Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, everybody and welcome to this class. Today we are going to be going through warm-up exercises to make sure you make your best art every single time. Now, I want to emphasize these are warm-up exercises. These generally are types of drawings that you will use as practice but not as finished products. Most of these can be done within 5-10 minutes and they're really quick and just to get your brain and your hands going before you start an actual drawing project. Now, a lot of these exercises can be used to help improve your technique and often if you do these exercises, one, or some of them, or all of them, every single day, will help you rapidly increase your artistic skill. These exercises are designed to help you improve your artistic skill and work with your hand and your eye but we'll get into that in the next video. I just wanted to quickly run through the different exercises we'll be doing in this video series. There is going to be 10 and I hope you'll participate in each and every one of them because each of them helps you in their own special way. Going through from start to finish, we will be doing lineweight and pressure exercises, which is basically doodling with a purpose. Then we'll go onto contour drawing, and then blind drawing, and then blind contour drawing, combining those two exercises. Then we'll go on to an exercise I like to call peanuts, then on to blob caricatures. I promise I'll explain all these as we get through the videos. Then we're going to quick wireframes and skeletons, then a speed sketch session, which is so much fun and so valuable to you. Then we'll go to a really challenging exercise which is drawing upside-down and finally, for a little bit of fun and relaxation as well as a bit of color theory, we're going to do some coloring. Now, I want you guys to know that all these exercises don't have to be done altogether. I am just showing you each exercise so you have many options to get yourself into the mood before you start your illustrations. I really hope that with this class series that you can follow along and do a part of your project with each exercise and follow along with me and that you'll be able to bring these exercises into your practice to help you improve your art and make sure that you make your best art every single time. Let's get started.
2. Hand and Eye: Just before we jump into our first exercise, I wanted to talk about drawing as a skill. A lot of people think that drawing is a talent which you have or you don't, but it's much more complex than that. Drawing actually combines two skill sets into one. We have our motor skills, which is the actual art of drawing and using our hand and I refer to all of the physical side of drawing as our hand. Then you also have the thought and the creative side of drawing and illustration, which I will refer to from now on as the eye. When we practice and try to improve our art, we have to work both on our hand and our eye together. For example, if I just worked my hand, I could get really good at rendering what I currently know, but my drawings, let's say portraits wouldn't have improved anatomy. They would still have the presence of my younger self. They wouldn't be up to this standard that you would see a fine artist or professional illustrator. Alternatively, if I just worked my eye in the creative skills, I could have these beautiful atomically correct portraits, which are really creative and unique, but the technical side is really bad. I haven't worked on my shading, or my line waves, or anything like that. I have this great idea but I can't render it. We have to exercise not just our hand and motor skills, but eye and our creative thinking as well. The exercises I have set up for you today are going to cover both working on our motor skill and improving technical side of our drawing, as well as working on our creative side. Hopefully through a combination of using all these exercises, not just one, we will be able to rapidly increase our art skills and always make sure that we make the best art we possibly can. Let's get started with the first exercise.
3. Line Weight and Pressure: Hey, guys. I have a bunch of tools here. I just wanted to let you know that when you do exercises, you can use any medium that you like. I'm just going to have a bit of fun playing with my color pencils, and markers, and outliner pens, as well as my handy HB. Just because these exercises are designed to work your mind and your hand but you can also practice a medium at the same time and it's great to kill two birds with one stone. Our first exercise is a really simple one. All I want you to do is fill up a page with lines and shapes. The idea behind this is that we're going to use a varied array of shapes and lines and pressure to create just a mess on the page really but it's just exercising your hand and getting your hand and your motor skills working and really getting you ready to do a drawing. I'm going start off here and I'm just going to start off doing some organic curves. This is just working my wrist and my hand and I am just going to go through and make these messy curves. This is a really great exercise especially if you're going to a work on body shapes. You can see that I've moved from using my hand to now I'm using my wrist to create these movements and then I can even use my elbow. I'm just going through and exercising and mark making. Now, I'm going to go and I'm going to do pressure because for instance these are really light and sketchy. Then I could go through and put a lot more pressure and have a lot more specific and permanent mark. I want to combine these hard and these loose marks so first I can go hard and then loose, hard and then loose. This is just an exercise. So don't stress about anything being perfect. Mine is perfectly messy. I'm drawing on top of different drawings. Then here I can come in and I can practice shading so I go from from heavy to light, heavy to light, and go through and practice different pressures. I am getting lighter here as I go on my pressure until you can barely see the marks at all. I'm just going to go fill up my page now with random things. Don't just practice your organic shapes, also practice your angular shapes such as squares and triangles. But we just want to go through and warm up our hand before we draw our drawing. I'd probably spend maybe about a minute to five minutes just drawing out random things and just working my hand and warming up those muscles but that's all this exercise is really intended to do. Just don't forget, try different shape forms, so organic and rigid, and try different pressures with your pencil. Let's get on to the next exercise.
