Cafe Portraits in Procreate: Explore Figure Drawing in Real Time | Siobhan Twomey | Skillshare
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Cafe Portraits in Procreate: Explore Figure Drawing in Real Time

teacher avatar Siobhan Twomey, Artist, Illustrator, Instructor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Cafe Portraits in Procreate

      2:25

    • 2.

      Introduction to the Class

      2:38

    • 3.

      Drawing with the Brushes in Procreate

      4:57

    • 4.

      Preparing to Draw in Public

      3:02

    • 5.

      Four Drawing Exercises to Warm Up

      6:32

    • 6.

      What is a Portrait Sketch

      8:21

    • 7.

      One Tip for Drawing Correct Proportions

      3:33

    • 8.

      How to Draw When People are Moving

      2:46

    • 9.

      Setting Up in a Coffee Shop

      2:19

    • 10.

      Project 1: Quick Sketches

      5:41

    • 11.

      Project 2: Full Figures

      7:32

    • 12.

      Project 3: Drawing Faces

      8:41

    • 13.

      Wrap Up

      2:29

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About This Class

Use the iPad and Procreate app to make dynamic gesture drawings, sketches of people, and quick portraits. And learn how to draw people from life.

If you love drawing on the iPad and want to improve your drawing skills, but you also long to be able to draw dynamic and expressive sketches, like gesture drawings of the figure, then this class is for you. You will learn exactly how to sketch people on your iPad. This one simple practice of sketching people in a coffee shop, in a park, at the corner pub, or in any public space, is THE ONE drawing practice that completely changed  my drawing style. 

I went from drawing very rigid and uninteresting figures, to being able to draw expressively no matter what the subject was.

This drawing practice is for animators, figure drawing students, illustrators and ANYONE who loves to draw and sketch. 

The scariest part of drawing people is making them look realistic. 

The scariest part of drawing from life, in public is the pressure of wanting to draw perfectly.

This class outlines exactly how to approach drawing people in real life, in real time. It gives you a set of sketching techniques and exercises, in Procreate, that will show you exactly how to tackle drawing people, even people that are moving.

During the lessons you will learn:

  • 4 powerful drawing drills that will ramp up your skills and help you to draw loose and expressive
  • 1 simple tip to draw the figure or the face in proportion forever more (without sighting or measuring)
  • How to draw people who are constantly moving or talking
  • How to make gesture drawings in a digital medium

Plus you'll also learn the difference between WHAT to draw and HOW to draw when it comes to drawing the face or the figure. I’ll also show you how to approach drawing in a public space, what to expect and how to navigate the challenges.

Throughout the class, I’ll be supporting you to make your own cafe drawings by setting you 3 projects that each progressively build towards drawing a portrait sketch:

Projet 1: Quick Warm Ups

Project 2: Drawing Full Figures

Project 3: Drawing a Portrait

You don’t need to be super skilled at drawing to take this class, and you don’t need to know how to draw the figure or make a portrait. This is a fun and easy exploration of loose sketching in a digital medium that anyone can do.

Meet Your Teacher

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Siobhan Twomey

Artist, Illustrator, Instructor

Top Teacher

My newly released The Gesture Drawing Workbook is now available to purchase. This guide will demystify Gesture Drawing and give you clear and detailed instruction on how to apply this transformative drawing technique to your Figure Drawing. Drawing the human body is about DRAWING LIFE: this guide to true gesture drawing is based on Kimon Nicolaides' groundbreaking work with students at the Art Student League in New York, and it will change the way you understand figure drawing.

