Draw A Seagull

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to another drawing lesson. In this tutorial, we'll draw a sea gull using sketching and shading techniques that are suitable for beginners. To start our drawing, we'll use the concept of a simple grid to find the correct proportions. Then we'll go through a standard drawing process to find important angles to identify light and dark areas and to build up shading. Once we've got the gull down on paper, we'll spend some time on creating the illusion of texture for the rope and for the wooden post. Now, if you have extra time at the end of the lesson, you'll also have the choice to add a background to make the light values of the gull really stand out against a darker background. Tutorial is perfect for beginners who want to practice a range of drawing skills by working through a full drawing from start to finish. Grab your pencils and your sketchbook and we'll get started. 2. Materials: For your materials, you're going to need a couple of different pencils. One for sketching with at the start. We want it to be nice and light. So maybe a two H pencil or an HB pencil if you feel like you can use that light enough. And then you also need something a bit darker. So I've got an HB pencil for sketching. I might use my mechanical for sketching as well. And then for shading, I've got a three B pencil. This is quite a hard one in terms of brand. And so something like a two B or a three B pencil will be fine, something with B in it that we can do a bit of shading with in a Pty eraser. And if you're going to do the background, then you may want some tissue as well. So it's going to be up to you whether you want to fill in all of that background, and the tissue can just help you smudge some of that out and keep it nice and soft. We might use it a little bit on the body of the bird as well. 3. Analysing Our Subject: L et's just take a look at our subject before we start. Now, if you have a look at the gull itself, there's not a whole lot of shading really that we need to do in that bird because it's a white bird. There are some areas here. On the wing, that's going to be a bit darker and on the bottom of the body. The rest of it is detail in shape. So what does that mean? It means we're going to have to be quite careful, and we're going to have to work on getting these shapes right of the head and of this kind of very distinctive chest of the bird, where the legs go and the length of the tail. We're going to work on all of that and work on the proportion as one step, and then we'll move on to doing the shading, which, like I said, won't be a whole lot of shading. But then we've got all of this background, which is very dark. Now, it's going to be up to you if you want to do the background, you don't have to. We've also got these areas here that are full of texture. And so that's another thing that we're going to work on is, how can we create the wooden texture of that post that the bird's standing on, and also how can we create this texture of rope? There'll be a few areas in the bird, where we'll look at texture as well, like the feathers just in here. There's some very very fine white feathers. We'll try and get those sorts of textures in there too. The background is very soft, so I'll show you how to do that. But that'll be up to you to finish off at the end because it is quite a lot of work, and you might be really happy with your drawing of a gull and not want to risk adding too much graphite onto the page or, you know, changing the mood of it if you're happy with your drawing without the background. 4. Working With A Simple Grid: Now, this class is being made not long after another class on sketching birds in which we worked really quickly and used simple shapes like circles and ovals for the head and the body. In this class, we're going to take a different approach, and we're going to use a really simple grid method. Now, I'm not a big fan of the technical grid method where you grid up your photograph and you grid up your drawing page, and you transfer every single grid. One by one because I feel like it takes a little bit of life out of your drawing when we're doing these observational drawings. It's quite a different method. There's no harm in doing it, but it's not really for me, and I don't teach it a lot in these classes, but what we can do is take the principle of the grid and use that to help us position the bird and to find the proportions of the bird. So how are we going to do that? We're going to take a really simple rectangle and fit that around the bird. So you can see it's only taking in the head and the body of the bird. Not worrying about the legs or the beak. Those are things we can add on afterwards. And then we can divide this up and think about how the bird sits within this rectangle or this grid that we're going to create. So the lines that we're going to add to this grid, the main ones really is, we're just going to find a halfway point, probably more about there. And a halfway point coming across the grid as well. And I'm just doing this by ey, something like that. And then we can see, you know, where does the head fall across the rectangle? So it is almost halfway across this upper right hand quarter of our rectangle. And that's where the neck starts. So that's another line that we could put down there in our grid, but it doesn't have to be equal parts of this grid. So when we go to put in in the head, we'll be looking at where it lines up this way. And then also where it lines up this way with our grid. And you can see that this line here doesn't fit perfectly within a grid system. So it's not one quarter of the height of the grid. But we could say, well, it's a little bit more than one quarter this distance here. There's our halfway point, and we're just going to use the halfway points really as a way of figuring out where the head goes. Another thing we might look for is the legs. So if we line the legs up Again, doesn't fit tightly into our grid. It's not, you know, one quarter across our grid would be about here, and this is a little bit more than that. So it's just a way to have something there, a very simple grid like this one, with just a vertical and a horizontal axis or halfway point through them to then be able to position everything in relation to those halfway points. Other thing we can do with this simple grid, which is going to be useful is we can use it to look for negative spaces. So negative spaces are the spaces outside the subject, and can be really useful to look at them because we don't have names for them. So instead of trying to draw the body of this bird here and maybe making it a little bit too round, doing this, we can look at this negative space here within our grid, the space that fits between the edges of the grid and the body of the bird. And looking at this space here, we don't have a name for it. We can't say, Oh, yeah, it should be round because it's a bird's body. Just have to look at that shape, and it takes a little bit of control of your mind, I guess, to make sure that you are looking at that shape and not looking at the bird itself. There's another little shape up here, that'll be a useful one to look at, and even around the head here to make sure we've got the shape of the head right. And even this big shape here, you see that as a shape might help us to get the a more accurate shape of the bird itself. We're going to work on it in steps. We'll start with proportion. Then we'll do some shading, and then we're going to work on detail, and we'll spend a whole section on working on texture as well to get in some of those more interesting details on the post and on the rope and the feathers of the bird. 5. Finding Proportions: So think about where you want to fit this bird onto your page. I'm using a whole A four page or 8.5 by 11 ", I think it is. And I'm just going to put him in the middle. But I also want to leave room for that post underneath and then the rope. And I'm not going to go too big, so I'm thinking about just sort of putting his head in here maybe smaller than a golf ball size. And then the body here. We can use that rectangle to start with, but just make sure that you find the position of where your rectangle is going to go and that you have enough room underneath to do the post and the rope. Obviously, we don't want to go too close to the edge of the page for the head because it's going to look a bit cramped, and we might want to put some of that background in. So I've cropped the photograph here on the screen, but you are able to print the photograph out if you want to or download it and put it on another screen. If you want to be able to see the whole thing, because it's actually like a landscape size or a rectangle, the whole photograph itself. So start by drawing a very basic rectangle, and you could just do this by eye. We are going to measure it. But just to kind of show you the size that I'm going to put it down as. I'm going to put something down first. And this is the way I usually work. I like to put something down first, and then I can respond to it. So this is pretty light. I'll go a bit darker, but I want you to use an HB or even a two H pencil, whatever allows you to go as light as you can. So we don't want this rectangle to be part of our drawer. It'll be part of mine, but no want it to be part of yours. We want to be able to erase it really easily. So there's the edge of my page there. Right the smack bang in the middle. We want to make sure we've got the proportions, the overall proportions correct first. And that's how this rectangle can also be really useful. We don't have to actually kind of measure the head and the body and everything yet. We can just simply measure that rectangle that fits around the body of the bird. So what I do is, if you have the photograph printed out, is actually draw a rectangle on the photograph. And once you've done that, then we can measure this rectangle, just using a pencil or something to compare the height versus the width. So I'll do it on screen in a moment. But this is what it might look like if you're measuring it from a photograph, you're going to take the width. Just measuring the length of that, using my fingers as a marker, and then you're going to compare that to the height and see what you get. And I'd say that the height is a little bit more than half the width. So let me show you that on the screen now. Here's the height. If I then take that and turn it around and fit it along the length of that rectangle. There it fits one time. It comes just past the halfway mark. So it's kind of a tricky one to name or to actually say, or it fits one point, you know, 75 times into the width. But what I just do is make sure that your height is slightly longer than half of the width. So when I'm checking this on my drawing, I'm going to use a pencil or something. Draw the rectangle, whatever size you want. But we have to make sure the relationship between the height and the width are the same as the relationship in our photograph. Remember, the height has to be a little bit more than half of the width. So I think I've probably got mine about right. Here's my halfway point. I'm taking a guess in the halfway point this way. I'm not even using a ruler for this. You could do if you