4. Contour Drawing: The first exercise wasn't too much fun, but it was just a bit of messing around to get our hand working. Our next exercise is much more fun and something which I love doing and you can even use to make a finished artwork if you want to. But we're just going to have a bit of fun right now. We are going to be doing contour drawing. Contour drawing is drawing an entire image or a picture with one line. I'm just going to draw a face to make it really simple as my first example. Just pick a starting point and then draw from there. If you see my previous video, I always start my faces with the eye so we're going to have all the fun. That was just a messy quick exercise and I did that all with one line. You could see that I adjusted my hand at some point when I was going between the nose and the lips, but I did just keep one line the whole time. If portraiture is not your thing, I'm going to do another version for you, and it is going to be just some flowers to make it really easy for you just to show you that this technique can be used for anything. Don't forget if you are using ink to put a page underneath your sweater, recall your paper. I'm just going to start off doing a basic. Bars form here and water level had a [inaudible] , tons coming up here and then commence with my roses. Now I just want to reiterate to you guys that the drawing that I'm drawing currently they aren't planned at all. I wanted to make sure that the presence I'm sharing with you is exactly what you'll be doing because you won't have a plan going into this. That is my quick vase of flowers. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. This is a real fun exercise. If you practice it, you can even make it finally. As you can see, I'm not the best at this technique, but I still love doing it. It exercises both your hand because you have to keep one steady line all time. But it also exercise your mind because you have to figure out how to get from one eye to another or how to figure out how to draw this drawing like I just sketch is one line. I hope you enjoyed it. I can't wait to see what you guys put down in the projects. I will see you with the next exercise.
5. Drawing Blind: Hey guys and welcome back to another exercise. Now this one is going to be a fun one and I'm going to look like little bit of an idiot doing it. But that's should be because I don't want you guys to think I'm cheating with this exercises. I want you to really enjoy them. Our challenge is for this exercise is working our eyes but blind. So what we're going to be doing is we are going to be working on mind and our memory. Trying to draw something from our imagination. But without looking. You can do this exercise two ways. You can draw from reference. For instance, I have this little setup here for our next exercise, where you're looking at still-life objects and not looking at your page and then drawing like that. Or you can do what I'm doing and use a blindfold and just draw something from your head and hopefully it'll all just worked just fine. As I am drawing with a blindfold, I would rather be safe than sorry, I'm just going to be using my trusty lead pencil because that way I won't start drawing on the table with ink or ruining my beautiful cover markers. To do this exercise, what you basically do is you get your page, you laid out, you feel like your edges and then you just start drawing and there's no other rules to this except you can't look at what you're drawing until it's done. I'm going to put on these head band around my head so I can't see my page. Hopefully I'll find my pencil and I will draw a little, I don't know. I'll draw a dog or personal something, we'll see what comes out of my head. Let's have a bit of fun with this next assignment. I promise you, I can't see right now, this is going to be really interesting because I've never done this exercise with my eyes closed I'd only look at a reference away from my page, so I feel a little bit disoriented not being able to see anything or get bisected. So see how could my pages I'm, going to try and or dog because I've been drawing dogs like these so hopefully I'll get something right. So draw my circle for the head and then branch here, I guess I'll draw my first eye I'm talking about what I'm drawing simply because I don't know what it looks like, you may not be able to understand it. We'll see how this goes that's my second eye might put a shine in there, give him a little bit of fluffy eyebrows. Now if that was my eye, but other eye is over here somewhere, so he need eyebrows over here to and in between the eyes, there will be breach of the nose so it will have a cute doggy nose here and then he has beautiful lips. Well, as much as dogs have lips and a little bit, chin and then estimating the size from where my pencil is. I'm guessing I'm drawing a dog this big. So that can be the top of his head nice, big, beautiful is, I don't know what big this is but they nice and pointy. Then I want to come down and draw his jaw, I'm trying my hardest to figure out where everything is. The difficulty that this exercise is that I have never been spraying for my Wang pencil is I don't know what I'm doing. So that might be a dog face it might just be a scribble, but I'm shaming an edge around here I'm going to try and draw people face now over here and see what we get. This is going to make banks trying to draw big so you can see it's trying to feel out with this guy, this can be one eye. That's the eye over there and another eye over here, and then that eye is perfect there draw nose [inaudible] , which mean the nose is there. So I'll draw a little bit of a smile in the bottom length draw my drawing hopefully here, I show himself and come back down and draw