from the same places thes so we can just continue the same board boards, and this one is mostly hidden by grass. But we'll just put put it in any way and we'll put the grass over the top later. So I'm going to just go back and now erase the lines. It's actually that's almost not necessary because you're gonna call her over him anyway. But now we have more of an outline of a tree to look at, which is nice, and we're ready to add some color or value. Before you do so I'd recommend making a photocopy of your drawing just in case you get into it and decide. Oh, I want to try that again. It's nice to have a photocopy that you can trace onto a clean sheet of paper, and then you have endless attempts, and it doesn't feel like you have quite so much pressure on you to get it just right the first time. Also, my pencil line doesn't mention before very dark, because I'm using a dark pencil, even if you were using a light pencil. If your lines look, um, at all dark, it's a good idea to go back in a race. You still want to be able to see your lines. But make them is light, as you can get away with and still be able to see them because you don't want them to show through in your final picture. So just take a second after you make your photocopy and go back and race, get rid of the crumbs and we're ready to rock 11. 3.1 Value Intro: So in this next section, now that we're done with our line drawing, we're gonna add value. We're going to start with our lightest pencil and move on to our next darkest and next darkest pencil, adding value as we go until we have a really nice range of values, from light to dark. 12. 3.5 Branch Details: So now we're going to start adding branches that you haven't drawn in yet. So I want to emphasize that you don't have to, And in fact, I would discourage you from trying to do every single one. The point is, you want the tree to be pleasing and believable to you. So whenever, at whatever point you get to that feeling, you can stop. So I'm going to start by just adding that. Do use your darkest pencil for this and go pretty slow. And just try to copy what you see doesn't have to be exact with ease the tip of the branch . Make sure you flick your wrist out so that you get that little wisp. And so I'm gonna do some down here, starting a little sicker, getting thinner, and then these big ones down here, which won't show up that well in front of the hill, cause the hills already so dark. But I can give Give it some presence, something like that. And this and you do just focus on the big branches first. And then we'll go back and add twigs and leaves and like so up here we have this little stuffy one and something coming out from it. And then up here we have this one coming out from the right into an elbow. And then, um, pretty sick and dark over here, we have this kind of a tangle of stuff going on. Something like that. There's this one, I think goes up and then curves down. We've got this hand coming out. It looks like a hand to me anyway. Well, now it doesn't, but it looks like a hand in the difference voting this thick one coming out from the bottom edge so you can probably understand why now, we're only doing this once with one pencil, cause if you can imagine trying to go over these with all the pencils, they would end up a little bit. Shaggy looking. Let's see where else? Didn't want to put big ones? How about right here again, going in front of the hill. But it does have a little bit of a present, so that's nice to show the sick one coming above on the right and dipping down below. Something like that. A lot. A few more. You can even make some up if you want. Like if I feel like it. I'm not even looking at the reference photo right now. I'm gonna put one right here. Why not just make sure it starts thick and ends up with a wispy little end. And also you don't want to have avoid totally straight branches and avoid manicure looking perfect ones. You want it to be very crag Lee and natural natural form. You go back and change. Your branch is a little bit like I just added a little bit of a sharper edge to this one. And it feels very thick to me here, compared to where it comes off the trunk. So I'm gonna thicken the babies and the section going up into that area. It will make it seem more sturdy in a loud one here. So I think that's pretty good for my tree. Unhappy with it for the sicker branches. Now I'm gonna sharpen my pencil and start adding some thinner stuff. So I'm not looking so much of the reference photo now because I have my structure. I'm just going to start going in and adding a bunch of little lines. Always plant your pencil inside a larger branch and flick out do make some crossover, make some independent random shapes, and it's a good idea also to do a sprinkling of twigs and smaller branches on each large area before you get too involved in adding even tinier detail. I mean, because you want to build up the whole tree as a single object rather than focusing on one small area. Try to space your branches out in a very random way, like right here. I feel like I space those so evenly so I'm gonna go back and add a few to make it look more randomly pleased. Because trees air, not even things they're very. They're very random. Remember, you can always go back and add more sick branches if you feel so inspired later, one more sin ones or whatever you like. So I'm gonna pause and take a look at my reference photo and just kind of notice where I want more. I feel like I want a little bit more out here on the right and some more very thin branches coming out to accentuate that little clump. But the rest of it it feels pretty structurally accurate. So you believe it. And now I'm gonna go in and put even more smaller twigs and dabs and thoughts. So now I'm gonna go even crazier and sort of just let my pencil barely touched the paper