Drawing 101:: Basic Drawing & Markmaking

1. Drawing 101 || Introduction: Oh, hi. Welcome to drawling 101 My name is Cookie and I will be your instructor for this course. I am an artist and designer, and I also run likes I love studio. In this course, you're going to learn the basic tools and techniques of drawling You're going to learn simple, citing and also mark making and mark making is a great device that gives you the ability and flexibility to learn what your materials dio without getting bogged down into the land of realism. So you can just relax and have fun and see what your materials can dio. The goal of this course is to relax, experiment and explore. And I want you to just see how many of these marks you can create, because our final drawling for our project is to take all of our experiments and sort of homogenized them all into one piece. So I want you to have fun. I want you to experiment and see what your tools condo's, and I want you to have fun on the journey of learning how to draw. Welcome aboard 2. Drawing 101 || Supplies: All right. Welcome to drawling Wanna one. It is time to officially get started. First things first. Supplies, not supplies, could be as simple or as complex as you wish to make it. So let's go over this sort of basics, and then I'm gonna go into the more I'll say detail oriented, as long as you have a pencil of some sort and some sort of paper. And this could be even. You know, the paper that you use in your printer? That would be what I would call the absolute bare minimum pencil and paper. You can use markers. You can use sharpies. You can use flare pens. You can use ballpoint pens. This would be the absolute minimum. But now what if you want to get into the little bit more fanciers style supplies, You know the ones, the ones that when you go to the art supplies store, you linger over and dream about. All right, let's go over those really quick. All right, So if you want advance beyond the printer paper, here's what you're going to need a nice paper sketchbook, and, you know, you're drawing pencils. We have the pink parole erasures that air the classics, the kneaded erasers there a little bit more flexible and blending torta loans. We have charcoal that is compressed and pencil format. We have vine charcoal, and we also have just regular compressed charcoal. And if you can find a set, find yourself some graphite pencils as well. I have a supply list available in the course. Resource is for you that also contains a description for each of the item. You're going to hear this a lot in this class. Just experiment. If there's something that you're curious about, you know, try it. Something else not mentioned I have in. No, this isn't a different container because I buy it, you know, in the really large container, import in the smaller. But try some drawling inks. Try India inks. Grab a brush. If you want to try brushing the ink on. Maybe you want to try the white. You know Kant A pencils are the reddish contact pencils or charcoal? Sorry. Try it. Why not? The whole sort of focus of this class is to just experiment to see what it can dio. And you know, like I said, those air one of them called the basics. But what more is out there? So take a browse either at your area local art supply store or check out some online sites like Dick Blick on just see what they have in their drawling sections. A lot of times, this is even like at the chains like Michael's and A Seymour. They're going to have the drawling kits, and a lot of the items that I mentioned will actually be in there. So why not try it? If you want to explore, be on the sketchbook. I used the cancer mixed media pads. They have them in spiral bounds or adhesive bound. I do like the mixed media versus the drawling, because then if I do want to use the ink or even watercolor if I'm going to be doing, you know, just line work that way, which you can sort of see in my sketchbook. I have some patterns drawn out with water colors. If you want a color, try it. See what happens. There are also drawling pastels that you can experiment with an old hill path cells. You get the idea. There is a lot out there, so I've going to cover the minimum the basics on and then eventually we're gonna expand out . But the key word experiment. So go ahead, wrangle your supplies. You can follow the lister, veer from it if you want. And now we can take those supplies and get started. 3. Drawing 101 || Getting Started: all right, so let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about the paper before you get started. So, like I says, only should have even copier paper that's going to do the job. I talked already briefly about the mixed media pads. Those work really good. Um, and I also wanted to just go over the others really quickly. So we have our drawing paper, just a nice standard paper. Newsprint. Newsprint can be really useful because it's not precious, and we all know that you know, that blank piece of paper is sometimes one of the scariest things out there. So if you don't want to worry about the preciousness, describes a new sprint. It's cheap. You can use as much as you want, and you'll get a lot of practice time in with it, and it will hold the ink pretty well. I mean, it's not like it's super awesome paper, but that's sort of the point of it. And then just a standard, you know, sketchbook. Each of these have different weights in the theory. Basically, behind the weights is if it's in a ream, however, it's usually I think, around 500 sheets and a ream, however much that ream of paper ways is the way to the paper. So this one is a £50 weight. This one is a £70 weight, and this one's just 32 so you can tell the lower the number. It's going to be a lot thinner, and you can also use tracing paper. I love working in it with tracing paper, especially with markers and even with the pencils, because it's going to smudge just a little bit. So, you know, maybe try that. Also, these just nine by 12. And if you want to work a little bit larger, we have an 11 by 14 and it can go the whole way up. So I would say the 9 12 for starting is a good size a little bit, you know, not tiny and not too large and overwhelming, but you