wanted to, if you find it really hard to gauge these distances, but, you know, I draw something and then I check it, so that wasn't quite halfway. I don't think. Now, I've got these two halves, even, I need to make sure my height is more than half way, and it is. If you found that say your height was the same as halfway, then you've got to make your rectangle taller. Or if you found that your height you know came way across to here, then you've got to make your rectangle longer. So it's always about comparison, comparing the height with the width, rather than using inches or something like that, because we can measure inches on this drawing here. But, you know, we might want to draw something that's bigger than 4 ". So instead, we use the relationship of the height to the width. So what we'll do now is just start to mark in a few more lines for things like the head and where the legs come up to, as well. So what I'm going to do is just make a little mark here, which is like the back of the head, and then I'm going to draw a straight line down. So where do you see that as fitting within our very simple grid? It looks like it's almost half of this rectangle here, but it's probably just a little bit less. So I'm going to draw a straight line down there. And that's going to tell us how far across the head is going to come. And then I need to find how low down does the head come. So I'm going to make a little mark here, and then I'm going to draw a straight line across. And again, it's not a quarter of this rectangle here. This time it's a little bit more than a quarter. It comes down a little bit more than a quarter. So what I'm doing is I'm looking at the rectangles that I've created on the photograph, the size relationships of them. And putting them in. Then we could actually draw in just a very simple oval shape using an ellipse to show where the head's going to go. Everything really light at this stage. Definitely not as dark as mine. I'm going to be doing a lot of rubbing out, but I do want you to be able to see what I've drawn. So now that we've got these grid lines in here, We can also start to look at the body. Where does the body come up to on the bottom? It comes around to that grid line there. We can draw that in, maybe looking a little bit at the negative space as well. It's coming from the head, coming around, look at that triangle shape there in the photograph, and it's going to meet up about here. Come up a little bit there. Then we can also see the back of the gull, where does it join up with the head right on that point, that intersection there from those gridlines that we drew. So here, and it's going to come down intersect through to the other corner of that little square that we've got there or that rectangle. It's going to come down some more and it pre comes about halfway across before the tail starts. So getting about halfway across, maybe a little bit less than halfway. Just about here. I'm coming down a little bit. So at this stage, we want to draw as much as we can with straight lines. So I've got the straight line of the back, putting a little straight line here. And then I'm going to come out with the tail, and the tail so join up just a little bit above this corner here. And I can run my eye over that negative space. Box see if it's the same kind of negative space as what is in the photograph on the screen. There's a little bit of a gap down here in another straight line that comes out to the tail again. We could look at the wing. Where does the wing sit with our grid? So you can see that it lines up with where the head starts. That line that we put in for the back edge of the head. That is also where the wing is going to start, and we're just going to decide how high up it starts. So again, looking at our grid, it's definitely pretty close to the top of this square. Maybe about there. It's maybe about three quarters of the way up. We've got quite a strong angle coming down at I guess, 45 degrees. And then it's going to start to come across and then join up with that point there. What I just did then was I found this point, it's in line with the back of the head, put in this angle. Then there's another strong angle here. Then I can join it back up with this line. There's this little bit of a wing here as well that we can put in. That just fits in here. It's a little bit like a triangle shape. Then we can put the legs in to have a look at our very simple grid. We do the legs line up? Here they are here. Maybe a third of the way across this part of the grid that we've created. If I find the back of the head and then I come across a third of the way in this rectangle and draw a line down and draw a line for the legs, and then just have a look and think, does it look right? Is it far enough away from the tail? Is close to where the body starts to curve up. That looks right. There's two legs there. I'm just going to put them in as very simple lines and then just put the feet in as a very simple horizontal line. Now, how tall should the legs be? Well, we could measure that if we wanted to. So I've just done it by eye. But as I do it by eye, I'm actually measuring it by looking at other things. You know, even if you're not really consciously doing that, you're thinking about the size of the bird and then how the legs compare to that. So I could take, you know, here's the distance of the legs. The length of the legs. What can I compare that to? Probably the easiest thing to compare it to is just fit it within the body there. So another length about the same would be to about there. So, you know, sort of probably about to here. Minor about right. You could compare it to anything. You could compare it to the width of the head if you wanted to. It's probably about the same as well. So this length across here. With this length, it's probably about the same check them in your drawing, just using your pencil as a ruler and lining the end up with one end of what you want to measure and using your fingers to make a mark. And then there's your measurement. You're going to compare that with the legs. And again, mine's pretty much spot on. So with this grid that we're using, we're drawing it in there, but even if we didn't have that grid there, you can still be using the same kind of technique. So you're thinking about where do the legs come across to? Well, you know, across the length of the body or the body and the tail, what there may be like a third of the way across. So you're all the time thinking in this in this method that is similar to a grid anyway. Where does the bottom of the head for? We divide up, you know, the rest of the bird. Maybe a quarter of the way down. So you can use whatever way works for you. But it's always going to relate in some way too that very simple grid, because we're always comparing things to the height and the width of the body. So I hope that makes sense. Let's bring our grid back to see if there's anything else that we need to fit in there. The only other thing at the moment would be to just put in the placement of the beak. So have a look at that top square or that top rectangle of the head. Where does the beak come across or how far down does the beak start? Primary starts about halfway down. But then, this line of the beat that comes through here is a bit lower than halfway down, something like that. Put an angle there. And then where is the eye? How far down does the eye come? Here it is here. If we divided that rectangle up, it's probably about a third of the way down. Another way to do this would just be to put a very simple grid within that rectangle again, that's probably the easier way to do it. You know, when we just put the vertical and the horizontal and you can quite clearly see that it's right in that corner there. So now we've got something that probably looks a little bit odder and mechanical, but this is just a map for our drawing. And hopefully you've kept it really nice in light because in a moment we're going to go through add in some more angles and then start to sketch in a more natural shape of the bird. But just before we do that, let's just add in an idea of this post here. And again, we could use our grid if we wanted to. You draw a line up here. Where does that edge of the post interact or intersect? It pretty much lines up with that side of the eye, and then this one at the back here. I is almost in line with how center line of our grid, which is here, so I'm just going to draw a line down. And a line down from that one. So it's a bit wider than I thought it was, actually. If I just drew this without checking, I might have drawn the post, you know, really narrow. So it should line up here and here. And then it's got a very, very narrow ellipse on the top. So we know that it's round, but because it's close to our eye level, that that ellipse is actually quite flat. Let's put that in and then just give an indication of where you want that rope to go, maybe sloping it down slightly on each side. So it's a gentle curve in it. Now we're ready to move on to the next stage. 6. Finding Angles: So for this stage, I've gotten rid of everything except that really simple grid because that might still be useful for us. But what we're going to do now is we're going to go through and put in some really strong angles that are unique to this subject. So one of the strong angles would be this one. You can see that on the photo there. Just at the top of the chest. There's also quite a straight line here. So when I say straight lines and angles, what I'm looking for is an edge that doesn't really curve much away from that line that I've put in there. We bring this up just a little bit bigger, so you can see it. We I've put that line down the side here. You know, there is maybe a very slight curve to it, but it is quite straight, and then here's another one here. So when I put the line in, the edge that's next to it doesn't really change much from that line. Definitely through here it curves. But if we can put in these straight lines or straight angles, here's another one up here. Really straight there. You can't see any curve underneath that line, and also the back of the head here. If we can put these in, then that's going to help us find the correct shape. Otherwise, what people tend to do is they tend to sort of make things a lot rounder than they actually are. So looking for these angles, here's another one here. These straight lines is a way for us to get around or get past our tendency to do that, to make things round. It's going to help us to see things more clearly. So I'm going to get rid of those lines because they might be a little bit in the way. But let's go through and put these ins. We've got a straight angle here. This is where we will start to join things together too. So, so obviously, the head isn't completely round, and these angles are going to help us find the correct shape. But we can also look at those negative spaces. So remember the space in here. Look at that as you put in these straight lines, this one, and this one. So we got a straight edge here. Mine's probably sloping down a little bit needs to come out a little bit here. Very light with your angles. Again, I'm doing mine pretty dark. It's quite close to that halfway point of our grid. So even though we've drawn this shape in