and do some a similar motion to what we did with the Bushes earlier. Remember when we were doing this scribble Scrabble? But this time I'm only letting my pencil touch the paper sporadically. Same motion, but just not pressing on the paper all the time. Just doing something like that kind of all over everywhere you want lots of Branch E twiggy like things or suggestions of dead leaves. Or maybe in this case, might be early spring so they might be leaves getting ready to come out. They don't even all have to touch the branches. It'll make it seem fairly light an area if you have some just sort of out in the sky. And, by the way, feel free to use a lighter pencil if you prefer. For this, if you're using the nine beers darker pencil like I am, just don't press very hard. Obviously, you're not pressing hard anyway, cause your pencil is only sporadically touching the paper at all and do go tryto force yourself to go a little bit fast here. Normally, I advocate slowing down and taking your time. But the reason I think it's a good idea to go fast is because you get out of your head a little bit. And don't worry too much about precision. Um, and it adds a really quality of looseness and life to your picture. If you see these real fast, quick, little mindless strokes, especially now that you spent so much time measuring and making the values match and the textures everywhere else, it will be a nice compliment to that quality to have this loose, very sort of a joie de vive feeling step as a last punctuation mark to your picture. 13. 3.2 Light tones: Okay. So, again, before we start adding value, I'd like you to just look, take another look at the tree at your reference photo and feel. Feel the presence of the tree. Is it young, Old, vibrant, desolate? How does it feel to you? Get a sense of it? How does it sound when the winds blowing through it and then pick up your lightest pencil, the one you were hopefully drawing with, which in my case, is now the two h. I've got my to age and we're gonna start adding value. So for the sky, we're going to start in the background and move our way forward. The sky is obviously very, very soft and smooth. There's no hint of line at all, but were interpreting here into a linear medium. One that is lines. So we're gonna add lines, and it's going t later. Translate into a value or a gradation where color goes gradually from one value to another . So start just by coloring, you can do diagonal lines. You can do vertical lines. One way or the other, you're gonna be doing a lot of different directions, so it doesn't really matter which way you start, but start putting in very light lines wherever you see value. The exception is the middle of this guy. If you can look at the left in in this photograph, it's almost exactly the same values the white. So I'm really not gonna put any over here in this middle area. But I'm gonna put a lot in the top corner, both top corners and coming down more than I think I need Teoh. One of the traps people fall into with graphite is not putting enough value. You kind of get afraid to darken too much. But that's why we have that this little white value. I don't know what to call it that value detector. Um, and I'll show you how to use that in a minute after we get a little first layer on here. So I'm going to start just really adding color value, and you can do a little bit of coloring where your not not taking the pencil off the paper . But mostly I'd like you to do individual strokes. And the reason for that is individual strokes don't have a blunt edge, but, um, individual strokes don't have a blunt edge like like coloring does if you color, you end up with kind of a blunt edge at the bottom, and we're trying to not have that here. So that's why I want you to take your pencil off the paper with most of your strokes, and I'm going to go a little further down into the sky, and this first layer is very, very light. You achieve value range in graphite by layering and repetition, not by pressure. So don't press too hard here, just go over it a whole bunch. And I've got it done in a lot in that direction. So I'm gonna do some of the opposite direction. This, by the way, is called cross hatching. It actually has a name when you go in one direction and then the other to create texture or value and graphite, and you can do it in many different media. But graphite. It's a very popular one for cross hatching, and I'm going to start going a little horizontal just to add some variety, because I don't actually want it to look like a tic tac toe board. In the end, I wanted to look like kind of scribble e actually so I can just barely see these lines, which is a good thing, because this is my very first layer. We are gonna be going over it, as you can see, not only with the same pencil, but we're gonna be going over it with all of the pencils, which is gonna make it darker for right now. I mean, introduce you to the value detector, which I just named that right now, Um, what we use this to compare. So if I put this here in the top of my sky, I can see that little area of gray and I can see what the value is clearly against the white paper. I'm gonna just take a mental image of that and move it over and see how my compares. And it's not close yet if my needs to be significantly darker and I'm going to, like I said, not push it with this pencil because we're gonna be layering. But that just gives you an idea of where you're headed and how to proceed. One thing that's kind of common when you're just learning how to draw our make make any kind of art is being hesitant to push value to make things as dark as they are, there's there's sort of a fear of over doing it or messing up what you've already done. So I just want to encourage you as much as you can to abandon that fear and try to just copy what you see, because