Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi, I'm Tim.
Welcome to my class. I am a self-taught artist
and a lifelong Doodler. I've always loved to draw and
a few years ago I decided to take the plunge and make
being an artist my job. There are a lot of
challenges involved, but a big one was developing my ability to draw accurately, confidently, and consistently. I didn't realize how important a simple skill of drawing
lines was back then. Drawing lines is one of
many foundational skills. It fits into being
able to draw shapes, it fits being able
to understand forms, it fits into understanding
perspective and value. In this class, I
want to focus on it. Show you why it's so important and how you can
begin to master it. I think the key to unlocking
it as a scale is practice. I've loaded this class with
techniques to help you train. As a mix of speedy exercises, you can fit into
your busy schedule. Then more fleshed
out ones with a bit more of a tangible outcome, which takes a little
bit longer to complete. Now, just to set your
expectations for this class, this is not going to teach you absolutely everything you
need to know about drawing. We are focusing in on basic. It's going to feel a
little bit like boot camp, a little bit ropes, but really take the time to go through all
these practices, build them into your
routine and you'll be amazed at what these will
help you to achieve. We'll talk a little bit about
it as an element of art and how you can use it to convey
emotion, express feeling. But really this class is just focused on building
up your techniques. The project is basically
another practice exercise, but it's a chance
for you to pick something that you really
wanted to be able to draw. Trying it out from
your own imagination. It is about you. It is about your skills growing. It is about you trying something that maybe
you've not done before. I encourage you to
join in with as much of a class as possible. All you need is a pen
or pencil and paper. I've got a big A4 Doodle pad
here and I am ready to go. Are you ready? Let's grab our things and jump straight in. [MUSIC]
2. Your Project: [NOISE] Hi, it's great
that you're here. This class is all
about practice. We're going to be
starting with practices, working our way up to some
more complicated ones. If you go through
all the exercises, then you will have a
portfolio from start to finish of a whole range
of practice techniques, a whole range of output. All of that together
is your project. But the final page,
the final piece, is something you've created
from your own imagination. Who could be anything
you want, really, whatever you can think of and then you're going to have
a go at drawing it using some reference a few times and then trying it out from
your own imagination. Just to let you know that
the mantra for this lesson, I'm going to say it lots of
times is to do it again. If something isn't perfect, if something isn't exactly
how we want it to be, we just put it aside
and have another go. We put it aside. We try again. The most effective way of building of skills
is to go for volume. It's really easy to get
caught up in making one perfect drawing and then beating yourself up because it's not what
you want it to be. When in reality, you have got
to go through the process. The project is designed
around this principle that you will try
something a few times, and it might and may look a
little bit rough and ready, it will look a bit
sketchy, but that's fine. That's all the point, we want to make things look
a little bit rough, but we're growing
in confidence and you'll be able to see
a gradual improvement. So let's go through this. Let's stick in some
real practice time. Trust in this process
that will help us to grow and then make something that is completely yours at the end. [BACKGROUND]
3. Line Essentials - Tips before your start: [NOISE] How to draw lines? Well, this is a bit of
the class so I hope sticks to the most
because it boils down all of this stuff that
we're going to be practicing into a couple
of key principles. If you were going to take
one thing from this class, one little digestible nugget, then this is it, draw loosely. Now, you might be used to making really tightly
controlled short marks where you're really
digging in hard with the pencil and you're
trying to be exact, precise, and focused
in on minute detail. We want to be thinking
about the opposite of this when we're talking
about looseness. Long flowing fluid lines that will absolutely set
the way you draw free. It can be a little bit
difficult to explain because it comes
down to a feeling, but the practices that
we're going to do will help you to draw this out, they'll help you to understand the thing that you
should be looking for. This also plays into how a
line can be used as a tool for expressing different moods or feelings in a piece of art. Here I'm going to draw this
apple a few different ways. You see each one is
done very loosely, very roughly, very messily, but they're all clearly
the same apple, and they're all a
very different mood, a very different feeling
when you look at them. As an artist, you are
interpreting what you see and allowing yourself
to be expressive, allowing yourself to be loose, not just with your lines, but in how you see things, then it opens up so many
more possibilities to you. A few key things to think about
when you want to do this. The first one is how
you use your arm. We're very used to just using our wrists and moving our
hands like that when we draw. To really make the best marks, loosen up your shoulder, just try and open out a
little bit and then use that. That's the basis for how you move your arm
around the page. [NOISE] Whole movement. [NOISE] The most of the movement comes from your shoulder. You can make your art