our neck [inaudible] and jump on. So I'm to draw on two drawing blind and I really want to see them before we go any where else. So use the reveal. Well, that's really interesting. My dog has split into three different creatures there. It's nice to see that the facial bits were all in the same area and tugs face was in another area. So maybe if I put them together, it would look okay and then my person, I don't know what happened, there's two eyes really far apart. There's nose and mouth together, hair and blob, I'm going to give this one more guff for you guys and you're going to have another, a bit more fun. But I really recommend doing this exercise because it keeps you on understanding of like you really have to think about were things are whether it be a face or a piece of fruit or something that you're drawing. So drawing that fruit, I'm going to try and do really easy one and I'm going to draw an apple and a banana and then maybe try for the more complicated things again. So I'll put my trusty heaven back over my eyes so I can't see what happens. Pencil guessing I've drawn over here so I'll come here. Make sure I can't see anything, I don't know, why I have this on my eyes close onto here anyway. I'm going to start with apple bit of a funky shaped I think and they need to stand and how about we give them slowly then come round here and I want to draw a banana tree, banana have really simple shape. It's like a small of a [inaudible] why they, if my banana and apple maybe I should put in some grapes too. So if I had got my apple maybe here then on the things here may I will draw on some grapes. So this is fine because you can go from one grade to another and they just goes when you're drawing a quick sketch like these, pretending there is apple there and assuming this stem here I hope that's right. So let's have a look at my fruit salad or scribble whatever we end up has been, so that one isn't too bad. My apple, who looks like a butterfly, but it could be a funky apple. Banana, looks like banana, very simple shape, and then grapes, another simple shapes. So I would recommend if you're doing this exercise, fill up your page. It's really hard because you can't see what you doing. But it's definitely a lot of fun and it's something which I would even recommend doing with your friend. So I'm going to have more fun doing this and then, I'll move to the next exciting one, which is also blind contour drawing. I'll actually be not blindfolded but looking with my page drawing the composition, which I showed you before. I would love to see the messes or masterpieces that you guys made doing this exercise, please put it down in your projects to give us all of it fun and I will see you in the next exercise.
6. Blind Contour Drawing: Hi guys. I'm really excited about what we're doing next. We are going to be doing a blind contour. This is an exercise I actually learn in an art camp in my final year of high school. Now what a blind contour is, it's pretty much a combination of the two exercises which we just did. Drawing blind and drawing only using one line. I'm going to make it really interesting. We're going to do two lines, so to do a blind contour drawing, what we want to do is we want to have somewhere on page as a reference point. I'm going to put this piece of kneadable eraser if it sticks into the middle of my art work so as I am blind and can't see my page, I can just simply know that that's the center of my pages so I can build my composition around there. My composition today is just going to be a simple crystal skull which I have in a fake apple. The reason I'm doing two objects and not just one is because its a bit more of a challenge and its more interesting to show the composition rather than just a single object. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through two colors, I have red and blue, I'm going to go through and just do the majority of the work with the red and then I'm going to go back through with my blue and try blind contour in shading. Wish me luck, I promise I am not cheating and hopefully we get something resembling the composition. I'm done with my first color not looking at my drawing. I know I've done it really tiny for you guys, I'll zoom-in. Generally when I do blind contours, my work does get really small unless I use an easel because I use the joint in my hand. One thing I would recommend is if you're doing bland contours to do multiple ones, at one where you do a smooth where you're using your wrist and your hands to practice that motor skill and then one where you're using your whole arm including your elbow and see how they turn out. Now don't forget this exercise is exercising both our motor skills and our eye and our brain because even though we can't look, we are training ourselves to remember what an object looks like and feel around the three-dimensional forms without pencil. I'm going to go in and I'm going to try and do some shading with my single blue line and see how we go. This could start getting messy. Again, I'm filling out for my point and starting from there I'm trying to remember what I did to start with. I think I remember the jaw line of the disco going down. I am just going to try and shade that. I pretty silly liters I see through objects. I am looking at my object which is over here that's why I'm looking at the whole time. But I'm also trying to imagine what each shading would look like if it were a opaque object. At the moment I think I am shading in where the concaves for the eyes and the nose will be. But I don't really know and I'm tracing now up the side of the skull and just finding my dot, I'm going to move over to my apple now. I remember studying my apple at the bottom of this little dot. I'm going to shade