might want to try. You know, this pack here I got at Michael's. A three pack was 9 99 and had a coupon so you can get these for pretty cheap, and that's always good for experimenting because you don't feel like you've invested a ton of money into it. It could just sort of see what it does for my adventures with you today, I'm gonna go a little bit larger. I'm gonna use the 11 by 14 just to make it a little bit easier for you to see in the demo. All right, so we're going to get started. And the first part of Mark making is Let's just make marks and see what they dio. I have my assortment of pencils. I have my vine charcoal have some compressed charcoal on. We can just go ahead and get started already got a mess on there, So that's good. All right. So I have in the handouts and explanation of the different types of pencils that are out there and as well, the hardness in the softness range. Ah, b stands for something that soft that's going to be a little bit darker. And the ages are the harder pencil. So it's gonna be a lot tighter of a line, and you could get a lot more detail. Is going to be a lot lighter visually. So what? I would recommend a sort of get these in order. If you've gotten you're drawling kit, it's going to already be in an order. So I'm gonna put my four b my to be I be HB and I just have up to a to h. I had a really simple kit, but that's kind of nice, because that's not nearly as overwhelming. And the standby to be, um, which just has an eraser with it. So let's go ahead and just test that first mark. This is a four B and I'm just going to one line to be and I am gonna keep each of the pressures consistent during this stage so that you can sort of see what each of them are doing. And this is just purely there is No, there's no we're not worrying about realism here. We're not making a masterpiece. We're just seeing what exactly do each of these pencils dio and you can you know, right by them what they are. So if you want to refer back to it later, you're going to be able Teoh. They also have really nice 6 to 9 bees. Usually they're the wordless ones, but they have a really nice, soft, dark consistency to it. So you get a little bit of each and see how they interact with it, have my charcoal paper or pencil. Sorry, that's what this one looks like. This is actually an HB band. Let's just keep going. This is just the regular charcoal and pop out a piece of willow or vine charcoal. The joy of our willow vine and compressed in this format, not pencil format, is. If you don't want to work with the full stick, you could just break it down and have little bits. This is good when you're drawing, so you could use it as a whole flat surface like so. Or if you just wanted to have a little bit, that's a little bit more manageable, and you can see the charcoal bits for sort of popping off of it. You could just sort of brushed them off that we don't actually brush them off because these air really soft material and they will smudge right off, which we're going to get to that in a little bit with toned Rawlings. So for this first section, grab all of the materials that you haven't even if it's just a marker sharpie a pencil a pen and just see what each of them dio make lines, make shapes and just get comfortable with the material. Um, this is going to get you more familiar as to what each one does that. When you do start something, you're gonna know exactly what matches the vision that you have in your head to take a couple minutes and just see what each of your materials dio. 4. Drawing 101 || Lines: all right. The basics that were actually going to start with is the line. The lion builds up all of our pieces, and there are a variety of lines from which we work with. And then these lines begin to turn into mark making. And our final project for this course is going to be a sort of exploration of lines and mark making. And how can we use them in our work? All right. So I may use my charcoal so that we can see the line a lot better A line. This is a most basic math. It goes from one point to another, so this could be a straight line. This for 1.2. The other could be a wavy line. You get the idea, and it could be a zigzag line. It could be a dotted dash tow line, etcetera. So this is the path that we're going to take. And we need to think about what sort of line do we want in our work. So our lines, when they build up, they're going toe at our values, or we're going to be creating patterns and textures out of this so lines when they stack in a parallel manner. This is just hatching. Were just, you know, one after the other. It could be loose like this. It could be pretty close together, and you can see when it's closer together, you're going to get a stronger values. You're going to make it. You don't was gonna have a darker feel to it. Eso are hatching. If we double up over, this is cross hatching and you're going to get an even darker tone out of this eso. What we're going to be doing for our project is we're going to be doing these. I'm gonna comelec segments so you can divide your papers in the four if it's this size. If you're using computer paper for your printer, maybe just fold it in half and we're going to explore different types of lines and how they shift into mark making S o. R. Curves. Maybe our curves are going to look more like waves. But what happens if we build one on top of it? So we start getting these really interesting patterns out of it. Try it with the charcoal, try it with graphite, the vine, charcoal ink, markers, whatever you wish to explore Because this is if this is the wave, one is gonna completely different as pencil as Penn etcetera. What if we have just circular circular shapes? These lines are gonna build up. We're going to get our tones, and this part becomes somewhat meditative. So you can just sort of relax. Um, I'm going to give you two options for your final. You can build your marks individually and then just cut paste, glue them into another sheet of paper to build your actual imagery. Or you can build your imagery, subdivide it and then put the marks into each section. So it's going to depend on how you wish to work, which I will have a demo on that just