a little bit easier by extending the amount of pencil that's sticking
out from your hand so is a bit further away. It just lengthens your
arm a little bit. Looseness is an
absolute key watchword. Now, I've not really
made a video talking about the materials
you're going to need because it's very basic. You just need something to draw with and something
to draw around. Grab your stuff, get some space, get a nice hot drink, and I'll see you in
the next lesson. [NOISE]
4. Exercise 1 - Straight Reps: The first exercise that
we're going to do is to really hone our ability
to draw straight lines. It's very simple so let's follow along
with the process now. First, we're focusing on straight lines just
to start to loosen our arm up and get a bit more
of a free-flowing action. We're just going to get our pen, making sure our wrist is off
the page, and it's locked. Just away from the shoulder, we're going to draw some nice
straight parallel lines. The focus here is on
moving consistently, making sure all the lines are going in the same direction, and really trying to
loosen up the arm. Remember, that we're
not rotating our wrist. We are using our whole arm to
make these drawing motions. I start off quite
small and slow, again focusing on consistency and to have a nice
relaxed motion and start to fill up
the whole of the page with different parallel lines
using different lengths, but all going in
the same direction. [MUSIC] Now that we've done that, we want to do the same thing again on a clean sheet of paper. The only difference being
we're going to try and do it in different directions. I'm starting off
with horizontal hair remembering we're trying to
keep our lines parallel, remembering to draw from the shoulder and to keep
them consistent and smooth. [MUSIC] There we go. That is a straight line
repetition exercise. It's well-worth doing this
just a few minutes every day. Bash a few of these pages out, and you'll really start to
see massive improvements. Focus on changing up
the angle of the lines, changing the length of the lines and you'll really start to see massive progress in your ability to draw just by doing this.
5. Exercise 2 - Ghosting: So hopefully if
you didn't awesome you must have warmed up now and the next exercise is all
about honing our accuracy. So what we're
practicing this time is a technique that is
called ghosting. That's not the same thing as ignoring an ex-boyfriend
or girlfriend, it's what we call practicing
alone a few times without touching the paper
before we actually draw it. So we need to get you a
piece of paper like this and plot a whole lot of points all the way around the
edge like I've done here. Then we've got to pick two
of them and the ones on the page start with two which are relatively close
together, I suppose. We're just going
to practice with our pen a few times
above it and then just sweep line in when one quick smooth
motion like this. Now the idea here is that we want to just do it in one go, focusing on going as quickly
as possible, so a quick, smooth line and it really helps you to be looser with
how you draw and it helps you to be
more accurate so don't worry about exactly hitting the points that you
have aimed for. We're just trying to turn off that bit of our
brain which needs to get it completely
perfect and we just want to focus as much
as we can on speed. [MUSIC] And again, we're going
to repeat that mantra. Do it again, fill
up a whole page, then get a clean sheet
and do it again, mark out some more points and do it again
focusing on speed. Trying to challenge yourself to do lines that cross
the whole length of the page and fill up a few
pages just from doing this. [MUSIC] There is a school of thought
that every line that you draw should be
ghosted a few times. First, massively ramps up here accuracy and your
consistency drawing lines. If it's a piece of art that relies heavily on
the lines looking clean and purposeful and going exactly where you want
them to go then this is a technique you want
to be using to do that.
6. Exercise 3 - XHatching: Great, so that's two
exercise out of the way. The third one we're going to
do is called cross hatching. You've probably
heard of it before. It's a fairly well-known
method of shading, especially used in
comics cartoons. They use it a lot in Manga. It's a great way of practicing more of your straight line repetitions that
we've been doing, but so they get control
over where they go. It also demonstrates a
way that you can use them really effectively in your drawings as well.
Let's give it a go. This is another very
simple exercise where we're just going
to draw a random shape, any size, any shape
doesn't matter. Then fill in with
more straight lines. Is very similar, but we're really trying to ramp
up the speed here as fast as we can and just fill in the whole enclosed
shape with parallel lines. Might as well, make most of
it fit in the same shape with a few different
directional lines. We want to try and
focus on even spacing and limiting the lines to be within the bounds of the
shape that we've drawn. Same as before, repeats, add more shapes and fill them in again with lines going
in different directions. You want to be thinking about
keeping a consistent angle. All the lines should be going in the same direction and then also how they're spaced as well. If they've equal spacing
in-between them, then it makes the art
to look so much neater. Just add this to the repertoire, this is three things we've
done with straight lines now. First, just the drills, the repetition
sticking in pages and pages of straight lines
going in all directions, then we've talked about
ghosting, and finally, we've talked about filling in enclosed areas with
straight lines. Excellent work, keep up. Let's keep going and building on what
we've learned so far.