Click here to purchase: The Gesture Drawing Workbook

Click here to purchase The Beginner's Guide to Figure Drawing

Click here to purchase High Resolution Fine Art Prints

I also offer 1:1 coaching for drawing.
I have over 20 years experience as Figure Draw... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Cafe Portraits in Procreate: This class outlines exactly how to approach drawing people from life in real time. It gives you a set of techniques and exercises that will show you exactly how to tackle drawing people even when they're moving. In this class, you'll learn how to make expressive drawings in a digital format on your ipad in procreate. My name is Shavonne. I'm a top teacher here on skill share. I have over 20 years experience drawing the figure, drawing portraits, and teaching drawing, and I'm so excited to share this approach with you today. In this class, I'm going to break down the subject of the figure and I want to share with you four drawing exercises that can support you to draw people in a fast paced environment. I'll also explain the difference between what to look out for when you're drawing the face or the figure versus worrying about how to draw something. You'll also learn the one way that you can get correct and accurate proportions without having to do sighting or measuring. I will also teach you how to draw when people are moving. Then you and I are going to head out to my local coffee shop and spend an hour or so drawing. You'll get to watch the demos in real time and learn how to explore quick, loose and dynamic sketches. We'll tackle drawing a standing figure, a seated figure. And we'll look at the way that you can simply and easily draw some portrait sketches. You don't need to be super skilled at drawing or know much about figure drawing or portraiture to take this class. These are very loose free and fun sketches that you can do with no pressure. I believe that you can't fully develop your natural response in drawing by only ever drawing from photographs. I think if you love drawing, if you're really keen to develop your drawing skill set, then you need to draw from line Cafe sketching is the perfect opportunity to do just that. So I'm excited to share this approach with you and I can't wait to get started when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and I'll explain how the class is structured and I'll explain about your class project. 2. Introduction to the Class: In this lesson, I want to welcome you to the class, and I want to explain how the lessons are structured so that you know what to expect. Plus, we'll talk about your class projects. But first of all, I want to discuss a little bit about the overall approach in this class. Drawing from life opens a set of opportunities that you just don't get to explore when you're drawing from photographs. That's the biggest distinction that I want to make at the outset. Being able to observe people make expressive and dynamic drawings based on that is very different to drawing from a photograph. More often than not, the drawing that you make, you might not think it's as good, but to be really clear, that's the point. Take this next hour or so as an opportunity to explore something different in your drawing than you normally would. In this class, we're in a unique position to work with digital drawing tools. Meaning that we can undo marks that we don't like. We can scale things up and down. We can move our drawings around if we need to. But we're firmly applying a traditional drawing approach to this medium. The main focus really is to use your ipad to make dynamic gesture drawings. In the first few lessons of this class, we will go through procreate. We'll go through the brushes. And I'll explain which brushes are best suited to do this style of drawing. I'll also tell you what to expect when you do go out to draw in public. In the next section, I'll go over some techniques for drawing in proportion. And I'll also share some tips on how to draw people when they're moving. Then you'll learn four distinct drawing exercises that you'll get to apply later on in your class projects. I'll also explain exactly what is a portrait sketch and what you need to look for when you're drawing the features of the face or a full figure. Then once the groundwork has been laid for a successful drawing session, we'll head out to the coffee shop. We'll work on three separate drawing projects. Quick sketches, full figures, and a portrait sketch. By the end of this class, you'll have a complete understanding of why you should be using this drawing practice. As often as possible, you will have experienced for yourself the transformative power of using your observation and your expression to make dynamic and exciting drawings. I can't wait to see the work that you do. I'm excited to share this process that has helped me so much in my drawing. Let's get started. In the next lesson, we'll test drive the procreate brushes, and I'll point out which ones are best to use for sketching. 3. Drawing with the Brushes in Procreate: In this lesson, we're going to look at the different brushes in procreate, and explore some of the options. Plus I'll give you my recommendations on which ones I think are going to really help you within the context of drawing people and sketching life when you're out and about. For this class and for this project specifically, I wanted to use the native brushes in the procreate app. So that means that the brushes I'm using a default within procreate. You don't have to go off and download these brushes and install them or create brushes yourself. But it is worth mentioning that if you wanted to explore some options for different styles or different kind of sketching tools, then there are tons of resources online for you to check out and brush packs that you can go and explore. Percy. My go to marketplace for looking for brush packs is gumroad, so just head over to Grow.com and there you can check out brushes that other artists have made. They normally say that a brush pack is not necessarily going to improve your drawing. That is true, but sometimes it is nice to have different kinds of brushes that give you different effects. So with that being said, let's just quickly go through some of the brushes inside procreate and I'll let you know the brushes that I tend to use for sketching. Obviously, if