already underneath, now we are going through and correcting it. This one's pretty close to the legs. Even just that, can you see putting in this line in this line? It's making it look more like that gull. Now it's looking a lot more natural and I can then start to join these lines up. Let's do the ones at the top of the head. Put those in and also look at that negative space up there. And then the back of the head. And then down the back here, it starts to change slightly. Just about that midway point, where are two axes cross. The angle changes slightly. We've also got another feather up here that we can add in. Look at where it lines up or another set of feathers. Look at where they line up with the start of the head or the back of the head. And with our axis lines. And once you're happy with those angles that you've got in there, we can rub out everything else. So we don't need our grid lines anymore. We've got all of the shapes that we want. We've got the angles that we want. And now we're just going to move on to the next stage, which is to sketch in our natural flow lines. Now, I'm going to go ahead and push mine back just a little bit. You can see that. I've got some really dark lines here. So I'm going to make them a little bit lighter. And you could do that if you feel like you've gone a little bit overboard and got some very heavy lines. But just make sure that you're not losing the information that you need. So, you know, if I rub out this line here, I'm losing that angle that I spent time to find. So I need to make sure all I'm doing is maybe just lightening them a little bit. You don't have to rub anything out, so if your lines are nice and light, ideally, you just leave these lines underneath, and they're going to disappear when we put in our other details and maybe a little bit of shading, and you can always rub them out in the white areas later if you wanted to. 7. Sketching Flow Lines: L et's focus in on the head and the beak. And we're going to start there to put in our flow lines. So the flow lines are simply looking again at the shape. I'm going to switch to my regular HB pencil here. And following your eye around the shape. I'm looking at the photograph as I do this, just rounding things off, but not losing those angles. So there might still be some corners, but they're softer corners now. And we can put in the beak. If we put in the shape outside the beak or the white areas, just back here in the head where the beak comes into the head, that's going to help us find the shape of the beak as well. Let me zoom in a little bit here. So you can see I'm putting in this triangle shape. I might not have come down quite enough into the beak area there. So it's a triangle shape, but it has a bit of a curve in it that comes right across to underneath the eye. Here's the triangle here. A bit of a wobbly line underneath that as well. Can you see where it's the other side of the underside of the, the white part there. There's a bit of a line here. So now we're looking for all these really fine details, or I should say fine edges. We'll add in details later when we put in our dark points. But for now, we do need to look at these edges a little bit more closely. So the top of the beak starts just a bit But past that white corner there. There's this white shape here. You see the beak starting just a little bit above that. We've got a couple of triangles, actually, we've got this triangle, and then we've got this little triangle here. And then it comes down on a slope. Now you'll feel the tendency to curve it around. Just bring that line out first, make sure you've got that slope and same on the bottom without even curving it yet, just bring it out on a slope. Down the bottom here, comes down on a slope and then it straightens out. And then we've got kind of like a center line of the lips or the lips, the beak that comes straight down as well, and then it curves down. There's an angle there. But before I put in the top curve of the beak around here, I'm looking for this line and this line. Then when we've got that structure, then we could put a bit of a curve in there. I maybe brought my top part of the beak, top lip, or whatever you call it. Top part of the beak. I've brought that down a little bit too low, so just bring it up a little bit. So here's the bottom part of the beak and the top part of the beak just overhangs a little bit. So hopefully you've got the beak looking okay and natural. We didn't really measure how far out it comes. But what you could do is look at this shape and here this negative space, and maybe even think about a line or an angle. That's coming from the end of the beak to hit the body. What would that angle look like? So if you do that and your angle looks more like this, then you've got your beak far too back. If your angle looks more like this, then you've brought your beak all the way out here. So we're looking for this kind of angle. Coming up from this we put in that angle of the body there. And then also use that angle to look at the shape in here. So these are things that artists are doing all the time without actually showing that they're doing it. And that's what I hope to help you with in these classes, is actually point out some of these things. These techniques that artists are using that you may not be aware of, or maybe you're aware of them, but you haven't quite got into the habit of using them in your drawer. And they haven't become really natural to you yet. Let's put the i in while we're here. So, have a look at the placement of the i, see if you are happy with that. We had our grid lines before, but we could take a different approach now. One approach might be to look at where the beak is. So drawing a line straight out from the beak there. Here. That's going to intersect the top of the eye. Now, that's only going to work if you've got your beak on the right angle, I think mines slightly up to the angle of it. So I'm just going to bring that down a bit. And then I can put my eye in. We also want to check how far across the eye comes. And I've just sort of put a line there, which I think is about halfway across the head. If you remember our grid that we had in there, that mini grid, it was about halfway across that head, just make sure your eye is sitting in that kind of area. And then we'll get rid of these lines so we can see it. So it's got a kind of an arm and shape to it. We want a really nice sharp pencil for this, and don't push too hard yet in case you need to change it. But a little point at each end and then it's going to have a bit of a border around it. But then it's got a round pupil inside there. And one of the things that's going to make this look more like the character of this bird is the little bit of shading that's going to come on either side of that. You see there's a bit of a line or a crease just there. Now if you're working quite small like I am, you might find this a little bit fiddly. That's why you want a nice sharp pencil. We add some more flow lines to the body of the bird and then we'll be ready to move on to a little bit of shading. So what I'm doing here with these flow lines is, I'm looking at the edge of the bird. I'm working my way around now. And going over the lines that I've already done, but all the angles that I've drawn. But making changes if I see changes. I think this angle, maybe I had it a little bit coming a little bit too low down. So look at the photograph yourself. Ideally, you've got this printed out, and then start to draw in some of these other shapes. So here's one of those wings. The other wing is behind it ale bit. We've got that triangle shape there, and then we've got the tail, which is mostly going to be shading, but we can see that there's a few tail feathers sticking out there. I'm putting those in. Is that, couple of dropping down, which are quite hard to see. Then we can also approach these legs in the same way, looking at details now trying to see the edges. There's a little bit of a nobly part there for the bend in the leg, the joint in the leg. And then the s lower part of the leg is on just a slight angle. The foot we can't see a lot of. We can sit see it from the side. So again, it's a matter of looking at just the shape that you can see. Don't get caught up in what you think it should look like. When you're looking at this, you're thinking it should look like ducks feet. But we can't see the top of the foot, so all we can look for is the edges, shapes that we can see there. For this other little joint here. So feathers coming down there as well. And we break this up even further, these wings here. Just the lines of the different types of feathers. There's going to be some coming down here that we'll work on when we do a bit of texture. 8. Assessment: So at this point, before we move on, I just want you to look at your drawing, look at the photograph, and see if there's anything that you feel like you need to fix. So I can see something with mine that needs to be corrected, and it's something up here. I feel like if the head is the back of the heads a little bit too long. So I'm just going to sketch a little bit, get a feel for what's happening. Look at the photograph, work my way, you know, round the form again with my pencil. And see if I can figure it out. There's no rest. You have to keep looking. To keep looking at negative spaces, looking at edges. It's looking a little bit better. Some of the corrections will also come with the shading as well. The shading will help us to see new shapes, or see things in a new way. Maybe the top of the head here. It's a little bit of an angle that I can put in there. Maybe my beak is a little bit too long. It's put in the angle here again. Yeah, I think it is, and it's not a lot. That's probably the correct angle there. Mine comes out a little bit. But, you know, that'll tell you that something not quite right, and it's worth fixing it. I little bit of an exploration of your drawing. See if you can find anything that's incorrect. Now, I don't want to rub out all of this beak. I just rubbed out the part that I wasn't happy with the length of it, and then I'm looking again. I think I just brought this line out too far. Following the same process as before. So at this point, you're probably still feeling a bit strange about the drawing. If you haven't done a lot of drawing before, you might be feeling like you know, it's not looking right or it's unfinished, which it is unfinished. It is a really important stage of the drawing. At this point, we can't quite see forward into the future what it's going to look like with all the shading, but we can go back to our grid, and we can look for measurements and things, angles that we can rely on and make corrections. So it is worth taking 5 minutes now to try to figure out what could be corrected. So it's almost like you're doing is spot the difference, ******* your eye from, you know, the photograph, the photograph to your drawing back and forth. Is there anything there that is not quite right? Without thinking too much about the finished result, just thinking about the structure and the shapes right now. I think this is a place where sometimes people can get a little bit thrown off course because they look at this drawing, or they look at this plan, and they think it doesn't, you know, look like the way I want the drawing to look like. That doesn't matter. It needs to look like that photograph there and needs to look like just the structure of that photograph there. If you've done that, then we can worry about what it looks like at the end, but we'll have a really good base to work on. I hope that makes sense. Don't get too caught up in what you want this drawing to look like at the end. Just trust the process. Trust the method of using that grid, that simple grid, and finding the angles and looking at negative spaces. Next stage, we're going to move on to shading. 