all the bottom of my apple, and it's a little bit like [inaudible] , but I'm just going to shade around this side too to match my skull. We'll see how this is going in second. I think I went a little bit of shading where my skull and apple join. I'm going to come back round here to my dot. Make sure I keep my one line going and just draw the side of the skull in the side of the apple a little bit. This is what my final image looks like for this exercise. Now, it is interesting, It is definitely not a finished hour, but that's not what it's designed to be. It's designed to be working my hand in my mind. I recommend doing this multiple times. and of you're drawing it as smalls as I have, you can just move your dot and redraw something else on the page. That's exactly I'm going to do right now, to you guys but hopefully another example maybe a little bit bigger, using my two lines and we'll see how that goes. I am going to be drawing this little pop [inaudible] which I absolutely love. We'll see how that turns out. That's my base full done and now I'm going to go and try and shade it. I've kept my finger on that dot the whole time so I can get my bearings of where my drawing is and now I'm going to try and shade it. We came out this way with this thing. We should put some shade in here, a [inaudible] next go here [inaudible]. We have another interesting example. I actually really love how these are turning out because I understand what the object is supposed to be. If I were you, when I'm doing this exercise, I would probably spend three minutes per illustration. It doesn't really matter and then maybe do two or three just to really get yourself going. As I said you can do this in any meeting. You don't have to do it in color pencil, I just like that cause its easier. Lets get on to our next exercise. Don't forget to add your projects down below so I can see them and help you out if you have any queries.
7. Peanuts: Okay, last few exercises have been a bit of fun and a bit of a challenge because we had to be blind. We had to only use one line and we're really restricting ourselves, not drawing as you would in a final outpace. Now, even though they might seem a bit silly, those exercises are actually really important and I will definitely putting them in my practice more often because I definitely need to practice them. Really designed to get your mind working and your hand work. I recommend out of all the exercise we have done. Do the line weight pressure exercise before you do any big piece that you want to be like finished, published and then pick one of either the blind contour exercise to get your mind working and your hand working, doing a drawing. You obviously don't have to do every single exercise all the time. But all three of them are about your hand and your mind working together. Now, we're getting on to something which is much easier and much more fun because we'll be able to see what we're doing and we can draw exactly how you want to draw. This exercise is called peanuts, and the reason it's called peanuts is because of the first part of the task. I want you to fill up your page with random peanut shapes. Now, when you do this, please leave a big gaps between peanuts because we are going to be using them later. I'm going through a orange pencil, no-name brand, and just draw my peanut shapes. Okay guys, my peanut shapes is done. I have drawn eight, you can do this exercise, with anything from 3-50 if you want. It all depends on the time you want to donate to the exercise and how much practice you want from it. I wanted to note here that I've drawn my peanuts and a lot of them like this one and this one are actually three-dimensional renditions of peanut [inaudible] saying it's just a little squiggle. I wanted you to draw actual peanuts you can even draw down exactly the ones I have or whatever you like. It's just a bit of fun. What we're going to do is to turn these peanuts into torso and that's really easy to do because it is generally made up here of your ribcage and then your hips or your pelvis. When you put all that here, I'll just put an arms and legs down here. When you put that all together, that turns into, you guessed it, a peanut shape. I'm going to go through now and use the peanuts which I've already drawn here. I'm going to put in quick gesture lines and make them into people. You can also make your peanuts into animals if you like, but it is designed to get your gesture's going in to get forms and figures going. Now, this is not a hand exercise, although gesture lines always great to now it is a mind exercise because you have to work with the perspective of the peanut which you have. I'm going to do this at a speed time-lapse and I hope you can follow along and maybe make some cool little characters for yourself. I quickly went in and I filled all of my peanut. Now, you can see the reason why I told you to draw peanuts with different perspectives and different sizes is because, it leads way to a new and individual characters with different body types. As you can see here, I had a really unique perspective from under the feet like a worm's eye, here it's bird's eye, I had different angles and perspectives for the rest of them. I hope you enjoy this. Definitely a good exercise to get your mind going to work out characters and how limbs fit into a body definitely helps if you have a little bit of an understanding of anatomy, but this is a great practice to put into play. I can't say at least five minutes, hopefully from you guys leave them in the products so that we can all have a look at them. If you have trouble with the exercise, just leave a note in the discussion and I'll be more than happy to help out. Let's get to the next exercise. See you there.