you're familiar with procreate, you will know that all of your brushes exist under this icon here. If you tap on that, you're into your brush library at the beginning, it shows you some reason brushes that you might have used and then underneath that are all the categories they're sketching, inking right the way through to painting. And even some abstract texture brushes down here. So what I want you to do before we start anything is just go through all of the brushes and literally experiment and test each of them out. Some of them are going to give you great lines, some of them are not going to give you great lines. It's really worth spending a few minutes to figure out which ones you like. Some of these drawing ones, for example, have quite heavy textures. And since we're just focusing on sketching, I wouldn't be going for something like that. But it's up to you and like I say, try to go through them and make a note or pick a few that you think are going to really work for you, right? For me personally, the brushes that I like to draw with are actually here under the inking section. Specifically, I like to use this brush called dry ink. I find that it's got a nice thin line but it's also quite textured. I would avoid a line that's say, something like maybe gel pen that's very even and doesn't have any tapering effect on it. These brushes are very nice for doing a cleaned up drawing if you want to make specific outlines. But for sketching, I think you want to go with something that's a looser, a little bit more expressive and has that textured look on it. Something like dry ink works really well for me. Obviously, you could make it bigger by increasing the size over here. You need to. You can also work with the opacity a little bit, but I tend to keep it at 100% obviously. The other thing that I like to do is pair that line with a wash. Let's say down under painting, you'll find a lot of these brushes that are big flash blocks of color. I like to work with one of these alongside a very thin and tapered line. Again, I'd encourage you to explore these and see which ones you really like. For example, another one that I quite like is Salamanca. Salamanca is wonderful. It can give you some amazing effects over previous lines that you've laid down and interact with them really nicely. Then obviously, this is all monochromatic work, but feel free to look at color as well. Maybe you want to sketch in a different color, or maybe you want to lay down your line work in one tone and your wash or block of color in another tone. But the point is to experiment now before we head out, so that you have an idea of what brushes you might like to work with when you're ready. Then meet me in the next lesson and I'm going to talk about what to expect and how to prepare. 4. Preparing to Draw in Public: In this lesson, we're going to look at how to prepare to draw in public. Because it's definitely something to consider. Rather than just pitching up unprepared, I think you'll have a much better drawing session if you prepare in advance. Now, the process of sketching in public, it should be very relaxed and very supportive to a relaxed approach. But having said that, I think it's good to be intentional and specific at the outset. So when you do head out, think about how long, how long you're going to give yourself to draw me. I'd suggest give yourself at least an hour or two. So that's the first consideration. Give yourself enough time to have a good drawing session. The second thing is bring your ipad, obviously, and make sure that it's charged. I've gone out a few times with my ipad not charged, and it's very frustrating. So make sure it's fully charged. I would say if you wanted to, you could bring a sketchbook along as a back up. If you're not used to drawing on the ipad in a very loose and sketching way, then it can be difficult at first to get used to it. The last thing I want is for you to have a frustrating drawing session. That's why it might be useful to have a sketchbook as a backup to draw in. The main thing to know overall, is to keep your set up light and simple. Don't bring along a wet media like inks or paints unless of course you're very comfortable with that and with using those materials in public. I'd say just stick to your ipad and maybe one sketchbook and one pencil. Now, what to expect when you do get there and you're drawing in public? Well, one of the first things to expect is that you might not actually see something to draw straight away. And that's something I just want you to be aware of. It might be that you sit down, you get there, and there isn't the perfect portrait waiting for you to draw right in front of you. Or maybe you get there and there's not that many people around, I would say. Be prepared to get to your chosen coffee shop. Order yourself tea or coffee or whenever you like, just give it a few minutes. The other thing to expect is that your first drawings might not look great. That's just the way it goes. It's good to know that it's very often towards the end of a drawing session that you actually start to make really good drawings. Don't be too disheartened if the first few sketches that you make aren't great, it always takes a while to warm up and to get into the flow of it from the beginning. I want you to give yourself time to loosen up. I'll be showing you later on exactly what exercises that you can do in order to loosen up. But I know that you only start getting very good at drawing towards the end of the drawing session and that's part of the process. When you're ready, I'll meet you in the next lesson. 