after this. But take some time and just explore. So what happens if our diagonals, you know, sort of have these interesting basket weave style intersections? Or what if some of them shoot off on an angle? So you're getting this really interesting varied pattern to it. What if it's just, you know, the little dots in the line in these dots all lined up? This is a nice texture also also really quick how you actually go into the line. Work is gonna make a difference too. So if it's, you know, a little bit slower, a little bit more precise, you're going tohave one feel for it, versus if you do something a little bit more speedy. So try slow versus fast as well. You can also make spirals. This is just sort of How many things can you think about that? How can you replicate them also, uh, let's say, Well, actually, I'll stick to the charcoal lying types. You could have a thin line. You can have a thin short line, a thin dash line so you can see how these start to build up on each other. But what happens if we use the wide part? What? We don't have a thin line anymore. Let me get a little bit of pressure on here. Now we have a really thick line. So what is this going to look like in your drawling versus this? What is it going to look like with marker versus pencil? So maybe pick a couple of these, I say for this a couple pages in your sketchbook because we are going to be repurposed. Sing them later down the lines to maybe like 5 to 7 pages. Then that way you can sort of get an idea. Some of them you uses some of you won't. You will end up having a sort of potentially pattern Esca feel to it. That's fine. Another type that you can work with is pro Taj. Fra Taj is interesting because you're dealing with texture, but you're negating. This sort of stage is more of a scavenger hunt. And with pro Taj, you're going to find textures out in the wild, so to speak, that could just be in your house. Or you could just take a walk around your neighborhood and see if you can find anything. For that. I will recommend you're probably gonna want the charcoal or the vine charcoal. The pencils will work, but it's gonna have a little bit more of a great out appearance. Crayons work really well for this also, so if you have some crayons laying around, grab those and see what they dio. So for Fra Taj, find something that has texture and what you will dio have that texture in front of you and just rub with a light to moderate Tech there pressure that's going to depend on the object . If you want something to have a little bit more both to it, you apply more pressure. If you just want a sort of delicate flow to it, use less pressure. Maybe try both in the beginning, just to see which one works best. But here's a quick in the wild glimpse of what it's like to do for a Taj. All right, so let's go on a bit of a field trip. You can do this inside and you can do this outside. And what we're looking for is a couple sample rubbings of things that you find around town around your house that are interesting. We blocks signs, patterns, textures, greats, power switches. Don't touch the electric. Um, used common sense on. Just see what sort of textures you confined with it. Crayons, pencils, graph fights. Char Cole's. I'm gonna be using the compressed charcoal for mine. And I just have my regular a drawling book, and I'm just gonna go sheet by sheet on this. Some are gonna look great. Some are gonna look so great. But that theory is as ever, with experimentation. How will you know, unless you try. So let's go ahead and have a walk around and find some textures and do some pro Taj and, - uh 5. Drawing 101 || Contour Drawing: all right. So you should have an idea of what each of here materials dio. Now, let's actually do something with them. I went and I got some of these there in the floral sections. Just Styrofoam shapes. I think they just use them for wreaths or what have you. But in my juggling classes, if you've had me, you know, you draw these for quite a few number of weeks adjusted, get comfortable with your materials and then translating your hand and your eye coordination, which withdrawing This is a big part of it, Much as you, you know, here, people, people talking about, you know, Are you listening? Are you hearing? Are you seeing? Are you looking? So if you're just looking over something, you're disposable casually glancing around. But if you're really seeing something, you're getting into the nitty gritty, much akin to actually, you know, absorbing the sounds. You're absorbing your sites. So a lot of beginning how toe learning how to draw. Just figure out how to connect this to this and get the to sort of working in unison. So instead of worrying about complicated shapes, it's nice to just have the geometric. So you sort of negate the sort of panic of this doesn't look like a person. I'm trying to draw my pet. It looks nothing like them. This is a great way to build a foundation. A sort of practice study. So these air really cheap might be something you want to look into also. I mean, think about it this way. You know, this could be a book. This could be an orange. And who knows, maybe have an ice cream cone. You know, you don't have to use Styrofoam. You confined shapes that are similar within your house. I have also photographed some of these with different light sources and in different sort of positions. So if you don't have these, you will also have my version in our resource is below. So I'm gonna make a semi interesting arrangement here. I'm not gonna get bogged down. We're going to get started. The first thing that you typically start with when you learn how to draw is the contour contour line. Drawling is just simply outlines were not worrying about details were not getting bogged down into the shades or the tones. We're just looking at that outline and looking for the edge. So let's just start with the first thing that I see in a friend of me is this circle. And for this part, we can look back and forth the next step. I'm gonna mix it up just a little bit, all right? And I'm just using the standard to be so if you wanted to condition use you know, your normal pencil. That's fine. Also, maybe do the first on with