that's kind of what this is about. And the more you're able to do that, the faster you'll learn and gain confidence in your own skills. So I'm gonna leave the sky for now and move down to the hill. The hill is very horizontally oriented. So I'm gonna now I'm gonna color because it's so solid and dark that the blunt ends aren't gonna matter. We're gonna layer over this so much that it doesn't matter. So I'm gonna color and I'm gonna go sideways and just colored and pretty solid because there's nothing in that hill that is lighter than this pencil. So everything we put on from this point forward is going to be darker, and we're gonna be pulling pulling those darks out with darker pencils. But this is just a first coat to get the form established. So I'm gonna color all this area between, and I'm sort of laying my pencil a angle so that the lead covers more area rather than rather than coloring like this where I get just a very thin line I can color like this and get a little more area covered all at once. So I'm being pretty careful and getting right up next to the edges, mainly just cause I want to preserve my forms of my tree and everything. But it really doesn't matter if you go outside of these lines because we're gonna add bushes and we're gonna be coloring over the tree anyway. So it's completely fine to be a little sloppy here, So that's good for the Hill. And we're gonna also start adding our first hints of trees. So for trees, um, kind of get into the reckless abandon mindset and just start coloring in scribble Scrabble in different directions. What you don't want is even evenly spaced, evenly sized trees or trees that are made of circles. So avoid this. What you do want is something more like that. Almost. I like to pretend my hand Israel nervous or frenzied when I'm doing foliage because it just it lends itself to this very natural kind of wild quality, which is exactly what we're trying to copy here. So I'm gonna do this all the way across the top pretty quickly. Just getting a first layer and again here. You can't really see what's going on so you can have even more freedom to make it up and get crazy and do very the heights also. So I needed, like, here ago, I was pretty even with my heights. I'm gonna go a little lower here behind the brand. Get tall, get into the branch. Better to get into the branch than to stop. Short of it is another thing you don't want to have happened. Show you this with the darker pencil. If this is the bottom of your branch, you don't want your foliage coming almost up to it because it'll look outlined with sky and that's not natural. You want your foliage to go definitely behind and coming up behind it. And then later, when you color in your branch, it will overlap that foliage, and it'll look like the foliage is in the background. So I'm gonna keep going with trees here. Then there's three sort of pointy ones on the right. This last one's not quite his pointy. Something like that. Then we'll move down to the grass and getting the grass or dirt or whatever that is is pretty horizontal. It's very light over here on the left. So this is the one place I'm not gonna press particularly hard. Not that I'm pressing hard it all with this pencil, but I'm gonna go particularly lightly there because that's where the sun is hitting. And that's where it's lightest. It's still darker than the white of your page. Those So you do want some value there. Just not very dark. Yeah, you do the same thing on the grass that I did in the hill. Just coloring very horizontal. I'm not worried at all. Right now about the dirt or stones. This is just your first layer of value. The dirt and the stones and the little Tufts of grass will come later with darker pencils. So as you can see, this fills in pretty quickly. And right now the value of my grass is very similar to the value Myhill, if not exactly the same. So you're almost losing the line between them but I can still kind of see it. And even if for some reason I lost it completely, it's really easy to measure and put back in. So don't worry about it. Go between the fence posts here. Fence boards, give everything in. Nice first layer. Okay, Um, for the purpose of keeping the highlights on the fences, I'm not going to color those in. I'm just gonna put a layer on the darker areas of the fences. But I could go back later and dark and those a little bit if I need to. I just want to preserve that that little edge and these because they're darker. I'm not actually pressing harder. I'm just coloring more thoroughly. I'm not leaving as much white showing between lines. In fact, I'm coloring very solid, which is easier to do in a smaller area. This next board has almost no highlight on it. The top edge. But I'm gonna leave a little bit on the right. It seems to have that taint teeny bit on the right, but not in a color. It's solid. Same thing for the top board, and then this one. I'm just gonna color the shadowy area darkening these next boards as we go and then the tree and even the highlights on the tree trunk, which are very few should should show. So I'm putting this first first pencil down as the highlight color, really, And then we'll be layering over with Shadow. But I'm not going to draw subsequent branches until I get to the darker pencil, because I don't want to make it look layered. Having to go over the same exact teeny little twig four times will not make it look natural . War teeny. Actually, it will be get bigger with every layer, so we're only going to do those once with the darker pencil. So for right now we're just coloring it in, and that's our two h pencil. 14. 