9. Starting The Shading: I've turned our photo into black and white so we can more clearly see the values. As I mentioned at the start of the class, there's a lot of white in here. There's not a whole lot that we need to do up around the face in this part of the body. All of this in here should be nice and clean if it's not, then you might want to do that now. Just using my tombo ase a pen here, and also cleaning up the edges a little bit. So we don't really want any outlines except if you are planning to do that dark background. It doesn't really matter how dark this line is here because the background is going to blend into that line anyway. But if you are not going to do a background where you're not sure yet, then it should be, really nice, fine, light line. And not a dark outline. To start shading, we're going to identify the main shadow shape. So anywhere that's not white because this part of the bird is white. Anywhere that isn't white is an area that's receiving some shadow. So what can you see that's receiving shadow? There's a shape just here. There's also this shape here. All of that is in shadow, but can you see it changes from a very light gray up here to more of a middle gray? Down here. And then there's this wing here which has quite a dark value, not so much shadow, a little bit shadow, but also just the colors of the bird. It's very dark at this edge, and then it fades as we move this way. So what we're going to be doing is shading smooth gradients, really and fading things out. Now, you might want to have a little bit of a practice of this first, holding your pencil further back. This is an HB. You could use a two H or an HB if using an HB, make sure you're using very light. So if we're shading the area under the head, for example, you start on one side. And just use lines or maybe even small circular motion with your pencil, and you move towards where it starts to fade out, and then you're going to just lessen the pressure. So I don't want to have to smudge it or anything like that. You see, I'm going from darker to lighter and it's just lifting the pressure of my pencil as I move out towards that light area. You might have to tidy up some parts or darken up some parts, but again, you're going to lift up the pressure of your pencil as you move out towards the light area. If you've got any hard edges, then just very, very gently feathering out those light parts are shading into the white. So it just disappears. Let's go ahead and put in this shape underneath. The beak here. Starting at that edge, you might be using this hand, if your right hand is starting at this edge, very gently moving your way across and lessening the pressure as you do that. Look at the shape of that shadow area. You could very, very lightly outline it if you want to. There's a bit of a line that comes across the bottom here, but it's a shaded line. It's not straight. It's got a little bit of a curve in it, and then the shading blends into that. How gray should it be? It's a light gray here. As we go under the chin no or under the beak, getting to a mid gray, so they might need to darken up just a little bit. We want to have at least two or three ve, three values here, very, light, and then a mid gray. Then we're going to do exactly the same thing on the bottom of the body here. I'm going to start at the darker area. And you could turn your page around and work in whatever direction feels comfortable for you. Using kind of like circles, like this sort of motion. But you see how far back I'm holding my pencil so that I'm barely touching the paper. And I can control the pressure. If you're holding it like this, there's a lot of force, there's a lot of downward pressure. You're pushing down on your pencil, or is holding it at the back. I'm just resting the pencil on the paper. And I'm going to work my way up. It starts to fade out up here. So that's where I need to barely use any pressure on the paper. If you're getting a bit of texture either from your paper or from your pencil, that's okay. This is quite smooth paper, so yours might not look the same as mine, but getting the values correct is important. Even if you've got lots of texture in it, if you have a light value up here and then it slowly gets darker, you're going to get the three D form, which is what we want. Build this up a bit more. There's a little bit of white just under the wing, so I want to leave that. I've got a kind of a feathery mark just from my lines, which suits the feathers of the bird. So I think I'll keep. I'll keep those marks from my pencil, but if you weren't happy with them, you could smudge a little bit. Just being aware that this can make it a bit darker. And so you don't want to do it too much up the top here, where we want it quite light. So once you've shaded in, then we need to decide, well, how dark it doesn't need to go? We can compare it to this part up here. Down here would be darker than this part in the photograph. This part and this part are probably the same, which tells me that well, even this part here on my drawing, I haven't gone dark enough yet. There's a few patterns in there, you can see maybe there's a bit of a shape in this area here. All around that neck is white, but there's a really gentle fade from the gray into the white. So not a lot of shading to do in this bird, but it is quite delicate shading that we need to do. I'm just doing another layer now, still with my HB pencil, building it up, building it up. Increase the pressure down here, but just gradually because I don't want to have any hard lines come through, I need to keep an even pressure as well. I can see that I'm getting to the limit of this pencil. I don't want to really push hard with it. So I'm going to switch to another pencil. I'd suggest a two B pencil this one. Is a three B, but it's quite hard using it on its side. Now I can see that I'm getting a darker value down there. So I can put that dark value in and then I need to fade it out into this lighter value. So as I move across, I just very, very slowly decreasing the pressure. You might see me going back a little bit every now and again, or see an area that I've just left or skipped over by accident, a bit of white that needs to be filled in or a bit of just a gap that needs to be filled in. But I'm really focusing on getting this to gradually blend here. I'm just going to define that there's a little bit of an edge there underneath that white part, just a little bit of extra shadow under there. It's a bit of an angle. The more you look at this, there you'll see into detail, so I can start to see more shapes coming around here. You can put those in if you want to or you could just keep it quite quite general. I'm pretty happy with that. I might just put it a little darker part over here. I can see there's a bit of a tuft or something. It's a bit of white, or not white, but lighter, so I'm going to go around that. And maybe just a little bit of darker shadow here. 10. Working On The Wing: Then we can work on the wing. Let's do this one at the top here because it's pretty simple. Just keeping my two B pencil here or my three B pencil. You could use a two B, but I'm using it very lightly. Apologies if this is a little bit hard to see, but I don't want to overdo it. Go too dark. It is just the light gray. But you'll see at the bottom of it, it's a little bit darker. I'm just going to erase the line that I had there. You can see along here. It's a bit darker. I could actually draw a line in, and then I want to shade along that line. And then I want to blend that into the lighter area. Starting with harder pressure and then litle small circles lessening the pressure. Now I'm going to do that just one more time because it is a bit darker in there. A little bit darker. That's a little bit better. Then there's a light part and then a dark part, it's like these feathers here or parts of the wing that are overlapping each other. We can show that by keeping a light part and then doing a darker part next to it. So the top, the back of the bird, it is a light gray, actually, so it should all be shaded in, but it's lighter and then it starts to gradually get darker. With these wings here. Now it would be a good time just to add in some linework if you want it. So what I mean by linework is, just these feathers at the end here. We can't really can't really shade them because they're pretty much white. We can shade around them, maybe. But this triangle shape here, I'm just going to work my way around very lightly and put in some of the shapes that I can see. And then same with these feathers that overlap at the top here, white. You can get away with having just a light outline like this, even if you're not going to do the background, so I've kept my pencil on its tip. So I get a nice sharp line, which makes them feel delicate. It's a little bit of shading in here, probably best to go back to an HB at this point because these are very, very light. And there's some shading in here. And we as we add a bit of the texture while we're here because it's kind of part of the shading. So I'm adding in some lines, but I'm shading those lines. I'm not just drawing out lines like here. I'm just shading them in. Again, I know it's very light at this point. It's going to stay pretty light as well. So it may not be showing up really well on the video. Just do the best that you can. A lot of this is going to come out when we do this darker part. Right here, but let's do a little bit more on this wing. You can see that along these feathers here, If you look at them closely, you'll see that they have a light edge to them, and then there's a bit of darker shading, light, dark, light, dark. It's like a pattern. So light, light, light, light, light, and in between those is some darker shading. So we can take that pattern and we can apply it in here bit. But what we can do first is just give all of this a layer of shading. So I'm using HB pencil very lightly filling the whole thing because there's not really any white in there. Even those light edges, they're not white. They're not the same white as on the front of the body. Filling in any gaps, just doing an even coat of light gray. Maybe a bit of a smudge there if you want to. That will keep it really nice and soft looking. Now moving back to a darker pencil, to be pencil, and I'm starting at this dark edge. Drawing in a bit of an outline or shading an outline, so I know where that dark edge is going to go to. And then I can start working on shading that in, but I want to blend it into the lighter layer underneath. So working my way across. As I come over here, I'm going to lessen the pressure. And also, as I come up, I want to