7. Exercise 4 - Curve Reps: I hope you're still
following along. I promised I'd keep this
very basic, very simple. You're seeing that so far with the exercise we've been doing. Now we're going to kick
it up a notch here and do something which is I mean,
it seems very simple, but it is actually quite a bit more complicated and it's moving into trying to achieve more consistency with
curved lines instead. We're going to do
three exercises to do with curved lines. As we do all of these, we want to make sure that we're remembering all the stuff
we've been learning so far especially making sure that we're using our
whole arm to draw. Really make sure that you are loosening up
that shoulder joint. It especially helps if you keep your hand off the paper as well. It's going to feel
a little bit alien if you're not used to this, but keep on practicing. That's the point
of this is to get used to those smooth
flowing motions. First, we're just going
to draw lines that curve in one direction. You can think of
these as C curves. Just like when we were
doing the straight lines, we're going to draw it
once and then repeat the same motion across the page, drawing them in parallel, trying to repeat the motion and achieve consistent results. The reason I said that this
is a bit more complicated is because there's so
much more variation when it comes to drawing curves. Straight lines are fairly basic, but a C-shaped can bend in
all sorts of different ways. What we're focusing
on is repetition. You draw any old
line, any old shape, and then repeat it.
This does two things. It builds up your muscle
memory and it also helps your observational
skills as you are imitating a line that you can see and trying to reproduce it. Then do it again, change up the angle, change up direction, change up the size, and then do it again. Do it again. Fill up a page
or two with this mark. [MUSIC] Perfect. Exercise number two
is to draw circles. Keeping with letter theme, you can call these O curves, but everyone knows
what a circle is. Now, set some
reasonable expectations for yourself here
because drawing circles perfectly is a
really difficult skill. We're approximating here. But what we want to
try and do is to get as close as we can to
closing the loop off neatly. Doesn't matter if you
can't do it every time. Just quick motion of the whole arm and if your
ends meet up, then perfect. If not, move on to the next one, try again and then do
it again and again. You see what I've done here is I have done large circles with
smaller circles inside. What I'm trying to do is
to keep them parallel. Keep a constant width
between the two lines. Again, this is for building
up muscle memory and also for improving those
observational skills. As usual, you know the
drill. Fill up a page. Fill up another
page if you want. I really work hard getting all
of these repetitions done. [MUSIC] Finally, the last type of curve we're
going to draw is an S curve. This is a line that bends in one direction and then bends
smoothly back in the other. I've saved it for last
because it's probably one of the most important lines
to be able to draw. S curves have got so
much application. They're really fundamental to things like drawing
a human figure, drawing expressions, adding dynamism to
any type of drawing. When you hear about
dynamic lines, the lines of action, more often than not, you'll be drawing an S curve. There's a lot to it and I don't really want
to dig into it now. What we're focusing on
here is just practice. Set it for the other two, we're building up muscle memory, we're building up our
observational skills. Again, try and do a few
pages of this thing. Because there's so
much variation, you could do a lot more of this than you could
with straight lines. Two, maybe three pages
is more than enough. The more you do these
and the faster you get. It just become so much more natural to draw
free flowing lines. You will begin to feel the
benefits the more you do this. [MUSIC] Recap. When you are practicing
drawing your curves, these repetitions really
help you to loosen up and achieve more
looseness with those lines. So important for so
many types of drawing. The S curve in particular, if you want to do figure drawing and you're finding
that line of action, just getting a beautiful
smooth S curve, just being able to patch
it up in a second without too much thought is
really powerful. Even if you can't quite
see how these can be used, practice them. Practice your curves,
your C lines, your Ss and your Os. Practice over and over again and you'll be amazed at what
you'll be capable of.