3.3.1 Mid tones pt1: So now we've got our our light that lightest lights down everywhere are going to switch to the next darkest pencil, which in my case, is the H B. And we're going to exactly the same thing again. Fewer lines in some areas and Mawr and others. So we're gonna start in the sky again. Same thing, just lots and lots of lines. Diagonal, horizontal, vertical, crisscross, scribble, scrabble. But again, try to keep your lines individual. So try to avoid coloring where your pencil never lifts off the paper tried to make each stroke distinct and just go back and forth. Lots and lots and lots and lots of layering starting from the top and pulling down into the middle part of your sky. Andi, I'm gonna move down a little bit and do the same thing because it's darker here on the right than it is on the left and I'm gonna go in the other direction and down you're in a little across and here I'm gonna go in both directions. But I'm picking my pencil up each time. That's kind of a fun thing. You also. But I would only do this horizontally in the sky I wouldn't want to do it vertically your Dagnall because then I'll get little dabs of dark pencil of the base of this guy, and you want the base of this guy to be the lighter part. All right, so that's a good next layer, and I'm gonna come back and darken it more even. But let's check out that value again. Just Justus. A point of reference. So there's that top corner, darker grey, and actually, it's pretty pretty similar. So we probably won't do much more layering, except maybe to even out the lines, because it does look very lining right now. But that's also something that's gonna disappear As you build up the texture in the foreground, the lines in the sky will be less and less noticeable. It's also something that goes away after you frame it and cut off the frame. You don't really notice the lines anymore, so there's our sky, and we're gonna go back and do the same kind of layering here on the hill. And once again, there's really nothing in that hill that's lighter than this pencil value. So I'm gonna color the entire seeing solid. I'm not leaving any of the lighter area showing through it's just another layer dark, making sure to get all the way up to the trunk of the tree, not leaving any space showing next to it, even if it means coloring into the tree. That's totally fine, because your trees gonna be a lot darker than this. And I kind of lost my bottom. Julia, it is of the hill, but I found it again. Coloring totally horizontal pretty much horizontally. Go a little askew there, but just to follow the natural direction of the hillside without his goods were gonna get with the H B. And then I'm gonna go back and do some trees for the trees. I'm going to do the same thing I did before, but not going all the way to the very top of each tree because I want there to be this very , very, very faint suggestion of branches above this edge. So I'm going to show you an example with the darker pencil so you can see it really well. We're still using the lighter pencils, though, but let's say, for example, that this waas your first layer on a tree with the light pencil What you don't want to do with the next pencil is go up all the way to the top because that just solidifies that top edge and makes it look more cut out. Cardboard Like what you do want to dio let's say there is your light tree again is go up maybe 3/4 of the way with your darker pencil so that the top edge appears to be lighter than the middle. And then with your next layer, you go even lower so that you have light medium dark and it just makes your tree look really full and round and riel. So I'm gonna keep going on Lee Going up about 3/4 of the way on each tree was this next darkest pencil, but still that really nervous jagged e scribble Lee hand. And over here I can see some light showing through. So I'm not gonna go all the way to the bottom of the hill. I'm gonna just color kind of the middle of the trees a little bit rial loose cause I want some of that light showing through in the end, something like that, and then I'll go down to the grass and now I'm going to be careful. I'm not gonna color over these lighter areas because those are the parts. I want to preserve the lightest color that I put down first. So I'm going to start by darkening right underneath it where that long shadows being cast right into the back of the tree looks like it's a little higher than that, just as a placeholder. And then I'm gonna go about darkening some of the rest of the area around the shadow, getting lighter and lighter. As I go to the left. I'm just lightning upon the pressure. Gonna leave some light showing here and darken a patch below. Another thing that's important to do as you're drawing is be looking at your reference photo quite often. It's very common mistake to get so absorbed in your drawing that your eyes are only here, and every five minutes you look up and see what to do next. And then you realize, Oh, I've colored the whole thing solid and there was light there, so it's a really, really good habit to get into. And when the all professional artist, due to always be looking at your reference photo every few seconds, even keeping your eyes on the reference photo occasionally while you're drawing. So you're actually drawing kind of blindly. But what you're doing is just copying what you see. And our brains are really great at fooling us into thinking we know what we see. But unless we're looking at what we're copying, we really can't tell unless you're one of those people was a photographic memory, which I've only heard tell of. I don't have one myself, so I wouldn't know what that's like, but that that could be an instance where you don't have to look at your reference, Soto constantly. So down here it's fairly That's kind of medium to dark, but I'm gonna dark in all of it cause these lights here are not as light as the lights over there. So I really want this to stand out from those going all the way up to the fence posts. I'm gonna be pretty careful