lessen the pressure. So that might mean turning your page around a little bit, matching the value that you've got there, pushing quite hard, and then coming up and lessening the pressure as you move into that lighter area above. So match the value and then lessen the pressure. Looking pretty good. This is going to have to go darker, is the only thing. I'm going to put a bit of that in there now just so I can get an idea of how dark it is. I is probably about right, pushing a bit harder this time. It's close to black, but it's not as black as the tail feathers. Then I'm just going to do the same thing again, Blend, lessening the pressure, blending into that layer underneath. Both as you move up the feathers or the wing, and then as you move across the wing as well. So I did say there's not a lot of shading to do in this one, but you're actually spending a fair bit of time to try and get these really nice blends from dark to light. It's not something you can do quickly. You've just got to take the time and make sure you're covering the ground. And then you have to do that several times as you build up these layers. I think that's getting dark enough now. So now I'm going to start putting in this pattern. If you had the time and you wanted to, you could look at every single one of these feathers that come across this wing. I'm just looking for the main things that stick out to me, so I can see a bit of a darker line here. I'm putting that in. Then from there that pattern starts as a bit of a curved one, and then it's gray, and then it's a bit darker, and then it's lighter and then it's gray. You could actually draw these in very lightly first if you want to, draw in some lines like this. You see those, and then making sure the edge of each one is light. So you're going to leave a light area, and then you're going to shade just behind that light area. Leave a light area, shade just behind it. Then you start to get that effect of them having a light edge. Now as we come up here, everything's a lot lighter. I'm leaving some light lines. So they're not white, but I'm just leaving some areas of the layer underneath to show through for those light edges, and then I'm shading Is the middle part of the feathers. Just working my way across that wing, and then back across that wing looking for shaded areas or areas that should be lighter or areas that should be darker. All of this needs to be darker. So you can get away with having this pretty loose in here. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be exactly what you see in the photograph, but if you are someone who likes to pay attention to detail and likes to get these things right, then you could take a lot more time and put in every single feather. I'm just looking for the patterns that I can see. Another pattern I can see is that this area here, this other part of the wing is sitting underneath this top part of the wing, so you can see that it's a bit darker just as it meets that edge there. And maybe you can see some separate feathers there as well. To show these light feathers here, there's a shaded line that comes up here. It's like a gray. Let's have look at your values, see if there's any other values you need to add in there. It's darken up this one. You see that one standing out to me. Something up here, standing out to me, a couple of feather shapes. 11. Working On The Tail: Let's go ahead and put in this tail of the bird, and that's really going to start to bring things together. After that, we've really just got to do the eyes and the beak and the legs, the details, but this is going to bring out our full ton range. So what we need to do is make sure that we've got those white parts marked out parts that you want to leave white. So we're just going around them. And there's a little part under here as well. That is white or light. The light gray. And then everything else is going to be darker. Now, you can treat this like a negative space. So I'm working my way around the other feather shapes first. Using this black area to define the shapes of the lighter feathers. So I've just made my way around these feathers here. It's not perfect, but just to show you that edge that I'm looking at there. And I've essentially created an outline, but all of this is going to be shaded in now, so it becomes part of the shading. I'm using the three B pencil, and I'm pushing quite hard now. But still using it a little bit on its side, so I get a softer mark. You can do this in patches, but you want to make sure that you are matching each value that you put down, so it doesn't look patchy. That's about controlling the pressure of your pencil as well. And then there's a feather that comes out underneath, it has a light edge, has a light tip. And it's not quite as dark as this main tail feather above it. So go to shade it. But I need to make sure there's a difference between the two of them. So either keep this one lighter, Or if I feel like that's not dark enough, I go darker. Now I need to bring in something darker again to darken up that first tail feather that we did. I was bringing in this is a four B pencil. I really add some black, strong black in there. 12. Reviewing Our Values: Have a look at your drawing at this stage and just see if you've got the same range of values. It should be really dark down here. We should have some darker areas in here, but not quite as dark as the tail. Then some mid grays under here, I think mind could go touch darker. Once you put in that black area, that can help you to see where other areas might be a little bit too light. I think all of this needs to go a bit darker. Again, I want to fade it out as I come. If you're happy with your range of values from the darks to the middles to the very lights, then we go ahead and put in the face. 13. Refining The Face: So take another look and see if you've got the eye in the right place. I think mine is a little bit out. I just not doing so well with the head for this drawing. But I think what it is is that I remember I corrected the size of the head or corrected the shape. So now the eye is just a little bit too far over to the left. And so I need to change mine. I am actually going to rub out the whole thing this time. I know I usually tell you not to do that because we want to be able to see what we're doing over top, or what we're changing, but I just need to to be able to see a little bit more clearly where to put it. That was the center of the head, something like that, and I'll just do mine very quickly because hopefully yours is fine and you don't have to change it. That's looking better. Then we need a really sharp pencil. We need to put in that shape it's like an arm and shape. I go a little bit of a point at each end. Lake a fatter armand. Then the pupil is maybe slightly above midway, slightly higher than center. You'll know if you've got this right because it will have that bdi effect or a By look about it. These lines around the eye, the darker lines. They need to be a little bit thicker. Now there is a point on each corner, but the inside of each of that line is round. So there's not much to it, but we do need to get it right. If we don't get the pupil the right size or in the right place, or we don't get the fine details of that edge or that ring around the eye with a slight points, but the round and the edge, then it's going to look a little bit different from the photo. Which is okay, but if you're going for accuracy, then take a bit of time to really study that eye, and see what shapes you can see. Try not to draw what you think it should look like. But what you actually see there. Look for the negative space or the white space of the eye. See if you've got that shape the same. He's got a little bit of like an eyebrow around the top here as well, just with a very light shaded line. And then we can start to put the beacon. This part that is almost like a smile. Again, it's a soft shaded line. We don't want a hard line because it's like a light gray. I feel like there's still not quite right with, but I'm going to go ahead and hopefully I'll figure it out in this area where I'm shading the beak. If you feel like there's something not right with, see if you can figure out what it is. Sometimes when we get into these details, it helps us to refine the shape a little bit more. Sometimes, we won't see what it is until right at the end. I won't see what's wrong, which is a real pain, but it happens, and ideally we'd be taking a break. So do take a break if you can. And then come back and you'll see it a bit more clearly. Put in that triangle shape in there quite dark with a sharp line. And then all of this bottom part of the beak is shaded. It's in shadow. It's corrected it a bit for me. I wasn't quite sure what was wrong and maybe there's not much wrong. Maybe it's just I need to put more detail in. Maybe it's a little bit short now. After I corrected it. Before I thought it was a bit too long. So take it out just a touch, see what happens. This top part of the beak is very light. I don't want any outlines or hard dark outlines. We can help it. Have a look at the shape of that bottom part of the beak. Angles down a bit and then it flattens out. There's a darker patch here, and that's where, if you remember from the color photograph, there's a little bit of red on the beak there. It is, for me, at least a very fiddly part because I'm drawing small for this drawing. If you're also drawing small, then it's better to just leave an impression of it rather than worrying about, I don't have that line or I don't have that line there, if the general shape looks good, then you'll be okay. Put in the nostril here as well. So that shape is hard to get to because a lot of it is defined by the background, and I don't want to hard outline there. Just check that you don't have any white on that beak where the shouldn't be white. So it's really only white along the top edge. The rest of it should all be shaded in, and then it should be a bit darker here. Look for any black points, what needs to be black. There's a little bit of black just here. Follows this line down. The nostril is quite black. 