8. Blob Caricatures: Welcome to another exercise in our series of warm exercises to improve your art and make sure that you have the best illustration protocol every single time. This next exercise is a exercise for both your hand and your mind. We are going to be creating what I like to call blog characters. Basically what happens, is we are going to draw about five different randomly shaped blobs. Or you can get your friends to draw them, which is heaves a fun. Then we're going to try and fit a face into those blobs. If you bear with me, I'm just going to use this blue pencil and just draw up my lines so you can clearly see where they are. Now, I have my five random blobs. My challenge is to turn them into faces, so I am going to go through and just draw in with my pen. This going to go through and fill in the faces. Now, this is a great exercise to really creativity going, especially if you want to work in cartooning or you want to practice your facial anatomy, but you can also use these blobs to create anything. It can do like, I want to draw cats, and draw five blobs and enter them into cats. But I'm just going to do faces because that's the easiest thing anyone can train. [inaudible] I'm using a pen for this basically because I want to practice these and do a direct sketch. I don't want to erase at all, I am drawing this first hand [inaudible] so let's get started. As you can see, what I've done here is I've quickly gone in and drawn this rather large nose on my character. I'm just going to go in, and give him some extra features like eyes and big eyebrows because I have an obsession lately with drawing nice full eyebrows and other features like ear and mouth. This is obviously not the only way you could have used this blob. You can do whatever you want with it. But I really like doing at least one large nurse character every single time because I find nurses the most diverse object to make interesting shapes. As you can see here, I did this very quick, an ear and it's actually working out of my shape. Now, I recommend you can do that. We settle features like maybe a couple flakes of hit or for instance, in this case [inaudible] , but I wouldn't do this for all your features because then the blob becomes an essential. If for instance, if I wanted to draw a mustache and the sky, I might add that in, but we are now going to go to next drawing. On the second one, I have used the top space here to create the hair and then just filled in with a face of a person. As you can see here it's definitely interesting. But it's always an experiment when you're working with blobs to see like what goes in and the more you do, the better they're going to get. Now this guy here for real obvious thing to do is to use these lines as a [inaudible] , like a side view of the face. Because that's so obvious, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to try and challenge myself. What I'm going to do, I'm going to use this area as the ear of an elf girl rather than the nose of a man. Let's get started. As you can see here, I will define and made a really great sketch of a fairy tale figure and you can do that to other things. I can fill out these last two guys. Give me some more ideas of what you can do. I am just doing really good works on them. This is just an example of how to do the [inaudible]. Let's get on with [inaudible] Here is five quick examples of how you can use to exercise. I really recommend doing it. I missed a lot when I was warming up to character-based work, but absolutely love it, and this is probably of all the exercises one of the best for really getting your creative muscles moving. To see at least five characters from you guys. I will see you in the next exercise.