here, actually coloring a little bit vertically to preserve the edge of the fence posts. But then I'm gonna color horizontally right over my vertical lines to get it oriented again . Two horizontal nous and I'm gonna keep going over here to the right and this I'm just gonna color totally solid because it is fairly dark over there. Her, at least this dark, is this pencil. Same thing between the fence cereal so you can see my highlights on the fence rails that I left earlier are defining the fence at this point. So it's a really good thing that those air there because otherwise it would be very easy to just lose the fence in all this similar of colored pencil. And we're gonna go over the darks and fence again, and I'm coloring pretty haphazardly because it's it's an old fence. It's very weathered wood. I don't want it to look pristine. I wanted to have the quality of where so I'm going over it kind of sloppily. But I am following the green of the wood with my pencil strokes and another layer on the tree through that treat pumps out from the background, getting center as I go out to the tips of each branch. Just following my original drawing lines and coloring. Pretty solid is it is a very dark tree silhouetted against the morning light. Okay, so that is our HB pencil. If you are working with just two pencils, a light in the dark, you're gonna do a lot more layering. So you're just going to keep going back with your darker pencil and pressing a little harder, pressing a little harder. You don't want to press, so hardly make a dent in your paper. So do practice on your scratch paper and make sure that you when you rub your finger over your pencil lines, you can't physically feel a dense in the paper. Um, what you want to do is air on the side of multiple layers rather than too much pressure. But I have four pencils, so I'm going to switch to my next darkest, which is my four B, and I'm gonna do the same thing again. 15. 3.3.2 Mid tones pt2: as I said before that I already matched the value in the sky. I guess I could go a little darker up here, so I'm gonna put a little bit of four be up here. But I'm not pressing very hard. I just wanna push the dark in this right corner a little bit more. Make sure you're also going over the edge of your frame if you notice my frame is right here and my pencil lines air going over it because when you free minute, you don't want to see any hint of white paper. So I'm only going to do this right corner, since it's the darkest in the other direction some lighter lines as I go down just to make sure it blends well from dark to light. Here, we check that out again with the value scale. That's pretty good. So I'm happy with the sky. I'm not gonna go back over it with the nine B, but I'm going to continue with the four b into the land. So once again, we try. I'm assuming this pencil is about dark enough to be now the lightest value in the hill. I'm just gonna look at it, though I use the valid not the value scales of value. What did I call it? Detector value detector to see if those match Yeah, they match. So the I'm gonna color the whole hill this this value and then the next pencil, the nine b will be what I put those darkest patches. And with between the branches other side of the tree, I'm coloring a little along the edge of the branch now because I want to make sure I don't lose that branch in this darker pencil. And it's the softer the pencil is, the easier it is to camouflage. Um ah, line going wrong direction. So I put that in, but then I can color horizontally over it, and it disappears much more easily than if I was doing it with the and h pencil with a lighter pencil. That's harder. Do the same thing over here because I feel like I'm losing my tree trunk a little bit. And then I'm gonna do the bushes, trees and wishes. So now I'm going up even less even shorter distance than I did with the to the HB pencil, just to give the darkest darks in area. I'm also going to add a few little dabs and dots at this point, a pyre in the branches, but you don't want them evenly space or evenly sized. So just a few random sort of specs and scribbles to make it look very organic. Decks and scribbles. And as I'm coloring now at the base, I'm coloring down into the hill a little bit, too, so that they almost marry a little bit. I don't want there to be a hard line between all of the trees and the hill here. You can see a bit of a hard line, but we'll define that later with the nine B pencil, the darkest pencil. Right now I'm just trying to get them to look like they're kind of softly joined. Put a few little dabs up here, go back and put a few more over there. I'm leaving some light showing at the base of these trees for the sky to show through, but I'm getting right up next to the bottom edge of this branch so that it looks like it goes behind the branch. And in fact, I'm just noticing that it seems pretty unnatural that there would be no tree poking up behind this branch. Sunken. Add just little suggestion of some leaves, just a few little dots up there so that it doesn't look like the branch cuts off the bushes in the background. Scribble. Scrabble is fun. Okay, so there's our bushes and trees and now another layer in the foreground. And I'm not only going to focus on darkening no, I mean to get a little more specific and start putting in some texture because what I have here seems to be kind of the medium value in the grass. So I don't need to focus so much on darkening now as adding all those little details. So I'm putting in this long shadow and I'm covering pretty hard right down the center of it and then on the edges. I'm gonna color a little bit lighter so that it appears to soften and the B pencils air really lovely for this, a particular effect. It's almost like you blended them, but you haven't just colored a little lighter