14. Working On The Legs: And then we're on to the legs. You're going to do these just the same way that we did with the beak. Just check the shapes that you've got there first. So any little details in the edges. You might need to add or maybe in this knobbly part of the knee. Drawing around where I can see light and dark areas. This one on the inside, we can just see the inside of the leg is just a shadow shape really. We could use that to help cut out the shape of the front leg. So looking at negative spaces, I'm looking at, what's the shape of dark that I can see on that back leg? How does that fit around the shapes of light on the front leg? Then when we move to the front leg, think about where the white areas are. Everything that is not a white area needs to be shaded in. And some of the parts, especially up the top here need to be a little bit darker. So when you're drawing things like legs, you're probably tempted to try and draw them with lines and draw them with outlines. But what we're looking at here is really just a series of shading shapes or value shapes. It's maybe a line down here. But all the way up that leg and those knobbly knees, and, you know, the back leg, that's all really just shading shapes. This back leg needs to go much darker, almost black. There is a little bit of a gap between the legs, if you can see it. Don't worry if you've lost it. I think I've lost mine, and I've lost a little bit of the white edge there. Bit better on the front of the front leg. There's not much to the feet at all, and most of that is going to come out when we put in the darker shading around on the post. Put in a little bit a dark shape here between the feet. Maybe a very fine line coming between them. Lost a bit of the on this leg here. I'm just going to bring it back a bit. Make a few corrections. Both of these legs have a light frontage to them, and unless we're drawing the dark background, that's not going to come out, but you could draw a very faint outline. Very sharp outline too. Your pencil, your HB on its tip. And just drawing in the outline there. I know I talk about not using outlines, but sometimes it's suitable if you have a instance like this where you really need the background shaded in. You just make sure it's a really fine outline, very sharp pencil so that it's not a big black, dark outline. The legs mine are a little bit vague. But I'm just going to leave them loose, I think. Put a bit of fluffy fluffiness around them. 15. Checking In - How Are You Feeling?: So how are you feeling about your bird at the moment. I definitely had some struggles with this one. I'm not quite sure why, but there's just something, you know, with that head that I struggled with a little bit, so I hope you can see that it's not always smooth sailing with a drawing. And sometimes you do have to just push through and maybe take a bit of time away from your drawing and then come back to it and try to see things in a clear way and just ph looking at that photograph, figuring out what is it that isn't right. Not what the drawing look like, not what you think it should look like. But what is different from the photograph? And there's a really tricky distinction to make. Is a perfect time to use those skills like negative space and angles because they can help us see more clearly and convince ourselves what we're actually seeing in the photograph. Otherwise, we tend to get carried away with what we think it should look like. We make things rounder, we make things bigger, we make things smaller. We make the feet look more like duck feet. But if we look at the angles of the feet, we look at the negative space around the feet that can help override some of those preconceptions that we have about it. If you're happy with where you are with your drawing, we're going to move on, and we're going to put in some basic shading for these other elements down here, and then we're going to work on the textures and getting some patterns, some wood grain, and some rope textures in there. 16. Practicing Texture: Okay, let's crack on with the rest of this drawing. We're going to add some texture into this post and also into the rope as well. Let's have a little bit of a practice of both of them first. The trick with extra is finding the pattern that is going to work. So if we have a look at the post, you can see that there's these kind of wavy lines that move around in a pattern. Something like this, if we drew it like this, it's going to look like wavy lines, and that's not quite what we want, but we've identified the pattern. So the pattern is these wavy lines, we need to find a texture that is going to make that pattern work as wood grain. So if you think about the texture of wood, little things like this, maybe, little grains, fibers of wood. So we can take that texture and we can apply it to this pattern. And instead of drawing wavy lines, we're going to shade wavy lines using that texture. That might be one, and then there'll be another one coming down around under it. And it's a little bit like the feathers on the bird. If you want to have them exactly as you see it, then you can meticulously follow those patterns. But otherwise, you can just create something that is similar. So this is that area around here in the center. Every thing sort of comes out on either side from that. I guess getting close to the core. So all of these lines that are coming down and around, I'm not drawing them with a line, but I'm shading them with this almost like I guess, almost like a zigzag pattern going up and down, but it's very, very close together. There's a little bit of a knot or something over here, but just shading it as a dark shape. And then again, bringing these lines and things, sometimes they get thicker, sometimes a. I'm looking for the general pattern, but I'm not being super meticulous about getting it exact. We're going to do this over top of a shaded base because obviously there's no white. We could do it this way, as well. We could do the pattern first and then shade over top, but it's actually easier to do the shading first, get the value up to what you want, and then put in that pattern over top. So that is the post, and then the rope. Think about what the rope is. Maybe draw this with me just to get your head around it is it's lots of strands of, you know, cylinders, very long tubes of smaller bits of rope, and they're all wound around each other. And each one of these strands is made up of smaller strands like this. And that's all winding around. So that's just to kind of understand what's happening. And if you think about light hitting this, if light's coming from the top, be darker around this side, and then lighter at the top where the lights hitting the edge of the strand or the rope. What we need to do now is look at that piece of rope there and try to see the shapes or the intersecting shapes. So even though we know that it's a whole lot of strands like this twisted around, what we're actually seeing in the rope, is these sections almost like backwards Ss. So there's a line curves up and then curves back slightly. And then there's another one that starts right at the bottom and it just slopes down a bit, curves down a little bit, and then does the same movement. Cs down a little bit, does the same movement. At the top, they'll come up ale bit over top of that general rope line. So try to identify that shape in the photograph now and have it go at drawing it. You might find it easier to draw all of the S shapes from the top. And then go and round out the bottoms. You might find it easier to draw them from the bottom, getting a little bit off track here. And keep looking back at the photograph. So when you start to get lost, I've kind of gone a little bit got the size wrong and that sort of thing. Then it'll be a good time to look back at the photograph and maybe choose one or two of those shapes that you can see and focus on those. No all going to be exactly the same. So that's the shape that we can see. And then remember here how where the light hits its light and it's darker or the light's not hitting there some shadow. We've got that across the whole general rope. So it's darker down the bottom here. The lights hitting the top, but then also within these separate strands, we've got some darker parts in here, and there's light at the top, and as they curve back around, it's getting darker again on the next one. So we've got this curve at the rope, and then we've got this curve of these strands, as they curve like this. That's what we're using this dark and light pattern to achieve now is to get the feeling that they're curving over, not just wrapping around, but each one of these is a round cylinder as well. If you look at the pattern, it's dark, and then it fades into dark, fades into light and it's dark down the bottom as well. And then on each one of these strands, we've got these individual strands. And they will also go from dark to light. So what I'm doing is I'm starting at the dark side and flicking across so that they sort of fade out as they get to the light side. We don't want like a dark edge on the light side because that's going to ruin the illusion. The dark or the dark line of these strands needs to be on the dark side. I hope that's making sense for you. Let me just demo that again. So I's following the pattern now, it's dark, fades into light, dark, fades into light, and it's darker down the bottom. Then as we go and put in the strands of each one of the parts of the rope, or each one of these lines of rope. We're going to start at the dark and move across that way. They can actually disappear in the light part. You can see along the top of each one of these in the photo. You can't actually see a lot of detail. It's quite white and faded out. That's where I put this part in dark on the light side, it looks strange. It doesn't work. Because it needs to fade out on that light side. There's so much light to it. You can't see. You can't see the detail anymore. 17. Adding The Wooden Post: Here's our post. Like I said, we're going to shade the whole thing. I'm just going to put a little bit of a darker ridge around here. It's not perfectly rounded, curved. There's a bit of shadow there where the top then starts to become the side. I can shade that in a bit darker and then I'm going to shade all of this in. I'm using an HB pencil. You can choose to make the post lighter or darker than the photograph. Doesn't matter too much as long as you have the lights in the darks in the right place. So what I mean by that is if you have a look at the post, it gets a bit darker in the center. You could start off very light and then go just a little bit darker in the center or you could start off quite dark for the whole post, but you've got to make sure it's darker in the center. Keeping this rough. Using long lines. So I can do it quickly, but it's also because it doesn't matter so much with this post. It doesn't have to be perfectly smooth because we know it's made up of fibers of wood, and then we're going to put the pattern over top as well. If there's some irregularities in that shading, that's hopefully only going to add to the drawing. You might want to fade this out of the bottom. Rather than just having an abrupt ending. I've just lessen the pressure of my pencil, let it disappear into nothing. Then I'm just going to shade a little bit darker in the center. This is how we're going to get that roundness, and then I'm going to lighten the pressure as I work outwards. I might need a darker pencil here. Work this way and lessen the pressure, and then work this way and lessen the pressure. If you do want it to be smoother, you just use your tissue to smooth things out a little bit, but I'm going to keep mine rough looking. So generally, if I look at the photograph and look at my drawing, this is way, way too light, even for the lightest value of that plank, or that post, but I'm going to keep it quite light. I'm not going to bother going much darker. I am going to put this pattern on and then maybe if the pattern is too strong, I can push it back with some darker shading over top. But it's not a major part of this drawing. Well, I mean, it's kind of important in this drawing, actually the texture. But the bird is the main focus. I'm starting with this triangle shape up here and I'm going to use that as a starting point, and then I'm going to kind of Jigsaw my way around. Jigsaw puzzle. Jigsaw puzzle my way