pencil than try one with charcoal. Try one with the vine charcoal. You get the idea. Just experiment and have fun with it. So we're going to draw the circle and you can go is fast or slow as you want. You can look up as much as you want. You can stop if you want. This one doesn't have rules singing. Sort of. Okay, that one's getting a little wonky. All right, So what happens if I speed up? What happens if I slow it down and again? We're just learning how to connect where the point is to where we're at on our actual object. I'm not worrying about the smudge. If my hands smudge it right, and we're just gonna close that form, we're gonna build the cone store. Looks like it's rising fourth from right there. I'm just gonna worry about the outside shape for now. If I want to get into the details, I can. That's going to be up to you and again. A nice straight line. And you can see why the geometrics air Nice because already comfortable with the concept and again, they're pretty simplified. So you can just work on practicing that hand eye coordination on. And then you can go on and do the other form. So I'm going to sort of pause there because I don't take too much of your time up because that could get sort of repetitive. I want to go over a couple other techniques with you. So this one's nice. The contour. You're just You're looking up and down. You're just looking at the form. Maybe now I want to go back in and fill in that shape, start adding the details. If you want, I will recommend a couple studies where you just work just plain just pure outline and then work your way. And maybe so maybe 3 to 5 is usually my number 3 to 5 or it's just playing contour. We just worried about the edges. 3 to 5. You start going into it, and I do have sketchbook prompts for you as well. And the resource is I wanted to make sure you had a lot of info at your arsenal. So I do have a sort of guideline that you can follow so that you know how many you know, the sort of practice if you wish to have guidelines. Otherwise, 3 to 5 is always a good number. S 03 to 5 of these, and now we can sort of start mixing it up. So we have our contour. It's just the plane. Plain old simple we're doing that outlines the next one to start ups the ante and these air more warmup exercises, I'll say, though a lot of artists to use this as their mainstay, we're going to do a continuous line. A continuous line is like a contour, but you're going to build all of the objects of one line, so there might be overlaps. You know, there might be backtracking zenit, but you have to, you know, sort of think about him. Plan your route along the way. You can change the sheet of paper if you want, but when I'm just practicing, you know, I don't care if the pieces overlap. All right, so let's start the continuous line. All right? I am going to sort of follow the same round. I'm going to do that. Shape the sphere rather. And again. I'm not lifting my pencil this time. You can pause on this one. Just do not lift that pencil. Just keep going. Keep looking at your object and them back to your paper. Got a little wonky there. That's okay. Don't worry about the wonky. These aren't processed these air. Just practice. All right, so I'm going to go over a little bit, and I'm not lifting my pencil and how I'm going to go into the cone. Now we need to decide. Are we going to do that detail? If we are, which I will for this one will go back into not lifting the pencil. I keep going, and then I'll finish that line. And this one I am going to dio the, uh, sort of rectilinear shape over here so you can sort of see how it works. All right, I'm just gonna travel over. There's a little bit of a gap, and then it starts, and I am gonna run out of paper, so this is going to be interesting. And so I'm just going to sort of shoot off the side, bring it back over, back down, create that edge. Go back up. I'm going a little bit fast. Just so we complete it and stop. Everything was made with one solid line the whole way through it. So we had a little bit of space there. That's okay. We just kept that line going, so you sort of have to plan ahead. So we're going to be starting to be more purposeful with our construction on. This is great practice for that. One other thing that's really fun with continuous line eyes that you can do it blind. And that means you can look at your objects. But you cannot look at your paper. And I promise you these air gonna look really sort of bizarre. And Kim boo Make sure that your paper is not really in your peripheral. So whatever you're looking at, you know you're not seeing your paper. And these are great practices. and eventually what you're going to find is they will look a whole lot better. But you have to practice. And what's nice with them is they are negating that, you know, keep using the word precious because it's this precious piece of paper, their precious pencils that are perfectly sharpened. Let's not worry about that. Let's just make marks and have fun. So fun exercise for sure. And I guarantee you either laugh or grown and chuckle all at the same time. When you're finished and just keep going. These are great. You can just practice as much as you want with it. I'm going to say consistent. Stay consistent. Sorry. And I'm gonna have the same starting point. I'm going to do all the shapes. They're gonna look really gross, but I kind of like that, you know, they look interesting. All right. Don't look at your paper. Just look at the objects and let's see, basically how your hand and I are connecting to each other off. I did look at you, so I lost my place. So that's going to be our first weird one. All right, let's do the top of the cone. Go now. all right, and I'm gonna have to backtrack under this, and then go ahead and start our cube shaped. And I am working pretty fast, because again, Yeah, I don't want to take up all of your time. Um, but sometimes when you go fast, you can get some really interesting results because you know, the speed of how you're working off eyes going to translate to this. So there we go. I want start off. But it do chuckle after it do 3 to 5 of these, you know, you can use the geometric. She can look at something