and it makes it look soft. So at this point, I'm going to stop and just check the value of a main area of dirt and see how that matches up. And it looks like I can really start just putting detail in with this, so I'm gonna focus on larger patches of dark and texture. So it was definitely a shadow here. Doesn't really matter what shape it is. Just a big patch. But it's not as dark is this one, So I'm not going over it as much, and I'm varying the pressure on this pencil a little bit more. That's another thing about be pencils. You can press a little harder without the repercussions of causing dents in your paper because the lettuce soft so it won't make a dent. It'll just get your pencil, your graphite darker on the paper. So really focusing on all these areas of darker value right up next to the fence post here , get that light edge redefined, and then this whole part is darker. Oh, I kind of skipped over this corner. Go back here. So now it's increasingly important that you're looking at your reference a lot because I'm not just coloring a large area solid with one value, like I was doing with the 1st 2 pencils. I'm really focusing on where the darker values are and it is your picture. If you feel like you want slightly fewer patches or more patches or differently shaped patches of dark, that's completely fine. But you can use the reference photo as at least a guide for where they are in the picture, and then you can change them if you want. We got something like that and I'm gonna go back over here where I left off. Continue that big shadow coming from the back. I'm sort of losing my tree trunk there, but I can still vaguely see it, So be able to outlined it and fill it in with Dr Value in a minute. There's a lot of big patch over here going over my fence post, redefining that edge with the dark and then that This this area here is just a little bit darker than most of the grass. I'm gonna go over that but very lightly put a little more off the base of the hill. I'm gonna put a little bit more all the way across the base of the hill to soften the edge because it is blurry in the picture 16. 3.3.2 Mid tones pt3: and now I'm going to go back and go a little crazy and just start adding random dabs and dots. And this is super fun. I love this part. So I'm doing some scribble Scrabble doing this just really, really funky. Lots of dots, dashes, dabs, clumping things together. So where I want particularly like dark dirt gravel looking stuff. I'm going to do this over itself quite a bit. The variety of strokes you put on is really, really a lovely thing to those look at in the finished product and the play was on your way there. Sorry, I highly recommend having a great time with this, and I'm sticking mostly to the darker patches, just sort of randomly adding a bunch of texture. Oh, you know what I forgot to dark in between? Fence opposed. That's not particularly dark, though. I'm looking at it. There's a little bit a little bit, Not much. Just a couple little patches, anyway, back to texture. And do you remember? This is an interpretation, not exact. So don't try to actually draw pebbles, just make dots and dabs and have a blast. Oh, you know, that would be a good time to start putting grasses and over here. So I'm just gonna plant the pencil outside the page, flick my wrist up. So I make really quick looking little blades with grass and similar to the twigs. What you want is quick plant your pencil and flick your wrist up and make them cross and go in many different directions. What you don't want is this blunt ends that doesn't look. It won't look like grass because it will be too uniformly thick all the way up or something like that. And now I'll go back and dark end, and now you can really see the dart, the difference in the pencils dark and the darkest part of the fence posts on the boards, leaving the highlight showing. We're gonna go back and make those highlights a little sinner with the nine B pencil. But for right now, I'm keeping them fairly six so I can see where the fence boards are way to the top. And at this point also, I can start adding those shadows that the boards air casting onto the post. Mitchell, do you in a minute? Oops. I went pretty sick with that. That's an example of what happens when you're not looking at your reference. Who carefully enough? Because I was not looking at the photo. It was focus too much on my drawing, but I can go back and erase it. Fortunately, graphite A races. I'll just do that now. Don't put the edge back in very, very lightly coloring out into the grassy area so that it doesn't look outlined and then put my edge back in. So it looks hard again and I'll put in the shadows. So these shadows air coming down at an angle, starting from where the board the board touches the fence post and going down diagonally to the right here. For whatever reason, I guess the grasses air covering it. So just put a bunch more grass over that. You're lastly, the tree those is the last time we're gonna color the tree without adding the extra branches. I'm sure you've been wondering, When are we going to do that? Well, it's gonna be like I said earlier. We're only gonna do it once with the dark pencil because we don't want it. Toe look layered. We do want the grass in the hill trees to look later because they are. But the tree is incredibly specific. It's almost a cardboard cut out, so we just want one layer of dark pencil on all of those tinier branches. These bigger branches really have no detectable highlight, so I'm just coloring them really solid. And then you make the base a little thicker here, following the rule that the branches always starting sicker and getting center as it goes up the tree. It's a little rounder right there, and I did accidentally color over my highlight on the left side of that trunk. So you just go back and a recent out, I'm just using a corner of the eraser, which is still too thick for this tree. But I can just go back and put in a little more graphite to cover up some of that area. And I'm just putting in a couple lines because it mimics the look of bark rather than coloring. It's solid, right up to the edge of the, uh, research, the highlight. So that will be it for our four B. And now we can switch to the darkest pencil, the 90 or again. If you're using just two pencils, you'll just do another layer 17. 