around, meaning I'm just going to start putting it together and moving from one piece to another. So as I get up here, it gets a little bit wider and then it gets thinner as the pattern comes down. And then there's this other part just underneath it. That's what I mean by Jixsaw puzzling it together. I'm working from one part to another, just wherever my eye takes me basically. I am sticking to the pattern that I can see. But if I go a little bit out, or if I don't have quite so many lines like here, I don't think I'll fit in those three lines there, I might just have on one, two, three. Yeah, I have got three. But if you didn't have all of them in there, it doesn't matter. It's just getting that general pattern, and it's also maybe looking for key lines or key shapes. So there's that darker shape that's quite important. Looking at how these lines of the pattern get wide and then get narrow. Then there's also some lines or some cracks that are moving through here and again, I'm using a jaggedy line. I'm going a bit darker, but I don't want to draw a straight line. I don't want to draw a line that is even all the way down, so it might get thin and then get a little bit. There's another one here. And there's one over here as well. They cut into the top surface as well. If you're looking at this crack that I'm drawing right now in the photograph, see if you can see how it changes, maybe changes direction slightly, gets a little bit darker down here or a little bit thicker, and then it gets thin again. I'm putting another one in here? I'm just going to add a little bit more detail to that k over there as well. Coming a bit. Maybe a little bit darker in here, just to add a bit more contrast. These lines of the patterns. They go thick to thin, but they also go darker to lighter in some parts as well. So I'm just adding a few little parts where maybe they're standing out a bit more to me as being darker. One down here. I don't want to go too dark right down the bottom here because it's going to draw the eye downwards. Contrast will always draw the attention, we'll draw the focus. I'm pretty happy with that now in terms of pattern. Like I said, it might be a little bit too light once you put that pattern and mind probably is, so then you can just darken the whole thing up by shading over top if you want to. Take much, but's just pushed some of those light parts back a bit and integrated the pattern a little bit more Then we just need to look briefly at the top of the post here. There's another little ridge you might be able to see. I'm drawing that with jagged lines. And then I'm just going to shade in. The rest of it. Just pay attention to where you can see highlights on that top part. So right around the edge here. All the way around the edge, there's a highlight. And to create that highlight, everything else on the top needs to be shaded in a little bit. Unless you're coming back with something like a mono zero, but sometimes that can be a little bit clunky, but that might be a way to bring back that highlight a bit. And then we can also add in the shadow under the feet now. So I'm just looking for the shadow line that comes under the feet. And blending that into the shading on the post. There's a little bit of shading on the feet, not much. Maybe just darken up under that highlight of the post there to bring it out a bit. 18. Adding The Rope: Let's start to put our rope in. Very lightly put in the outline of the large rope itself. I just as a guideline and on both sides. Remember, the top edge of the whole rope is going to be light. The bottom edge of the whole rope is going to be light. And then every one of those segments is going to have a light side in a dark side as well. So I'm going to start by looking at the photo and starting to follow the pattern I can see. Trying to draw those individual shapes. But if you get lost, then it doesn't matter because it's a repeating shape. It's the same shape the whole way along. Me to keep the top edges of all of these light up the top here. You don't want to push hard there. You can push a bit harder down the bottom if you want. S shape, backwards S shape. I'm flicking my eye to the photograph, but it's really just just to kind of keep track of where I'm at. And it's not so much about drawing each one of those shapes completely accurately. I do want them to feel like they're all part of the same piece of rope. I might have brought these ones down a little bit too far. So they should all line up along here. And we can fade them out coming along the side of the page, depending how far out you want your drawing to come to. And now I'm just going to start shading and I'm going to work on shading each individual one of these, but also the whole rope as well. So what I mean by that is looking for the dark side of each one of these. But also underneath the rope also needs to be darker. So a dark side fades into the center of that strand, dark side fades into the center of the strand, but also darker underneath. I'm using an HB pencil just so that I can keep the lines quite sharp for now, but you could be using a darker pencil. The hardness of your pencil is also going to contribute to the style of the drawing in a lot of ways. If it's a very soft pencil, you're going to get a grainy mark. If it's a harder pencil, you're going to get a smoother mark. And that can contribute to the style, or the feeling of whatever surface you're drawing. So already there, I've got a good sense of the strands curving around, twisting around each other just by following that pattern. And then I can go through and add in these flicks. Remember they coming look at direction they're going, but they're also coming from the dark side. And I think here I'm going to switch to my soft pencil because that one's just feeling like creating lines are a little bit too hard. Softer pencil will also give you a line that's thicker and then thinner when you're doing these flicks. Remember, close to the top, you can't really see much. Look at the photograph, it's faded. We can't really see any lines up there, it's very light. And then I'm just going to blend these in a little bit more, maybe add a little bit more dark, where I feel like it needs it. Look at that rope, look at where the dark side of the rope comes up to. And then look at those dark lines that come through each one of those strands. It's almost like long triangle shapes in here. Very dark lines along the bottom here. Shouldn't really be any white in there except maybe right at the top. And the lines, the dividing lines between the strands. They're still in there at the top, but they are much lighter than down the bottom. So if we have a dark line down here, it's going to fade as it comes up to the top. I could push this further, I think and go even darker. There's some really strong blacks in the photograph there, but I think I might just leave it as it is for now. Maybe just close to the post, I might add some darker ones so that it fades out a little bit. So here's how it's looking now with some of those textures added in there. It really brings something else to the drawing because we've got a lot of white up here and some quite smooth gradations. So it's nice to have some pattern in this drawing, as well as a contrast. I'm going to go ahead and do this side of the rope, and I'll leave you to do that on your own, so I'll speed it up, and then we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit about what to do in the background, if you want to do something in the background, and you definitely don't have to. No. 19. Adding Fine Feathers: So we're just about to talk about the background, but there is one other thing that I forgot to add into this bird that I want to show you. And that is just some of these really fine light feathers. So we zoom in on the photo here. Can you see just around that wing there? There's some very fine white feathers, and we can create those with a nice sharp pencil moving from our dark into the light area. Flicking like what we did on the rope and maybe even a slightly darker pencil than that actually just so I get that thick thick to thin, pushing down, flicking in and varying the weight of them meaning some of them a little bit lighter, some a little bit darker and the length of them as well. It's just going to give the illusion that there's white feathers overlapping there. You can see a bit of gray in here. And there's quite a bit more detail on the feathers that you could add if you want to take the time to do that. These feathers also occur at the top here. I've just started adding in just a little bit of the background there. So you can see that when you put in this edge of the head, if you do the background, you could do the same thing there and just flick in a little bit, and it has to be the same value as your background, but you'll be able to create some little fluffy bits around the back of the head there as well. 20. Background (Optional): So for this background, you definitely don't have to do it if you're really happy with your drawing. If you are happy with your drawing, then what I'd suggest doing is just comparing your drawing to the photograph and really looking at the values. Is there anything that needs to change in terms of the light and dark? So maybe once you put in these really dark parts, you find that the shading that you did under the chin doesn't really show up at all, and that might need to go a little bit darker. Good thing to do is squint at the photo, see what's really standing out at you in terms of the values. And do you have those same things standing out when you squint at your photograph, both the lights and the darks? If you do want to do the background, then there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can just shade it, which is what I'm going to do. But if you want to get a little bit creative, then you might take something like some sandpaper and send some pencil or some graphite. Onto that sandpaper and collect it, maybe in a little jar or even just on a piece of paper here. And then you could use a soft brush to spread that around. And that'll give you a very quick background, very soft and light. It's not as dark as what you might want to go. But that's an option. You might find that it gets a little bit uneven, but that's okay for this background because it's soft, and it has some lights and some darks. It. You want to spread that all the way around. The problem with this one is that it's a little bit hard to control. But it would give you enough to just be able to bring out that white of the head. I'm going to shade it just by taking a dark pencil and working my way around the body, and then I'm going to blend it out, or sorry, fade it out so that a little bit like the rope, it's going to just kind of disappear out to the edges. Now, the disadvantage of doing it this way is going to take quite a bit of time. Not an age, but, you know, you've got to be a little bit careful with it, especially around these edges. But it's something that you could do when you've had a break and you just come back and you want something mindless to do. But the advantage of this is we can get some nice clean edges. So I'm just starting to do that now. And what you're going to do is you're going to outline the edge the same value that