that's in front of you. Another one is, you know, use your non drawling hand and sort of, you know, just draw from that or your feet. If they're sort of propped up in front of you, take a pick. You know, if you're not comfortable with what else a representational subject matter, you know, do the geometrics until you feel a little bit comfortable and then start pushing yourself out of that sort of comfort zone. All right, so go ahead, Dio. Some say 3 to 5 regular contour do a continuous line or two, and then a couple of the blind continuous lines and we will reconvene in a moment with gesture 6. Drawing 101 || Gesture Drawing: all right. Have you had fun with contour and continuous line? Now it's time to up the ante and visit our friend gesture dressed er is a really movement based, kinetic style of drawling. If you ever take a life drawling or figure drawing class, you're usually going to have a couple minutes where you warm up and your instructor is going to say something. All right, 12th Rawlings. So you do 12th drawings, 30 seconds, One minute, etcetera, etcetera. Until you build up to the longer sort of timeframes gesture is a great way to do that, because you're going to be able to capture what you're seeing in front of you relatively quickly and you're always going Teoh sort of move with it and you're gonna hear a lot of, you know, pencil marks or charcoal etcetera. I'm going to use vine charcoal for this and the idea of gesture. It's a gesture. We're capturing a sort of a moment in time. Um, we're capturing that edge. It's sort of like the Impressionists with their in Stanton 80 Um, a quick moment and not sort of focusing or beleaguering it just going so fast that you're not getting bogged down. That being said, you can go back into it and build these up. But the idea of gesture is to just capture it in its essence. So remember, with Contra really deliberate and purposeful and it was a really slow and methodical, drawling style gesture is going to be the opposite sort of scratch at the paper. All right, here we go. And you can backtrack. You can move it around. See, this didn't quite get right. That's okay. We go back in and we reinforce the line again. It's building up construction. All right, I'm feeling okay with that. Let's go ahead. Start roughing in these. Think of it as if you're in the design world is I know a lot of skill share people are This is the thumbnail sketch. So when you're in that stage, if you you know if you are in design, this is what you would probably be working in to just get those ideas out really quickly, and we're just getting them out really quickly. We're not, You know, we're not creating a DaVinci here. We're just going to town and building in the shapes. Loosely gesture can be a lot of fun. So this is with the vine charcoal just so you can get idea. I'm just gonna draw on top of it. The compressed charcoal is going to give you a little bit deeper line, and I'm just gonna drop right on top of it. If you mess up like I did, they're just keep going. It's kind of fun to see those shapes on the extra lines that are a little bit wobbly again . It's just constructing it. So we have a little bit of perspective there, and then we build it up from there. If you want, try your pencil. Also. Ah, side note on pencils. We are so used to holding pencils when we write like we sort choke at them with drawling. It's actually better to be mid to the end that depending on your style so that you can get full range of movement when you are working. This does take a while to get used to, and you can also see how to spin this. I'm not choking it. I'm just sort of resting it in between. The more you work with it, the more comfortable that's going to feel. Eso that might be something that you wish to practice with that till you get comfortable with it. And again just rough those in and just drawing on top of the others. Thes they're just It's your sketchbook. And I had some students asked me this in my semester at the end of the semester cause I had a project where they put it in a sketchbook and they were worried about it being perfect. Like, Look, it's a sketchbook. It's just a means of expression. If you know there's, like, weird parts and stuff around, don't worry about it. It's a sketchbook, Sue, It's yours. Do with it as you want. No one can dictate our mandate. How you function within your sketchbook. If you are a loose and gestural style drawl, er go for it. If you were contour and a really detail oriented dark dollar, do it. There's nothing that says you have to work like a beer. See, in this experimental stage, try a little bit of everything. Try gesture, try contour. Try the continuous I don't know. Try. You know, a continuous like just er I don't know. You get the idea of this play and experiment. Let's see what our materials conduce. Oh, and the more time you spend with them and with different objects and drawing them, the more comfortable you're going to become in your actual execution of your pieces. So for the gesture, you guessed it just like last time. Do like 3 to 5 of them. You know, your hands, your feet, whatever is in front of you. Cuff table, pet. The geometrics that I photographed for you do 3 to 5. Just sort of get a feel for it. Make sure you're moving your whole sort of upper body when you're doing it. You don't want to be compressed and tight with it. Think of it as you know, a dancer on the stage and they're moving all their body parts. You know, at least this case, the upper body parts to try 3 to 5 and I will see you in the next section. 