3.4 Dark tones: So now we're switching to your nine b pencil or whatever the darkest pencil is that you have. And if you only have two pencils, you're just doing another layer with your darkest pencil skipping the sky because we already know that the sky is the value we want. I'm just gonna go to the trees. And as I pointed out before, there's a little bit of an edge between the trees and the hell. So I'm going to define that here with the 90 pencil, drawing a line first and then coloring up into the tree a little bit with some small circles. And then here just gonna add a few dabs and dots. I'm not gonna go over every tree like I have been with the other pencils. Just something to give more definition, more separation between the values and with the 90. I want to encourage you to be fairly fearless and just go for dark. It's very dark in some areas here, and the more value rains you have, or difference between your lights and the darks, the more believable as a realistic image. This is going to feel the more finished in polished and professional handsome little suggestions there and then on the hill, I'm going to go in and dark in the darkest areas, which is the most obvious one is this shadow laying over on the left and then there's sort of ah, fuzzier shadow behind it. So I'm not pressing is hard, and I'm just making random shapes there. And I'm also just looking at the value of the darkest area, and it looks like it needs to be darker. Yeah, it does. So I'm going to go over the whole thing with the nine B. But I'm not gonna press very hard cause I don't want to darken it enough to nullify those shadows. I just put in. Although I could just go back and put him back. But those are pretty dark, so I don't want to go too crazy with this. I just want to add one more layer, and I'm gonna really be very careful up against my tree trunk here because I just put in that nice highlight. I don't want to lose that. So I'm gonna color vertical along it and in little circles out to the left so that my vertical line isn't detectable and here. I'm gonna dark in a little bit and all the way across Bottom edge. It seems a little sharper over here, but it's definitely gets a little bit blurrier closer to the right side, in a soft in the bottom edge. By coloring very, very lightly on the bottom edge of that hill Here, I'm gonna dark in a little more, cause the value separation there doesn't seem to be quite as distinct on my pictures. It is in the reference photo. All right, now I'm gonna go down to the ground and just add a little bit more craziness so I can alternate between more dabs and dots and dark areas and darkening patches. Or you can do patches first, and then dabs and dots, It's really up to you. I kind of like to go back and forest because I find that to be more fun, I feel like I need a little bit more here of just value. So I'm going to use the nine b, but impressing extremely lightly or you can switch back to it lighter pencil. If you prefer a lot of rocks and stuff in the foreground here, the color right up next to this fence rail to get it really sharp again. And I don't wanna have ah, diagonal line there something a color out from it. Also, to camouflage it into the ground gets, um, stuff going on in here on the other side of the post. It's a dirt and gravel very far like and back here wanted to be. I want the value on the right to be at least a dark. Is this because it goes from light to dark There something in the dark in this top area all the way over to decide? I had a little bit more darkness in some places. Few more dabs, few more bits of gravel over here did that. I don't know what that is, but you don't need to put it in. I just put in a little darkness there to suggest it, and then a few more a lot, um, blades of grass over here on the right, and we're gonna go back into the fence post. So now I'm going to be particular with the fence post. I'm gonna get the edges the way I want the shadows and highlights Really sharp and crisp. So here we have a little bit of a hint of a shadow below the fence rail. I never did put in this darker one either of those. And that highlight is very sin. So I'm gonna come in on it from the right to make it thinner. And then on the top edge here, I'm going to make that sharper by coloring along it and then doing the same thing I did on this top one, which is coloring out to the left. Oops. I went into the fence post a little bit. All just color right next to to get rid of that. And then this top one, that highlight is just too thick. So I'm gonna color up next to it. And then I want to make the fence post, stand out a little more swing in a color some more dark in the grass, and to get rid of the outline, color out shoots a left, and I feel like this dark doesn't match this one. So it looks like the gravel kind of stops at that fence post, which is kind of a common mistake. So if you see that, just go back and add a little more value on the other side, so it looks continuous. Same thing here. Now it's too dark there. So I'm gonna add some more value here. You don't have to make it a complete huge patch of dark, but do make it come out in some areas so that it looks like it continues behind the fence, something like that and in the dark and a little more over here. Or if it feels like it's too dark