8. Exercise 5 - Challenge yourself!: Finally after all this, we've got to your project. For this, I want you to think about what it is that
you really want to draw. Maybe you're really
inspired by comics, or you want to draw
something realistic or it's figure drawing or
landscapes or anything, really. I want you to try and focus in on something very specific that you want to
be able to draw. For example, if you
want to draw people, then maybe focus in on front on faces or eyes or hands
or something like that. The example that I'm
going to go through is just drawing a few faces. The idea behind this is that we're going to see
against some reference up. We're going to draw a few
times from reference. Then once you're finished with that and all of that stuff
is fresh in your head, you are going to
have a go at drawing something completely from
your own imagination. I'm going to do a few portraits so you can copy along
with me if you want. I've gone to a free
stock image site. I've gone to pexels.com and just searched a face
and just pulled up a few random face images
and I'm going to go through them here with you now. Just remember, the
key things that we've been doing so
far are looseness, keeping loose lines
all the time. That really comes
into play here. You're not trying
to be a camera. You're not trying to draw
something perfectly. I don't even want you to
spend a long time on this. Every picture just maybe set a time for a couple
of minutes or less. We're really just dashing out a few quick lines
for each thing. You'll see what I mean once
I start doing examples. First one, I'll take a bit slow so you can see my process. Here is the picture that
I've got, my first one. It's a nice profile image, so it gives us a lot of nice
sharp angles to work with. I want to focus [inaudible]
in straight lines. First I'm going to try and find the angle for the
slope of his forehead. Then, ghost it in a few times. Then just quickly put a mark on the page to show
where his forehead is. Then I'll work my
way down the rest of the face and do
the same thing. Remember we've been
practicing observation. We're just reproducing the
lines that we can see in the picture and we're also working to simplify them
as much as possible. I don't want to try and capture everything in detail here. I'm just looking for the big angles and the big
lines and drawing those in. There's the shape of the nose, I'll put it in the
underside of the nose. I really wanted to make sure
that we're clear on this. It's that we're not trying
to draw something that is necessarily realistic or the
most beautiful thing ever. This is more practice. We're trying to capture
the essence of a picture. The first time you
draw something, it will always look a
bit rough and ready. Then that is the
structure that you use to build up a more detailed version of the
sketch if you want. But what we're doing here is we are just going to be making sketches that are at
this level of detail. Set your expectations here and don't get too caught
up in the details. I'm going to start
working on some of the internal lines
of the face now, the nostril here, the side of the nose. I'm already placing
them very roughly. It's not super important
that they're accurate, all that matters is
that we're remembering to put the lines in
neatly in one go, we're keeping them loose,
we're ghosting everything. We're not having loads of extra scribble lines where we've tried 50 times
to do the same line, we're just doing each one once. Try to stick to that level
of discipline throughout. If it's helpful as well,
you can also try to use imaginary lines to try
and play some of the points. We imagine a line
drawn from the corner from mouth up to the
corner of a nose here, then we can roughly figure
out where to place it, because all of these
features are going to be placed relative to one another. Now, I'm not doing
a portrait here but the idea is
that the techniques we're using here
are transferable to any observation drawing. You're looking at something, you're trying to
get the key angles, the key lines that
represent the shapes. We just want to get them
down as quickly as possible. Hopefully this is making sense. If not, all I can recommend is that you just try to do this. If it doesn't come at first, if it doesn't click
at first then, that's the point, is
that we do it quickly. Then just like everything
we've been doing here today, we're going to try it again. If it's not perfect, move on to the next thing, try again. I'll just speed it up as I
work my way down the rest of the face here until
we've got a full profile. [MUSIC] That's Face 1 finished. Now, like I said, we're not clinging too
tightly to this one, we're going to move on
quickly and do another one. Then we're going to do another
one, focusing on speed, trying to be as
accurate as you can, but not getting too caught up in details and just going for it. I have done seven faces
in total and I'm going to speed up for the
rest of them so you can see them all come
out in rapid succession. [MUSIC] That's all of my practices done. Now I'm going to have
a go at creating something entirely
from my imagination. I'm going to stick with
the straight line outline for the faces that I've been doing and I'm just
going to make it up. [MUSIC] Already I can tell it's not the best face I've ever drawn, but it doesn't matter. It was really important that I wanted to keep this
process honest. When I'm practicing,
it doesn't always come out as good as I want
it to, to be honest. I'm really pleased
with this. Now you've seen my example is, over to you. Make that commitment
before you start the drawing that no
matter how it turns out, you're going to
share it with pride.
9. Conclusion: You made it.
Brilliant. Well done. Thank you so much
for taking part. Thank you so much for
giving everything that go. We've covered a whole load
of practice exercises that if you can slot
them into a daily, weekly habit to
strengthen your ability to draw what you can
see in front of you, to draw what it is that
you imagine in your head. It takes time, it takes effort, but you're on the right
path so keep going. If you haven't go
at the project, then please head on down
to the project gallery. Take some nice photos of it
and upload it for us to see. Feel free to show all of your progress as well as
your pages of practices, your observation drawings, everything that
we've gone through. It's really nice
to have a little portfolio of all of this stuff. If you enjoyed this, if you think the
content was worthwhile, if you think that this
has helped you to take a few steps on that journey
and please drop me a review. Let me know what you think. Give me constructive feedback. Follow my class, follow my profile and watch
this space for more. I want to do loads of content
that is aimed at helping beginners really create
their confidence and unlock some of their skills. Thanks again and I look forward to seeing what
you've done and hopefully, I'll see you again in some
more lessons in the future. I wish you all the very best
in all of your endeavors.
Tim Balhatchet, Artist