7. Drawing 101 || Reductive: all right, So let's get to some of the more experimental techniques. And the 1st 1 I like to go over is the reductive style. And this is great visit, especially makes you sort of be pushed into the tonal ranges. And it's going to have you be thinking more about values rather than just edge. Uh, you can use any of the materials and will say the char coals are a bit more conducive to this process, in particular the vine charcoal. It's a little bit lighter and fluffy here for this part, but stage one is you just want to take. And I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do the edges for the demo sake, But, uh, if I was doing this is my final piece, I would take it right to the edge, all right? And then I'm going to go left and right, and up and down. It's taking the teeth. That the sort of tooth of the paper, and it is getting in there sort of setting in one option. You can also dio you can take a shammy or, in this case, a tissue, just a plain old Kleenex and sort of just lightly sort of flopping over it. Uh, the shammy zehr. Nice, because they're going to build up, and then you're going to be able to keep using them. And I am just gonna go left and right with this, also just to get a nice even value. And you guessed it. Once this layers done, we're just gonna keep building up layers so you can keep going faras you want with this? Um, I just do these two layers so that it doesn't take up too much time on again. We're going to be thinking about tone instead of just the edge. I'm going to go up and down and left and right. And this, Like I said, Well, even it out, All right? I'm actually very happy with that, So Oh, and also with fine charcoal, you can sort of see, because I have a second camera up there for you. You can start, see if you touch it. It will, You know, leave a mark. It's really a malleable, drawling tool. Eso if you don't like that, just, you know, brush over in wolf sort of fill itself back in. You do a quick note on the kneaded erasers cause yours. They're going to come in this nice little plastic package. I'm gonna go ahead and open that, Uh, we are used to you know, the pink pearls. They're, you know, robbery. But pretty much how they are is how they are. That is their shape. You can cut them down if you want. Are determined to stamp er's etcetera. But the kneaded erasers are a little bit different because they actually are Need herbal so you can take and sort of needed. It softens it up a little bit, just like if you're kneading dough. Uh, what's awesome with this? And I have a sort of clumpy pile here from other projects. They are really dirty. But once you start needing it, they are also self cleaning eso these I've had, I swear, since high school, which has been a while. So these last quite a long time. Eso as well as being able to erase any mistakes. You could also use the kneaded eraser as a drawling tool. So instead of using what we traditionally use, we can actually take our kneaded eraser, push a point onto it or any shape that you're looking for, and then start drawling. So in this case, we're going to be working the opposite with our pencils and charcoal were actually laying down the dark tones of the page for this one that's going to the opposite. We're going to be dealing with the lighter tones. So in this case, the edge of the sphere that's getting the light. Now, of course, you can go in and do your contour, so you sort of have an idea of the shape before you deal with the form. That's fine. Keep meeting it because this is going to get a little bit dirty. All right, go in, start lifting it. What's really awesome with the erasers is you're going to get a really fantastic texture with it s oh, maybe instead of, you know, using the point what happens if you make a little shape in and just sort of use it like a Stamper So you can be really, really experimental with this? All right, I'm gonna get these tones pushed in my mid tone, and we're gonna push the dark in, last and again clean up when it sort of starts sledging around for lack of a better word. So maybe again, like, let's get some of that texture in because those phone pieces do have texture. So almost has this sort of pointillist IQ feel to it at this stage. And I'm gonna clean up the bright edge just a little bit. Just so we have a full value. There we go. Same thing that's gonna push some of that value down and get a nice texture going. So I'm really gonna do this one because I get really sort of plus you with these. They take me a little bit longer, but what's nice is whenever say, you're finished. Let's say you know I'm happy with the tones on this piece, etcetera. You can go back in with your vine charcoal and then push so they always talk about the push pull. This is the push pull. So he pushed it, and now we're going to pull it back a little bit. So let's add that dark tone back in and that we couldn't push, pull, keep, you know, adding to it, etcetera. Now immunise are pushed off to the side so we can see the textures. So what happens if you're using these as textures? Both sides, you can get really amazing patterns all this on surface treatments. So this is a great way, one to sort of see tone in a different point of view, but also to get a really nice pattern and texture going maybe for your final project or just an interesting background for a piece etcetera. So reductive drawings were working opposite. We're starting with the ground and pushing the figure in, but it is again a great way. We're always trying to sort of, you know, see everything in a different point of view, and this is really good exercise for this. And if you mess up, let's say you didn't like these. Just color your Ryan charcoal back over it, and you don't have to worry about your mess up. Also note. You can also use your fingers as a sort of texture, or you can draw with them also, because this sort of sweat that one you is going toe pull off onto the going to pull the charcoal off. I will say, since I know a lot of people out there don't like the messier side of art, so this may not be for you, but I would at minimum challenge you to least make one so you can see how this works within the total range. Eso fingers work if you don't mind the mess. Otherwise, stick to you needed eraser. And when finished, just go ahead and we need it and have it back to working order. So, getting I challenge you to do one of these just to see how this works. 