to you, can a race and make the fence post stand out that way. I just prefer it darker myself. Do the same thing over here. Just kind of touching up defense, getting all the rails pretty believable. By that, I mean copying the qualities you see whether you have highlights or not, whether they're center thick, whether you can see wood texture or not on each one, this one has a couple of little lines in it. In the highlight and edge just needs the top edge right there. Something like that. And this one needs to be a little sticker in a dark area. So does that room. So now I'm feeling pretty happy with that. Oh, you know what I never put in the shadow from the tree either. So we're gonna put that in now. It looks like it goes over and ends up going off the fence. So it's pretty horizontal. It's almost parallel to the bottom of the page. And it's just a kind of thick, dark line, but it starts thicker and gets thinner as it goes out. And now we're going to go in and dark in the tree. So you're going to the same thing you did with the 1st 3 pencils, this time avoiding the highlight. I'm gonna add a little bit of a flick right there, the tip of the route to make it look like it disappears into the ground instead of having a blunt end. And I'm gonna go up in dark and all these branches, I'm getting excited cause we're entering the part where we get two free hands and branches , which is really fun. Okay, Dark and news Branch has a little market. The tip of it from where I measured before. So I'm gonna make it a little bit darker there and flick it out more to cover up that mark . Okay, 18. 4.1 Finishing Intro: so now we've mostly finished, are drawing. We've added all four values or however many values you had in your toolbox, and we are going to take a look at the picture and just add any finishing touches. If you want to erase out lighter lights or at darker darks or any last textures, more rocks or grasses. More branches, what have you Now is the time to do that and enjoy. 19. 4.2 Finishing: So now you're mostly done. Now we're just going to do some finishing touches. So that includes just going over your whole picture and looking at it and adding darker darks where you want them and it racing out lighter lights. So I start by looking at the edge of the TRIA. Feel like my edge got lost a little bit here. So I'm going to just put a very thin line of dark along the outside edge to define it and then color out from that edge to the left so that it doesn't look like the line. It looks like part of the background. I also feel like there's a little too much light at the base of the tree to be a believable shadows. I'm going to cover some of that up and see where else. Pretty happy with my fence. The grass Havel's like it needs to be a little bit darker right here behind the tree in the hill, even though that's making some of the branches a little bit more loss. That's perfectly fine. So it would look anyway a little more dark right there to get that highlight to pop out. Oh, and I just noticed this Bush isn't touching a tree. See how I have a white high? A white line right there. You don't want that. It will make it look like it's, um, cut out. So do you make it? Absolutely. Everything behind the tree should touch the tree and out a few more twigs. I feel like there's not enough. Um, are not twigs, thicker branches? I feel like there's not enough thicker branches leading from this really big one to these tiny ones. So you can add a little bit of thickness to some of these smaller ones just picking random ones to make a little bit thicker. Then here I feel like that could be wider. I mean, add one here. Why do it add a little more business? And I'm looking at the quality of these lines. The edges air pretty hard, and here they're not. So I'm gonna make that match in the sharpen up and dark in those edges. Same thing on this one. Just make it a little sharper, a little darker. So once we feel like we're happy with the tree, then we can finish up if you can. If you'd like to You can sign your picture and to sign. You can do your initials And the year, the date. You can just do your first name first and last name whatever you feel like doing. I mean, a sharpened my pencil because I don't want a big fix signature. You want your signature to not take away from the picture or draw attention to it. You just want it to be signed by you so that you have kind of your stamp on it. So I'm gonna sign right here at the top of this fence cereal, and I'm just gonna put my name. My first name Hoops, My pencil broke. Here we go. You can see it really blends into the background. If you're looking for it, you'll find it, but otherwise it won't dry your attention, and that's it. 20. 4.3 Spray Fixative Optional: so the last thing you can do, which is optional but recommended, is to apply spray fixative, which is going to just keep your pencil from smudging over time. A few sort in a folder or even in a frame. It will just keep it. Keep the integrity of the pencil better. So I'm using matte finish spray, which doesnt yellow over time, and it doesn't leave a gloss finish. So that's why I like this one and you want to do this outsides. It smells. It's toxic. And before you put it on your picture, just give it a quick little spray to make sure that there's no drips and that the nozzle is not clogged, and then just hold it about 12 inches from your pictures and kind of do circular motions and spray to give it a light coating over the entire picture. 21. 5.1 Recap: So just to recap today we've learned how to draw simple image from a photo using measuring techniques. We've learned how to apply graphite to represent values. And we've learned how to create textures and graphite. This is the image we drew today. I hope you had a great time. I had a great time and I hope you'll join me again.