5. Four Drawing Exercises to Warm Up: In this lesson, I'm going to show you four drawing exercises that I want you to start practicing every day. These are great techniques to develop an expressive style of drawing and you can use these either as warm ups before you start drawing, or you can use them as specific drawing sessions themselves. The first is continuous line, the second one is the search or mapping line, the thing, and the F is to drawing. Now don't worry yet about making perfect drawings of these techniques. Let's just firstly explore them and get comfortable using these kinds of lines in a loose and free way. Let's just firstly start to incorporate them into your warm up sessions and then bring them into your daily or weekly drawings. The first exercise is to draw in a continuous line. And to do that you're literally going to try to keep the pen in contact with the screen for the whole drawing. Just firstly, try it out on your ipad and get used to the free flowing quality of this line work. Then when you are drawing a specific subject, it means that you'll be going over and back again and again over certain areas with your line. That's very intentional in this exercise. If you're going to practice this with a reference photo, I want you to start to take notice of exactly where you are going over and back with your lines. It's likely that these specific areas are important features. This is going to give you a clue about drawing the features of the face or the figure and how to know what it is you need to look out for. But more of that later in the next lesson. For now, let's just simply use this technique as a simple line work or drawing drill. The next exercise or technique is to draw with a searching line. Now this exercise is where you use the line to map things from one point to another. You can practice this very loosely. It's quite similar to the continuous line exercise, but here what you're doing is getting one step closer towards being more intentional with your marks. Again, if you like, you can practice this beforehand with a photo reference or with something at home. And just try to get your lines to go you from one side to the other, up and down from one specific point to another. It's almost as if you're measuring the subject with your line. The next exercise or technique is contour drawing. This is where you aim to draw the outer edges or contours of a subject. The key to this exercise is to look closely at what you're drawing and to try to move your pen at the same time as you move your eyes. It's an exercise that is much slower, much more thoughtful. And it's very helpful because you can rely on following the lines of the edges without having to worry too much about the structure. You can also follow lines that are inside the subject and these are called inner contour lines. Then the fourth and final exercise that you can start to work with now is called tonal drawing. This is where you choose something totally different to line. You work with a much bigger something, maybe from the painting brushes or I quite like to use one of the charcoal brushes. Just choose anything that's soft, large, and maybe has a slightly lower opacity. With a lower opacity, what happens is the tonal marks will build up and get progressively darker. It's very nice to work with that with this technique, you're trying to build up your drawing with shading. It means that you work around your drawing just like a continuous line drawing, but now you're working with tone, it can create an amazing effect. It's very much like sculpting the forms and trying to pull shapes out of the tonal marks that you make. When we get to the project section of this class and when you head out to draw people from life in a cafe, you can apply any or all of these techniques to your sketches. Or you can rely simply on the way you normally draw. But think of these techniques as something to fall back on. If your drawing is not working out, just switch it up and try a continuous line drawing, or a contour or a contour line drawing draw, maybe a fully tonal drawing and add line work on top of that. In the next essen, I'll go over what exactly is a portrait sketch and I'll explain the main features that we're going to look out for. 6. What is a Portrait Sketch: In this lesson, I want to explain some points to look out for when making either a portrait sketch or a quick drawing of the full figure. Now just to be clear, I'm going to show you what to draw on the face and not how to draw. Each feature will depend on the exercises that we've done to develop your line work and your confidence in making marks. It will also depend on your own natural and unique way of drawing. This is quite a subtle distinction, but I think it's important to talk about it. Most people who start out learning to draw tend to think in terms of how do I draw an eye or how do I draw a nose. Really, I think what beginners need to first know is to be aware of what it is they should be looking for. For this class, we're going to step back a little bit from thinking about how to draw things perfectly and we're going to focus on what it is you need to look for on any face that you're trying to draw. Then, based on your drawing warm ups from the last lesson, how you draw that will take care of itself. But before we do all of that, let's talk first about what is a portrait sketch. Now the points that I'm going to show you are going to help you to make quick sketches, as opposed to making a proper long, fully finished portrait that focuses on accuracy in terms of a photo likeness. That's not really what we're exploring in this class. So it's important to realize the merit of a quick sketch. A quick sketch is actually a dynamic and expressive drawing. And this kind of drawing not only has a much better chance of capturing the essence that you see in your subject, but it also very firmly stamps your signature in the work. Whenever you erase out or try to perfect your drawing. I think you also run the risk of erasing out your own first impressions of what you see. These first impressions are so powerful, it's what I call your expression. Remember that in a loose drawing, you try to capture the expression of the person, but you're also imparting your own expression into the drawing. Now I'm going to show you the main points that I look for when I'm drawing. Obviously, the main features of the face are the nose, eyes and mouth. But what's crucial is to look for the distances and the relationships between each of these features. Personally, if I start drawing the eye, the first thing that I'm going to do is look to see where the eye is in relation to the nose. Then I'm going to quickly judge where the eye is in relation to the bottom of the nose or the nostril from the nose. I'll then quickly judge the distance to the chin. And then I look for the angle distance to the mouth and try to get the space between the lower lip and the chin, just like this. Then the next thing that I look for is where is the ear in relation to either the eye or the bottom of the chin? That'll give me