9. Wireframes and Forms: Guys, now we're getting down to the more challenging exercises. We are going to be doing wireframing and skeletons. You can choose what subject matter you want to do for this, but I really recommend that you use physical objects such as here, which my previous examples that I used because this exercise is for your brain, helping you measure out how 3D objects look with a wireframe in their internal structure. It's really good to actually have the objects so you can see them and feel them. We're going to start off with a simple one. We are going to do the apple and what I want you to do is I want you to rest your apple or your object. Definitely, put a piece of fruit, not an orange because that's too easy, on your piece of paper just so you can see it. Example here I'm just resting my piece of fruit down on a nice angle for me to be able to see. What I'm going to do is I'm going to imagine that this apple is made out of a wire mesh. Basically, if I were to draw you a quick example of a sphere my wire mesh would look something like this. Think of a globe. We have a latitudinal line. You can see how it goes through the front and round to the back, and then we have our longitudinal lines. I'm really not sure which way they go on a globe, sorry. But you can see here that I've made a wire cage of a sphere. We're going to go through and we're going to do this with the apple. You want to start out drawing the outline of the shape that you see. This is what my apple looks like from the angle that I'm viewing in. Now, I can see here that there is a ridge and it goes back. What we're going to do, is we're going to use this pinpoint which is our stem and we're going to do a longitudinal line to the back. I have mine on a bit of angle so I'm imagining that the core will be running through here. This line, for instance, which comes right round the apple, showing its round shape will come in to the core there. This one part out and around, along here and into the core. I'm going to just continue around the surface of my apple looking at how the side sits trying to make sure I'm always in the same perspective to the apple as when I started and I'm just going to go round and draw these lines in. I've drawn these almost flower looking lines for my longitudinal ones and now I'm going to go and make my contours for my latitudinal. I can see around here that it bumps in and out around my core. One thing with these lines is the ideally should be getting closer together the more adjacent you want to the object. This plane along here is flat to me. My line should be getting very close around here to give more of a three-dimensional perspective. Then we want to make sure that we go in as it is 3D and do the butt end of the apple as well. This might look a little confusing, but if I just go in here and add the lines that we can see on the apple. That's not 3D yet. You want to do this several times with your piece of fruit or anything. I find pears are really great, but you could also go through and do more meaning tapes. For instance, I have a pot plant here, this is what my pot plant looks like. I'm just going to rest that here and I'm not going to draw a plant. I'm just going to draw a pot. Here is what my pot looks like, sorry, it's in my way. Just move it out here so you can still see it. This is what my pot looks like to me. It's a different perspective now, so it's a bit rounder. Now as it's cylindrical, it's really easy now because I can go round and just draw my circles going up the pot. As it gets bigger, I want to make sure that they stay consistent showing this curve. These ones are my front lines. Just marking here for you, these are the lines which are at the front and then these lines which go around the back, which you can actually see. Then of course there is your wireframe, which are pretty much acts like a basket and then you just go back and use the imaginary ones. I hope you are understanding this exercise and how it works. I'm going to do a complex one using my skull, but because it's so complex, I'm only going to be focusing on all the contours, the front angle of the face because putting the back ones in could make it quite messy. One thing I would recommend if you are doing this as a bonus exercise, for instance spending half an hour on one object, I would focus on using more pressure on your pencil and darker lines at the front and then drawing really soft lines with the wire frame for what you can't see in the image. I have quickly drawn in a rough shape of my skull. I had it really quickly for you guys. Now I'm going to go in and put the contours of how this skull works. I'm going to do in blue so you can see it. I've quickly gone in and done the front side of the wireframing for this skull, as you can see like how it indents, when it goes into the eye and then it comes out again for the head and the nose and how its lines curve around the skull. This is just an exercise for you to understand the three-dimensionality of forms. I recommend doing this with as many objects as you can. Another great part of this exercise is to draw the skeletons of things. You can even go into and find a person and draw their skeleton. An example, lets say this is my person. They're just going to be sitting with their hands on their lap. I recommend actually using photo reference for this, but what we're going to do is we're going to put our skeleton. That's our skull and then we see how our spine runs down here, shoulders, elbows, wrists. We have our ribcage here and our pelvis and then we come down to the knees and the feet. This is actually a really good exercise to do diddly, where you can just go through and find a person or animal form and then just work out with their skeletons. I'm sorry, I ran through that really quickly, but I will do a video series on that later, which because it's a massive anatomy lesson, but it just goes along with wireframing as figuring out the form behind a 3D object. I hope you enjoyed it. I know it's really complex so feel free to hit me with any question and please leave your project down below, I'd love to see at least one wireframe. I will catch you in the next exercise.