8. Drawing 101 || About Shading: all right. Just a quick aside on shading and how to get you know, more smooth tone to your piece. I have laid a couple sort of patches. If you wish to do the same on a sheet so you can explore each of these. I just sort of laid my pencil on the side and has made a nice little sort of square shape on my sketchbook. Uh, we all we all should have digits attached to ourselves. So first stage, if you want a shade, you know, try your finger. I had a couple teachers in high school yell at me for this, and honestly, this still doesn't bother me, because sometimes you'll just be working. Let's even say it's with, you know, the charcoal. You know, just a quick sort of glimpse over it. And you get this really nice, you know, shading to it. You can sort of. Grady ate it out. If you want. I will say, if you're I mean, I'm getting to the stage where my hands are getting dirty cause I've been using charcoal a lot. If you're not a fan of the sort of dirty 30 or styles and techniques you might not want to use the fingers, but it does give, you know, it's really quick, you know, maybe just want to give a quick glimpse over the page. This works great. We also have the blending torta loans, and they also have stumps either of these air. Fine. I'm just gonna grab this one. So for that same thing, you're gonna start to use it on the side. Now this go over here. And so this is basically functioning the same as your finger, but it's just rolled up paper. You can see you can push out just a little bit. Try going on an angle and I'm not going to shade all of this piece out just so you can see it. But you are going to get that softening to it. It's going to depend on which one you like best. Now, maybe you like the sort of finger method been likening dirty. You can also use shammy cloth so that you can just get in any art supplies store. They also have been like the sounds really weird, But the car cleaning area, like in targets etcetera. Uh, those can be some kind of pricey, but you get these giant sheets of it, so just cut it down to around this size or use a Kleenex or a tissue, and I sort of folded up where to use this for the one charcoal so you can fold it and the same thing, and you could see you could cover a little bit more ground with this one. Keep it nice, even smooth pressure, and it's going to sort of slide it down so you can see how we can sort of blend into it. So any of these systems work. It's just gonna depend on your style as usual, you know the drill by now. Try a little bit of each of them and see which one is the one that works best for you. 9. Drawing 101 || Experimental Drawing Tools & Techniques: All right. So you're by this point, hopefully getting used to what? I'm gonna call the traditional drawling tools. So the pencils, you know the markers, etcetera. But what happens if we want to up our anti? I have my container of ink here. Now, let's get a little bit more experimental and expressive. You can get the drawling Inc if you want, Um, think Higgins makes it, and it just has a little sort of squirt bottle eyedropper. And they're only about this big, but I do by my ink in bulk. So I like to have a really, you know, smaller containers to sort of pour them into. I have a variety of brushes. So for this and it's going to go straight in, you're gonna want also have a container for water. Said you can put your brushes in, load them up. I sort of take a little bit of the excess off the side and just using the same mark making styles as we were just doing with the traditional materials. Let's see, what other materials do you know? Our diagonals are hatching are cross hatching. What if we have our circular and the same thing with the brushes and this is, I think, a Sumi brush. And with that, you sort of hover above and sort of let drop. So it does have a little bit more of a free, drawling style. But then and I just moved my, um, shapes for that demo. But, you know, I remember what they looked like. What do your forms that you've been sketching look like with the ink? What does this brush do versus, say, this brush? So we have our thin thick what happens if it's a little more dry and we sort of scramble it up from there? What if we have even thinner so we can have thinned, fix on a wide variety, explore and experiment. So our brushes and ink, you know, this is pretty standard. This is, you know, definitely much more expressive and free. But what happens if one your field chip, you start finding things. You I wonder what this would look like in a drawing and a couple of my undergrad drawing classes. We had to go out into the world and make our own drawling tools. And this was a great way to sort of see how things work. So what would a little bit of the bark do versus the solid side? So let me flip the page and this does need a, you know, a moment or two to dry heads up completely different lion style. Let's dip it in even further so I can get the others. So for our mark making, you don't have to stick to the traditional on the flip sides and see what this one does. What happens if you start drawing with twigs and sticks and stroll and grass and stuff that you find and you know, the park are in your yard? Scribble doodle sort of See what these are doing for you even got some pine needles from my tree and you can use the's just like you were your brush. Just gonna get these lined up. You can take them if you want. You could tape this toe would and literally make your own brush. Dip it in the bank. We're getting these interesting sort of splash backs with that. That's really cool. So everything you find is going to do something different. Scrap paper, scrap fabric, twigs, different types of twigs that this twig is gonna look a lot different versus are solid one . What happens if we just sort of dot with it or load it up and get you know, multiple branch sections on it on, just like our brushes, thin sticks, thick sticks, stones. This is the explorer and experiment and go all sorts of crazy with it. But what's really nice with it is you're getting these really unusual marks that literally you have just made from something that no one else has. So it's going to have a really nice you know, personal touch to it versus something that you can just buy in a store that anyone can get to try some brushes, you know, see what they dio with your drawings. And then as well, try Cem more natural found objects that you can see how that they work within your drawing style. This one have fun and go all sorts of crazy over it. And I can't wait to