pretty much the whole face at that point. The last thing that I need to look for is the space between the eyebrow and the top of the head or the top of the forehead. And then from the top of the forehead I will look at how high the top of the head is and how it rounds its way towards the back. Those are some very simple points that you can start to explore over and over again. Either if you want to draw from imagination and work it out for yourself, or if you want to draw from a photo reference. But basically, if you practice these points, by the time you get to draw from a real person in real life, it'll be much easier because you'll know what to look for. Okay, let's look at quickly sketching a standing figure. What you could do is start with a line of action. To simply map, a simple line of action to give you the feeling or the idea of the whole length of the figure. But normally, if I start off with the head, what I'll do is look first for the angle of the shoulders. Then from there I always tend to trace a line down to the waist to find the waistband of the person. Or I'll draw a line from the shoulder to the elbow, and the elbow to the wrist. That immediately gives me a sense of how the figure is standing, what the aspect of the pose is, and what the overall proportions are. The great thing about drawing people in public is that the clothing can give you clear indications or markers of the whole figure. You can easily look out for the folds at the elbow. You can look for the color or the waistband on the person, or the folds at the knee. These points will create distinct sections of the figure that you can build up for your drawing. Again, just to reiterate, these points are what to draw you and your searching line or your loose marks for the how to draw and don't be afraid to make really loose almost messy drawings. That's the point of this class, is to give yourself the freedom of expression, to explore line, and to use digital drawing tools as an expressive method of drawing. 7. One Tip for Drawing Correct Proportions: In this lesson, I want to give you my number one tip for drawing proportions. I believe that the reason most people can't draw proportions or make drawings where the proportions are off is not because they can't draw the figure or they can draw correctly. It's simply and only because of one reason. That reason is that most beginners, when they're drawing the figure or the face, we'll concentrate on one area at a time before they move on to the next. This is a normal thing to do for most beginners, but it means that drawing one area, you tend to give emphasis to that area. That's why it is bigger than the rest of the drawing where you probably didn't give as much emphasis to that section. All that proportion is, is understanding one part of anything in relation to another part. Once you can see that, then you'll start to draw in proportion much more instinctively. There's no need to do sighting or measuring. In fact, you don't need to know anatomy or the names of muscles and bones to draw like this. All you need to do is, while you're drawing one section of anything, draw it while you're looking at or checking another section. That's my tip for understanding, for learning, and for getting really good at proportion. Always think about the thing that you're drawing compared to something else next to it. For the face or the figure, look at what you're drawing and compare it to a feature next to it. If you learn to do this over and over again, eventually you'll be drawing by constantly checking and looking at something else in comparison to the thing that you're drawing. When I'm drawing the eye, I'm constantly looking at where the nose is in relation to the, where the eyebrow is in relation to the eye or where the cheek or the ear is. Then if I move on to the ear, I just immediately check where's the ear in relation to the back of the head or the top of the head or the eye? I look at the mouth and as I'm drawing it, I'm checking where it is in relation to the nose or the bottom of the chin. If this is new to you, then a good technique to actually make a practical exercise out of this is the searching or mapping line exercise that we covered previously. You can literally use your line to do this comparison. It's almost like mapping the drawing out. It helps you to visually measure on your drawing and it really helps you to instinctively develop a way of comparing one thing to another. The same with the figure. If I'm drawing a standing figure or even a seated figure and I'm drawing the elbow or the shoulder, looking at that, I'm drawing that, but I'm looking where that is in relation to either the head or the hands or the back. I'm constantly checking one section against another section. I have a go at practicing this exercise. And then in the next essen, I'll give you some advice following on from this on how to draw people that are moving around while you're drawing them. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next essen. 8. How to Draw When People are Moving: In this lesson, I'll be sharing some tips on how to draw when people are moving around. Because that's honestly by far the biggest challenge when it comes to cafe drawing. Drawing people when you're out and about. Unless you're drawing someone who is sitting very still. Most people are either moving, they're talking, or they're looking around. Or if you're drawing full figures, you might think, well, no one stands still for more than a minute. How can I draw a full figure? Here are my solutions. I firstly try to get down the most important aspect of the person. If that's the face, then I'm trying to get the location of the eyes, nose and mouth. If I managed to do that as quickly as possible, that more often than not is what captures the look of the person then if they move on or turn away or get up. And if I feel like the drawing isn't done and I need to add more to it, I'll then do one of two things. I'll either try to finish the sketch based on the memory of the person. If I can remember that first impression that I got, I'll try to finish the sketch off that way, but you know, I'm somebody who actually needs to have the person there in front of me in order to feel like I'm capturing the drawing truthfully. So if that doesn't work, then the second thing that I do is I will simply look at