10. Speed Sketch Session: Okay guys, so this is probably going to be the most fun exercise that we're doing and it is our one which every artist has done at some point, especially if they draw the Gou, it is called speed sketching, so you can do this with a live model. Basically what it is, is that you look at a reference of a person or thing, and you use that reference for only one minute and you can already draw for a minute and then you get the gesture down of that person that you are viewing, and then you move onto your next drawing. This generally happens in a live setting where you have a nude model or a model standing there and they will change their pose every minute and you just have to go with the flow. So this is going to focus a lot on getting your mind to think really fast, so working on your eye to be able to see what's in front of you and quickly render it down. But it's also working on our hand and really getting that speeding up our sketching. I don't have a nude model or a live model and I'm pretty sure you don't either. To do this exercise at home, there are some great resources. I'm just going to quickly hop onto my laptop, which I have here and show you a site that is really great. The site which I have here is called Line of Action and it's for face expression practice. As you can see here, it has some really simple things. I haven't logged in. I don't have to pay any subscription for. It's a free service. It pretty much asks you what you want to draw and gives you a bunch of expressions because these all people, I'd just said all and then asks you what gender of models, because some people like drawing male, female, or need to practice what they don't draw so often. Then it gives you two options, so you can either ask for a session where all your drawings will be the same length, which is a great way to start, especially if you only have 10 minutes in your day so I'm going to do that because I don't want to waste your time having you watch me draw for an hour and you can just go 60 seconds, so I'll have each drawing coming up for a minute. Or you can go class mode and class mode is really excellent because you can pick how long you have from 30 minutes to six hours and what it will do is, it will start off with some really short sketches. So you'll probably have like 5-30 second sketches and you'll go into 5-1 minute sketches, 5-2 minutes sketches then one-half-hour sketch and so forth. It's really great to work your way up and really bring the expression from the quick sketches into your big renderings of final thing. It is absolutely fabulous. Other sites I would recommend if you just want references to draw is Sketchy, which is a community specifically for that, where people upload photos of themselves and you can just sketch them and also just using Pinterest or Instagram for inspiration. I'm going to get started, and just hang out here for [inaudible] -60 seconds and I am going to hopefully get some quick gestural drawings down for us. As you can see here, I've done one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine sketches. That was nine minutes straight of drawing and none of them are perfect. But it was really great exercise, through it I was noticing every single person I was drawing had a different nose and it's really fun to draw them and then there was some beautiful ones like this, really complex mouths and interesting perspectives. So I really love this and especially to a nice fun idea for this one is if you want to cut to unify people, you could always just draw the cuttings down in that minute, use that to quickly jog your memory like how do I turn this person into my cartoon Starbuck, keeping their personality definitely fine. I recommend doing this at least once a week. I recommend doing four half hour session, but not of just one minute drawings, because that is a lot of pressure so I'd probably do half-hour session including 1-15 minutes sketch to five-minutes sketches in five minute sketches. I really enjoyed it. I hope you guys get a full-page like I did of just these gestural drawings and I would love to see them. Here is that website again, please take a look, I find it a really great free resource, and I will see you in the next exercise.
11. Drawing Upside Down: I hope you guys are all keeping up with me. There's a lot of exercises that we've gone through today, and I'm really starting to feel it in my hands, but we're almost done. We only have two more exercises left, and I'm really excited to share this one. I actually learned this from a friend who I went to go and sit in the art class in. He was all about working your mind and figuring out how much you truly know about facial anatomy because it was a portraiture class. Again, I'm doing a face just because it's the easiest example I can show you, but you can do this with anything but simple answer is, we are going to draw a picture upside down. What this means is, no, we are not standing on our heads and trying to draw. I'm going to be drawing a face, but instead of it being towards like up, like me, it's going to be flipped the other way around. I really have to think and use my mind to figure out the anatomy because it's not in the general position that I would normally say. I really love this exercise, there's two different ways to do it, there's one where I'm going to do it right now, where it's from imagination, where you're drawing the picture upside down. You can always do this with reference as well, but the reference is right way up. Then the alternative option is actually to flip your reference upside down, but draw your artwork the right way up, that one's a little easier, but I'm just going to give it a go and go straight in with pen in trying to draw a bit of a nice portrait, something less sketchy than what I've been showing you and see how it goes as it's upside down. Now it's time for the big reveal. As you can see, it's a little bit tall for a face and the nose is really long, so it's something which I will have to work on in my upside down drawing, but overall, I'm not that too upset with it. Basically with this exercise, I only spend seven minutes, six minutes drawing this, so it's a really rough sketch. It is really great to see where you're mind is at and what anatomy you actually do know and not because I had to think a lot more about the measurements I knew about anatomy to try and figure out this piece. I really hope that you like doing this exercise and that I can see you doing a drawing from upside down and don't forget, don't judge anyone's work from the work that we're producing today, this is all about exercising and getting yourself prepared to do an artwork. These are not actual artworks, but it is definitely a fun thing to do it and I would definitely recommend doing this. As I said, can't wait to see. If you have any questions, please leave them in discussion, and I will see you with our final relaxing exercise.