see what you dio if you want. Share your results of this in the course description below, so everyone can see what you're doing. I have a feeling you guys got a lot of fun with this part 10. Drawing 101 || The Project: all right. Time to get started on your project. So we have all these experiments of lines of mark making and textures and Protonix that you've been working with. So why don't we take some of these and assemble it into a sort of drawling quilt? If you will. First thing you want to dio, you know, grab a sheet of paper and create a drawling of some sort on this. This could be a self portrait. You could do a study of your hand, a landscape of you out your window. The options are really endless on this. So I am recommending for this stage that you stick to the contour because we're going to be putting our other experiments into it. So the contour of this stage is going to sort of help keep everything a little bit more simplified so that we can build it up. So let's just say for mine and you don't even I should probably prefaced this. You don't even have to work representational e at this stage. Maybe you just wanna work with, you know, different shapes or lines, etcetera. Eso I am. I'm just gonna work non representational Lee for mine just that you can see how this one functions. So let's say and then have a circle, another circle. I'm gonna keep this pretty I'm gonna say plane because I'm gonna let my textures do the talking. Maybe an overlapping triangle, maybe another one down here just to sort of balance that part out. And maybe I'm gonna put some waves in it to add a little bit more interest to it. And if you want, you could add 1 may be going this way to break up this space. It's going to be totally up to you with this, all right? I mean, this was pretty straightforward. So what we want to do is take some of our textures. Now, I did put these in a different book on I just sort took him around if I was having coffee or, you know, doodling during a phone meeting, etcetera, and just experiment with different marks. And I did for this. This is a thinking nine by 12 and nine by 12 sketchbook and I just divided in half. And that way I had a little bit of material to work with. I used some permanent markers. I used some graphite. I used some brush script, calligraphy brushes. I wanted to see how many different marks I could get out of this. So again, explore, experiment, goof off and have fun with the patterning part on. I did quite a few of these, so I had a good amount at my arsenal on. I also did some on loose sleeps. Uh, these were again. And none of these I would have considered is the precious. So again just exploring and having fun, which we did. So what we want to dio is take which ones of these we think are interesting and start cutting it out into this shape. Now, if you can't see your lines, you could reinforce it by using a permanent marker. Or you could just tear it out of the sketchbook and holding this against your window. This you create a sort of light box with it? Uh, I do have a dense enough lying here, so I'm just going to sketch it. And for this piece, I'm just going to take this corner right. We're going. Teoh, cut this out. Now, if you have scissors, use those. I just have my utility blade nearby, so I'm just going to use that, but I am going to cut it on the back of one of the sketchbooks because it's a pretty dense car board. I don't want to scratch up my desk or table or floor, etcetera. So if you're using an Exacto or utility blade, and if you don't have a gel mat, just use the back of this or a nice, heavy, strong piece of cardboard. Go ahead and make your cut and you can also pick and choose which part of this area you're looking for. It's going to depend on what you're looking for with your piece, and then you would just go ahead and glue this into place. So Option one all collage. That's great. Option two. I'm just gonna leave that one here, grab a different you know, Let's see what the H B does. And maybe for this section you want circles, and I'm just gonna think that this is sort of subdivisions like it would be for quilt. So I'm just gonna go segment to segment, all right, and I can mix the media. I can use some of the graphite. I can use some of the pencils I can use the markers, colored pencils, crayons, etcetera go all sorts of crazy. Maybe for the next section, I'm gonna do a four B, But I'm going to dio open circles so you can build the drawling with the drawling on and you're going to build the marks specifically for each segment. Maybe this one is going to be arches, and then they just sort of stack on top of each other. So again, this is going to be really flexible. Option three to a combo platter. Maybe some of them are going to be, you know, the cutting paste, and some of them are going to be drawn. And it's going to depend what you're looking for and what you know. What is your subject matter? Do you want it to be combo? Do you want it to just be cut paste? You want to be drawn in What's interesting with this? It's going to take all of our explorations and homogenize them all together. So if you want any of those systems work, this is art, and it's going to be your decision and part of the process to figure out which you know is gonna work best for you, and also that will depend on your materials. If you don't want to go out and have scissors and glue than do this system that works, what's really fun with this is once it's all assembled, what you're going to see from my students past examples. They can just have a life of their own. So you're making a drawling with your Rawlings. Oh, all sorts of craziness. So document your process, Show us what you're textures and marks that you made work. Show us the sketch before you put it on, and the show is your finished piece so we can share all of our experiences throughout this class. 11. Drawing 101 || Conclusion: I really hope you had a great time with the beginning steps of learning how to draw lions, Mark making getting used to materials will open doors to everything that you can ever hope for within drawling. I look forward to seeing your projects and thanks for coming along on this journey.