someone else who's in a similar pose or a similar posture. Because really, it doesn't matter if the sketch you're making looks like the person. Exactly what you want to do is be able to reference what you're doing with someone. And that's really what I do. I just look for the next person that I can see in the same pose in order to try to quickly make more of what I started in the drawing. Now, the third alternative is to just move on to another sketch. This might seem like you're getting nowhere with your drawing. You're not able to finish any drawing, but honestly being able to make a quick sketch and then move on to the next one is a really important skill. It's as important as anything. It means that you're able to just jot down really quickly with your own drawing, what it is you see in as quick a time frame as almost a few seconds. And that you don't need to fuss over it in order to make it look right over time. You'll really appreciate the value of this. All right, those are my top tips for drawing people who are moving. 9. Setting Up in a Coffee Shop: Now it's time to head out to your favorite cafe, or coffee shop, or wine bar or pub wherever you feel comfortable, people watching. In this lesson, I want to share some tips that might help you to set up in a public space in order to start your drawing session. When I get to my coffee shop, my main concern is that I want to choose a spot where I can see people, but where I'm not going to really be that conspicuous or stand out because you can draw a lot of attention to yourself if you're sketching away in the middle of, you know, a public space. I'm a bit shy about people seeing me sketching or drawing, so I often try to find a place where it's not so conspicuous. Here's what I suggest. You could choose a seat that's near a wall or somewhere towards the back of the coffee shop, someplace that there won't be anybody behind you that might make you feel a little bit more comfortable about drawing. Another good option is to choose a seat at a window or somewhere where you can look out. I find that's an excellent spot for people watching and it's not too obvious. I managed to find a place in my local coffee shop that's perfect. It's behind a shelving unit, so I can actually sit behind there and look through the shelves to see people which is great. They don't really notice me sort of staring at them. Another thing that you can do if you really feel shy about drawing in public is you could bring your laptop along and set it up in front of you. Then it looks like you're working on your computer and you don't draw too much attention to yourself. Now, I wanted to mention, be prepared to have people come up and interrupt. You know, folks are usually very curious and very interested to see someone sketching. And there's nearly always somebody who will want to stop and chat you and have a look at your work. Just be prepared for that and you won't mind it too much. And hopefully it won't be too disruptive to your process and you can get back to sketching. All right, so in the next lesson we're going to go out into the coffee shop and start out drawing projects. 10. Project 1: Quick Sketches: So the first thing that I do when I start a drawing session at a cafe or any public space, is that I'll make a few quick sketches. And this might seem totally obvious, but I think it's very good to be intentional about setting aside a few minutes at the beginning to warm up and to get used to drawing in a way that you might not normally be used to. It does take a while to get used to this, especially when drawing fast sketches of people moving. As I said, firstly, you have to get used to people moving. As I mentioned previously, if you're not used to drawing gesturally on the ipad, then this also might take a few minutes to lean into. I will usually make a quick circle just to start off when I'm drawing the figure. And from there I'll use a mapping line to try and pluck angles and try to plot the overall pose. You can do this with surprisingly few lines and it's perfect. Remember no details at this stage. I also love drawing faces, so this is something that I work on for my warm ups. It absolutely doesn't matter if your sketch looks like the person or not. Simply try to follow the person that you're looking at. As a guide, try to jot down the location of the eyes, the nose, and the angle between the nose and the chin. Get the ear in, check the back of the distance from the ear to the back of the head. If it's a profile, that's all that you really need to try and capture. Also bear in mind that these don't have to be fast drawings. Even if it looks like I'm drawing quite fast at this moment, they just need to be loose. In other words, I want to stress that a gesture drawing is not about drawing the figure or the person that you see really fast. It's really more about drawing the overall sense or the impression that you get when you at a pose or you look at a figure. That's what a gesture drawing is. Focus on trying to capture the absolute main essential aspect of the figure. Then later, if you could work up the drawing a little bit more if you felt like you wanted to finish it up a little bit. But as I said to try and warm up, just stay as expressive as you can and try to enjoy that process. The idea is to build up a page or two of these really quick sketches. If you feel comfortable drawing full en figures, that's also great, but faces and seated poses at the very beginning are perfect for your drawing session. If anything is too difficult or too complex, then, you know, rely on the scribble mark to indicate that area. Like for example, if I'm drawing hands, somebody holding a phone in this case, or a coffee. I'm not going to spend any time trying to get the hands right. Literally make a mark in that area that I know is going to actually read just fine in the drawing. And the reason why I am stressing so much that you don't have to focus on details and just, you know, use the figure as a reference point. As a reference at this point is because drawing from life is very challenging. It's completely different to drawing from a photograph. When you draw from a photograph, you'll have so much more time to study the details and get things looking right. But when you're drawing from life, there's an awful lot more going on, especially when the subject is moving. So the idea is to actually just start to get used to being in this dynamic between you, sketching somebody in person, and also if that person is actually moving around. So it's a complex dynamic and we're just going to take it step by step. Hopefully this process gets you into a free flowing drawing mode and helps you to warm up to drawing people in a fast moving environment. I hope especially that it helps you to draw gesturally in a digital format. Above all, I want you to make this process your own, by all means, find your own rhythm, your own style and flow that works for you and feels natural to you. So I'm showing you these demos not as a prescriptive way of saying this is how you do your warm ups or this is how you draw in any way. This is really simply to give you a starting point for you to explore your own drawing language yourself. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Project 2: Full Figures: So if drawing the full figure is difficult for you, then I would suggest you warm ups again of this subject. Draw as many quick gestures as you can on one page. And I find that this really helps me to get used to the proportions of the figure and to capture the overall pose in the people that I'm looking at. Once you've done three or four warm ups like that, then you can start focusing on one person at a time. Now granted, one of the challenges that we discussed earlier is that most standing people in a coffee shop are likely not going to stay standing in one pose for very long. So you do have to be very economical about your marks. And the lines that you put down here, for example, was a guy standing, waiting for his coffee. So luckily, I had a minute or two, but he was still moving around quite a bit. And what I did was stuck with the very initial pose that I had seen him in at the very start of the drawing. And then I just kept drawing it even as he moved and shifted his position. You can actually keep referencing the as they move around, even if they turn around, keep referencing the person and continue the drawing in the same way. You will get used to this very quickly and it's quite easy to capture a study of the figure in this way. I also drew the woman who was standing beside him, and luckily she was wearing a shawl, so that made the figure quite easy to draw. It's great when the clothing of the figure gives you a bit of a free pass or a bit of an easy way to draw the overall shapes. The next thing that I did was a drawing of a woman standing nearby, waiting at the counter. This was a very easy pose. I kept the sketch very loose and aimed to get the proportions right, more so than the details. But then once the figure was blocked in a little bit, I started to add a few more details to the overall picture. And even in this case, I added some shading and some tonal values to the sketch to give it a little bit more depth and a little bit more interest. Sometimes the line work alone can make a drawing seem unfinished. I don't mind that personally. But you might be more inclined to add tones or even colors into your sketch. That's something we'll talk about later. But by all means, if you have time to do that, I'd love to see that in your work and in your sketches, So definitely include that if you'd like to. I also quickly sketched this lady who was in the line behind the first woman. But I aimed to make this pose a little bit bigger in my overall composition. My last full figure sketch for this drawing session was of a seated figure. Now that's going to be the best option, I think, for full figure drawings, if you want to get in more detail or if you want to make a more finished drawing, because a person who's sitting down is much more likely to be staying in that one or in that one position for longer than someone who's standing. A seated figure is likely having coffee or working on their laptop, or looking at their phone. And that is perfect. That's going to give you a full 5 minutes or 10 minutes to draw something, which is really awesome for this kind of work that we're doing. The only real challenge I faced here was getting the overall proportions to work for me, you have to give room really for the waist and legs in a pose like this, or what you could do is you could just draw the figure from the waist up. That's also an option for you. But what I did was I tried to get everything down and I had to scale the drawing down a little bit to fit in the lower half of the figure, the legs. What happened there was that I made the lower half of the body a little bit bigger than the top half proportion wise. That this comes back exactly to what I mentioned earlier of not drawing while you're checking or referencing the whole figure and then giving too much attention to one section. So what I'd like to see in your drawings of the full figure is either a standing figure or a seated figure. But I really hope that you can keep in the loose gestural approach that we've been working with in our warm up sketches, because that's definitely going to give you the overall main aspect of the pose and will help you to actually capture a likeness of the people that you're drawing. It also helps you to capture the movement so clearly. And that's something that you do want to be able to bring into your work and you want to be able to express in these quick cafe style drawings. Movement is an incredibly important part of a drawing, especially a drawing of the figure. You never want your figure drawings to look like a still life. You want to be able to indicate movement because movement indicates life and loose gesture line work is the best way to capture that movement in a subject. I really hope you enjoy this project and then when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and I'll share with you my process for drawing a portrait. 