12. Coloring: Hi guys and welcome to our final exercise. It was really great that you guys followed along all of the exercises. You made me really happy to be showing you guys these things. Now, I've just been going really quickly through the exercises. Don't take any of the artworks that I've done as final artworks of my ability because believe me, these are far different to what I produce. However, I really wanted to show you these really important and valuable exercises that you can use every day or once a week, just to keep yourself in check and speed up your process of improving your drawing skills. Because trust me, you do see an improvement, especially in use of your mind and your hand in doing these. Now, if you wanted to really focus on working your hand more, I would suggest doing these exercises for more prolonged time of the rendering of all the images that you create. I've been spending 5-10 minutes on each of them just to show you the basics of the exercise, but you can push it so much further. Now that I said that, we're going on to what will be the most relaxing of everything we have done, and that is coloring. Now a lot of you might be thinking, coloring, really? I'm an artist, I don't want to be coloring other people's work. That is me all the way. But coloring is actually a really great way for you to understand color theory without having to draw an entire art piece. So I've just picked out this book off my shelf, which I haven't really used ever. It's called More Mindful Coloring by Emma Farrarons, my friend gave it to me and I thought it was just about time that I had done and did some color therapy for myself and really got into the simple things. I'm just going to go through it, and I'm just going to be using four markers. I'm going to use five markers. I have Copic markers, you can use anything. These are pretty pricey. I do like them but for the coloring that I gave, I'd rather just do a digital painting for finished artworks, but I will be using them for this exercise. I'm just going to go through and color a page in this book, and just get a sense of colors that go together, colors that don't, shading, all that things. I hope you guys pick out any coloring book if you want. I can leave some stencils I've designed a coloring book myself. Just let me know in the discussion if you want that. I'm just going to quickly do some coloring, a bit of relaxing for the end of the day, the end of the week filming day, and I'll see you at the end of this. I just completed my little relaxing color unit size. Definitely, a lot of fun but I would choose to use a more complex pattern if you wanted to create chaining stuff such as fish, or even these birds and these leaves, that's covered for you to work with shade and color. Again, I just wanted to be super quick to give you a bit of an idea of what the exercise is. I really hope you enjoyed it. I'd love to see any of the color works that you want to, even if you colored your own image, please leave them in the projects and I will see you my final goodbye.
13. Final Thoughts: Thank you all for joining me for this class. I really hope you enjoy these [inaudible] exercises that I showed you. Feel free to use all of these in your daily drawing routine. They are really great, especially if you're warming up to do a major artwork or you just want to make sure you are at the top of your game a 100 percent. They're also really good to fix an artwork. If you're having problems and you lost for ideas or you feel like, oh your drawing suggest a disaster, just relax and do some of these exercises. The two best I think for solving an artwork, are definitely are peanuts and the [inaudible]. Because you actually have to think creatively to make those figures and those portraits or whatever you choose to put in those gloves. I would definitely recommend them if you had an artwork. I can't wait to see all of your works. I hope that you will see some of mine. If you want to see what my actual illustration looks like and not just these [inaudible] exercises. I'll just head to my Instagram which is at cara.ord.create. Go figure out how to spell my name because it's also the same name as my Instagram account. If you guys had any advice or critiques on these lessons, please feel free to leave it down in discussion. I'm more than happy to take an advice because I want to do the best I can to teach you guys. If you enjoy these classes, click [inaudible] of thumbs up, I would really appreciate knowing what you liked and what you didn't like. Because as I said, I want to make the best product I can view. Until next time, I will see you.
Cara Ord, Illustrator & Graphic Designer