you're going to be shading it. So you need to be really careful that you don't outline it too dark, and then you're going to shade outwards from that outline. So the outline disappear you watch when I've shaded this. Hopefully, I haven't done it too dark. I'm using a four B pencil right now, so it's very soft. You see, then I don't really have an outline. I just have the edge of the bird, and I can actually see now that the edge is maybe not quite correct. Now that I've done that. And then I'm just going to have to work my way around the bird and also work my way outwards. And this is also a time to control the pressure of your pencil. If I push too hard now, or too light, I'm going to get patchiness. I'm getting a little bit of patchiness, but not too much. What you can do with this background, as well as you could use it to bring some style to your drawing. So, this soft mark that I'm creating here is going to have a very different effect than if I was to shade it, you know, like this with straight lines. You have to be careful, you don't go over the head of your bird or something, but you could do it, you know, carefully and then work your way up, that's going to have a very different feeling to the soft shading, but it's something that you could choose to do if you wanted to. So let's work our way around the head here. So I'll do a little bit of the background with you, and then I'll leave you to work on it on your own. Remember, we want to have a very, very fine line or, you know, maybe draw an edge around that bird just to define it. So you know where you're going to shade up to. If you find that you've got little marks, I've got some little marks in here, rubbing this one out. But, if it was in the middle of the shading, it's better to just leave it because what's going to happen when you rub any of this out is going to create a bit of a smudgy mess. So try to get your pressure right from the start, try to work in a similar direction. You can. My directions changed a little bit, but I can't really move my book around. If you could turn your sketch book around, you'd be out to work in the same direction. Keeping your lines going all the same way. And probably a good idea to start on the side opposite your drawing hand. So most of you might be starting over here on the left, if your left hand is, you might start on the right and work this way. And actually, just while I'm thinking about that, you know, if you are working across your drawing, it's good to have some tissue here, you could lay that down and then just work this way so that you're not smudging your hand across. You want to try and keep that tissue nice and still. Putting in this background is another opportunity for you to check your edges as well. So I'm redrawing this space down here or this negative space, trying not to go too dark. That's one way of refining those edges. And then also refining the shape of the beak. Now, what might happen is your shading might not be the same value as in the photograph, so mine's a bit lighter. And then I can see, well, when I come up to the beak, it's just going to blend in with the beak. And I don't want that. The beak should actually be lighter than the background. So you can choose to do two things. You could maybe just lighten up the bottom of the beak a little bit to make sure it shows up. Or you might have to go back and darken up all of the rest of the background to match this part that you're doing here, which is what I'm going to have to do I. You can see I'm just working away in sections. You might end up with a bit of a scrappy a look or uneven look. Like this. I actually don't mind that, but if you don't like it, this is where this bruh. If you've got an old paint brush that's soft, this can help. Just push that back a little bit. You can also use your tissue, but you just got to be really careful because it's a small area. You don't want to push it into the bird, and you don't want to have to rub it all really hard. So it might just be a couple of sweeps like that just to take out any of those little rough parts. But I do that at the end, so it's not a good idea to do it now like I just did because then when you're shading, it's gonna look quite different. I want to be out to smudge it all at the same time. So I'm just working my way around the body, maybe seeing if there's anything there that I can refine a little bit of a bump there, maybe. I've put in an outline that is the same or maybe lighter than the shading that I'm going to do. When I put it in, I use the edge of my pencil. I don't use a tip of my pencil. I basically just shaded it. I'm getting the same kind of mark as I will get with the rest of this shading. You might be working this way around or you might be coming down the back here. Just do this a little bit here because there's something I want to show you when we get to these feathers. So this is a good example of how my background isn't dark enough compared to the photograph. When you look at the photograph, that really stands out that wing against the background. So I need to go darker, but I'm going to do one layer, and then I'm going to build it up dark and fade it out some more. But what I wanted to show you is when you come around these feathers here, this is where they're really going to stand out because now you've got the dark background against the white feathers. There's also a very fine light line along that tail. You see that there. I want to make sure I leave that. If I didn't have it already, I need to leave that between the tail and the background. So that's just a little bit to show you how you can start doing this background. Then I'd be going through building it up. You can see how it's much darker over this side here. And how there's some variation in the values in the background. So I could build this up as dark as I can see in the background and then fade it out to that l area above it and below it as it comes down, I think, into some water. So all of that I do afterwards, after I blocked out the most part of the background or the main part of the background, then I'd go through and put in these darker parts. As you come down here and you're doing what looks like water. Then maybe you could work side to side. And again, it's about finding the contrast between the edges. So the bird is actually a little bit darker just here, and then it gets a bit lighter in the background to make the bird stand out. There are some light areas like patches, I very quickly do those. So we go like a light strip across here. I can see just along under that tail. It's a little bit lighter and just around here, some lighter parts. Then once I've layer up all of this with one layer, then I go through and darken up the darker parts. Over top. You start to get an idea of how long this is going to take. I'm doing a little bit to show you and then maybe you've already started doing the background. Maybe you're regretting doing the background or maybe you decide not to do it. If you do get a bit sick of it, then just take some time away, like I said, come back when you got a bit of time, you just do it in pieces here and there. Or even if you've got this far, maybe you just start to fade this out. I'm just trying to give you some options depending on what kind of artist you are, what sort of personality you have, if you have the patience to do this or not. Generally, I don't have a lot of patients to be honest. I mean, I guess I do compare to a lot of people, but compared to some artists. I prefer to get the gist of it down and character. I like to have a some kind of character in a drawing. And then the rest of it, I just kind of treat as background noise, so I just kind of fade this out. I mean, even that is almost enough if I did a little bit more on this side, a little bit more on this side, and just tidy out my values a little bit that would probably be enough. 21. Summary: So I think I'm going to leave you there. I've given you some options for the background. Like I said, I'll keep working on mine, and I'm going to go a bit darker, work on getting the bird to stand out against the background, but I will fade it out, so there's not actually a whole lot more for me to do really. I've got to fill in the space and the space and then just do one layer of darker values over top and just maybe give it a quick smudge right at the end. But I'm going to have a break, and then I'll come back, and I'll do that and I'll video it so you can see the process and it might give you some ideas for your drawing as well. It's also going to make the rope stand out down here if I get a bit of shading in against that light edge, too, so that might be worth doing, I think. Thanks for joining me. I hope you enjoyed this one. I had a few problems with it as you saw, but I did enjoy doing it. If you've had a few problems with yours, just remember that this is the first time that you've done this drawing, and it takes a while for your brain to make those kind of connections about what you need to draw, what you're seeing, and what you then need to do to be able to draw that. So do give yourself a bit of a break. Don't be too hard on yourself. But if you want to get better at drawing birds, you know, definitely give this one another go, maybe even try it on your o try to learn from what you've done in your drawing this time around what maybe hasn't worked the way that you wanted it to and how you're going to correct that? Is it the proportions? Did you end up with a grid that wasn't as accurate as it should have been? You know, maybe the heads too big or the heads too small. Is it the gradations between the light and the dark values? And you need to work on getting that smoothness, where it sort of just blends into white, or is it the textures? You have trouble controlling the mark making of your pencil? And how can you work on that? Anything, if you want to get better at it, you've really got to focus on those weak points of things that you struggle with if you want to improve on them. Please do share your drawings with me. I'd really like to see them, and I'd also be happy to help you figure out some of those things that you might be finding a little bit challenging and help you figure out a way to work through those or to improve on those. You can share your work with me by uploading it into the community if you're a part of the Sketch club membership, or you can put it in the comments below. Both of those options are public, so other people. Other students will be able to see them, and they can give their feedback or their support, as well. If you're part of the membership, you can also e mail your work to me directly, and I'll give you some feedback that is not public, if you prefer. Remember, there is another video released recently on drawing birds, sketching birds, and working really quickly to get just the essence of the bird down, so it's quite different to this one. We spend a lot of time on this one. The other one is drawing birds in, you know, sort of five or 10 minutes. So you might want to check that one out as well, just for something different, trying a different approach to drawing birds. Go take a break and remember to keep on practicing every little bit counts and hope to see you again in the next tutorial. See it. 22. Timelapse: Oh.