12. Project 3: Drawing Faces: In this lesson, I'll share with you my process for drawing a portrait. When I'm doing cafe drawings, really this is nothing too complex. But I wanted to let you know that if it's too daunting to start drawing the features of the face right out of the gate, especially from life. One thing that you can do, which I find really useful is to start off with just putting down some tonal values on your page. This can be useful because it helps. Not only does it make some marks on the page, the drawing gets started without too much pressure. But it goes back to that exercise we did earlier of tonal drawing, where you can start to build up your image or build up your drawing using progressively darker tonal shades. And it's really useful way to work at the beginning. Then I switched over to my drawing brush and started to work into it. Because I had put down these loose tonal marks, it was much, much easier to just start simply placing in a few simple lines where the features would go. What I love about this technique as well, is that the two marks or the tonal values and the line work can work so well together. And they blend together extremely well to create a cohesive overall drawing. The other thing to point out is that when you're drawing a portrait in a coffee shop or a public space, it's likely that you'll be doing a profile because you don't want to be looking directly at somebody and drawing them intently. And it's very easy to eyeball or reference people from a profile point of view. The main things to look out for in a profile, I find is definitely the distance between the ear and the back of the head. And the ear on the top of the head. Most people will tend to get those two distances slightly off in their drawing. And it's really important to keep checking the relationship between those two areas on your own drawing, make sure that you're getting that right. The other important angle to look for is the angle of the nose obviously, but also the angle from the tip of the nose to the chin. You can see here that I'm making corrections in my drawing where I got the top of the head slightly wrong, in the wrong place, and I'm just erasing out those marks to make the correction and make the drawing a little bit more correct. I want to stress and reiterate again that you're making these quick sketches from life. I don't really want to see details of the eyes. I don't want you to have to focus on how the intricate shapes and anatomical details of the eye socket and the eye lids. More often than not, when you're looking at somebody, you don't see that complex structure at all. What you see is a set of shaded areas. It's usually as simple as that. You can just make sure that you're getting the dark spots or the dark places down into your drawing and it'll actually read as an eye. One of the most important things that I learned about making a portrait drawing of anybody somebody once told me is to make sure that you get the shadow shapes in the right place. If you get the shadow shapes of a person's face in the right place, you will have captured a likeness of that person simply because the shadow shapes are what indicate the underlying structure. And they're the ones that everybody's face is different, so if you get the shadow shapes specific to one person in the right area. You will be able to capture that person's likeness in your drawing. So for example, if you look at somebody's face, the shadow areas around the eye are very important. The shadow shapes around the bottom of the nose, the mouth, and even the structure of the cheekbones. Those are the areas that I want you to try and capture. Not necessarily to be able to draw the structure or the details of each of these shapes, but simply look at where those dark shapes are. If you squint your eyes, even I know you probably can't do this when you're sitting in a coffee shop, starts squinting at somebody. But if you practice looking at things with a little bit of a close your eyes slightly, you start to see these shadow shapes much, much more clearly. You start to see less of what you think you should be looking for in terms of detailed and anatomical structures. And that's going to help you to make these gestural drawings very, very quickly. So I'm going to now leave this over to you. I really hope you enjoy this process and that you feel confident about heading out to a coffee shop or some public space where you can draw people from life. I can't stress enough how important this practice is for anybody who is wanting to improve their drawing skills, but particularly for people who are interested in portraiture or figure drawing and they want to get good at drawing people. This practice or this one exercise, let's call it, was actually the thing that made my drawing improve so much. When I started doing this, suddenly I was able to draw people. I was able to draw in proportion. And I was able to tackle drawing face a portrait much more confidently. And that's what I want you to be able to take away from this class. I hope that you've gotten some inspiration here and some inspiration for, you know, trying this out yourself. If you've never done cafes drawings before, I highly recommend it is a really powerful drawing exercise to do and it really will help you to improve your drawing skills overall. 13. Wrap Up: Now that we've covered the process and the techniques, it's time for you to grab your ipad, head out, and draw some people from life. When you're done with your drawing project, I'd love if you could post them up in the project gallery and leave a comment on your fellow classmates work if you feel inspired to do so. It's always so great to see supportive comments from other students. I'd also love if you could share some of your process and tell me how you got on. Did you find drawing people from life really challenging or did you enjoy it? What aspects of the process did you love the most? And most importantly, have you started to see an overall improvement in your drawing process? And you're observing. My last piece of advice that I want to leave you with is that drawing is all about seeing. And seeing encompasses so much more than just flat two D visuals. Really the only way to fully encounter that wide range of seeing, in a true sense, is to draw from life. The beauty of this is that you can then take that experience back to your regular drawing practice of drawing from photo reference. If you have any questions or thoughts yourself on this process, be sure to drop them in the discussion tab. Thank you so much for taking this class with me. I really hope that it has inspired you to push your drawing practice to the next level with some challenges. And to improve drawing figures and drawing faces. I can't wait to see your work. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll look out for you in the next class. De.