Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Carol. I'll be teaching a
course on how to draw the puppet using watercolor
pencil and water brush. I'm a self taught illustrator. I have coursework
in visual design, and this was supplemented
with learning about drawing, painting,
gesture drawing, and drawing in three D. I also have work experience
as a technical writer, and this gives me
the ability to break down lessons into
digestible pieces. In this class, we will have a combination of
experimental mark making in order to learn more
about what kind of marks the watercolor pencil and
water brush will result in. Then we'll also learn
techniques about drawing. This class is for beginners in drawing as well as people
who have no experience. In this class, you'll learn about how to use a photo
reference for drawing, how to break down
somewhat complex subject into simpler geometric
shapes and also how to render objects in three D. Our class project
will be a drawing of a puffin, and it will be done in watercolor
pencil and water brush. I hope to see you in
the first lesson.
2. Course Project & Materials: The main course project
is a drawing of a puffin. It will be done using watercolor
pencil and waterbrush. The reference for the
drawing will be this photo. We'll use both design
concepts and drawing fundamental skills to
complete this drawing. About the style of the drawing. The drawing is based on nature, so it is fairly realistic, but I'm not aiming
for photorealism. I'd like this puffin to appear believable on the page
as a real animal. The drawing will be done
using only one color, dark blue or another dark
color of your choice. The reason for doing this
is to focus on values, light and dark instead of color. One result of using one color is that the image
will look overall graphic, but I still want to emphasize a sense of softness and
vulnerability of the puffin. The water brush will
soften the lines and colors and add to a
sense of softness. About the materials, you will need at least
one watercolor pencil, dark blue or another dark
color of your choice. A clean sponge, you can cut
a regular sponge in half, if you wish, a water brush or a paint brush that is
suitable for watercolor. A small size is a
little bit better, like a size four, six or eight. Paper. You can use
photocopy paper for your initial sketches and switch to watercolor paper or heavy drawing paper
for the final drawing, a pencil sharpener,
and optional, you can use a
graphite pencil for the thumbnail sketch and
initial sketching practice.
3. Observing the Puffin: In this lesson, we
will take a look at the reference photo and make notes about what stands
out about the puffin. This will help to
determine where the visual focus of
the drawing should be. One of the first things
that we'll see about the image is that the puffin
has a very colorful beak. It's triangular. There is some dark
purple or blackish color as well as a bright yellow
and a reddish orange. Also on the face, the eye is triangular
and it stands out because it has a dark contrast against the mostly white face. The puffin has a pretty
round body and head. And it's mostly made up of a lot of black
and white feathers. There's black on the back on most of the wing feathers
and then also on the top of the head and a lot of
the face and much of the body around the breast and the lower part of
the body is white. It has very bright feet, orange. The feet are webbed. The
legs are also pretty bright. On the face, there is
a small orange floret. I is between the
bill and the face. The puffin stands in a
mostly upright posture. It's not stick straight
like a penguin would be, but it's still mostly upright. The way these observations
will relate to the drawing is that in the drawing, the goal is to give the viewer some specific
areas to focus on the first couple of elements that are noticeable when
we look at the photo of the puffin would probably become the ideal focus areas for
the final drawing viewer. For me, the elements that stand out are the bill or
the beak, the eye, the overall face area
and then also the body, just because the body
takes up so much space in the photo in the entire
image of the puffin.
4. Mark Making Demo 1: I In this lesson, I'll be going over mark making, and this will be the dry version or just the watercolor pencil. I'll be making a number
of straight lines, and you can try
drawing the lines in different directions and also using different line weights. So pressing lighter on the pencil and pressing
harder on the pencil. You might find that
drawing the lines in a particular direction
feels more comfortable to you. For me, when I need to draw
a longer straight line, I feel like it's
more comfortable to draw the line moving
away from my body. And For the curve section, I'll practice drawing circles, and they don't have
to be perfect, but you just want to get your hand and your arm used
to drawing a round shape. For the filled boxes, I'll draw a rectangle and fill it with an even layer of color. You don't have to use diagonal
motions to do the fill. You can find out which direction of drawing the fill is most
comfortable to you. For the gradient fill, I'll draw a rectangle
and color it in, so the left side is the lightest and the color gets gradually darker as I move
towards the right. How I think about this is I'm dividing the rectangle
into four columns, and for each column, I try to go increasingly darker. And then on a second pass, I might go over the areas between the columns and try to blend it out
a little bit more. O. At the very right, I want to try and press
hard enough that this is the darkest color that I can get using the
watercolor pencil. For the soft section, I'm creating my
goal is to create an even area of color
that is pretty light. It's the lightness of the
color would be pretty similar to the very left
side of the gradient fill. I was trying to make
the color light, so the soft section might not show up very
well on the camera. Uh, u. For the stippled section, I want to create texture
by making random marks on the paper and it'll be
a little bit chaotic. I'm holding the pencil
more at the tip, and I'm also varying
the pressure that I use to hold the pencil between
medium for the darker dots. Then if I loosen my
grip on the pencil, then I'll also get
random short lines. And I'm also trying to move my hand around the
page fairly randomly. This kind of texture
effect can be used to indicate the ground outside or dirt or some
kind of texture on a stone.
5. Mark Making Demo 2: For this demo, I'll be
applying the water brush to the marks that we made
in the previous demo. To start off, I'm pressing
the barrel of the water brush until some water
is pushed out onto the brush and then dabbing it
a little bit with a sponge. So I want the brush
tip to be damp but not super
saturated with water. And for the straight section, I'm just making brushstrokes on top of the lines that
I've already drawn. And you can see that the line becomes a little
bit more diffuse or a little bit blurred. Also the color becomes
a little bit brighter. What I find with
the water brush is that it seems like the
longer my brush stroke is, the wetter the brush can become. So at the very end, there's a little bit
of a water droplet that's pulling at
the end of the line. So with this drawing, I probably don't want to make really long lines
because I don't want to have a lot of water
pooling on the paper. So I'm occasionally dapping the brush on the sponge to
pick up some excess water. Also, when I'm making the
brush stroke on the paper, I'm not actually pressing on the barrel of the water brush. To clean off some of the
residual color on the brush, I squeeze the barrel
of the brush and simultaneously wipe
the tip on the sponge. And then I try making brushstrokes
on top of the circle. And I find that the color from the drawn lines doesn't
travel all that far. But the line becomes much
softer with the water brush. So the way that I think
about using the brush is where I want to
keep a cleaner line, I might leave the line dry or make sure that my
brush is just barely damp when I apply the brush
to the paper or to the line. For the fill, I
have a damp brush. And again, I can see that the color gets a little bit brighter
when it becomes wet. And I can still see a bit of the diagonal line markings from when I did the
shading with the pencil. And for the last one, I'm
just going to show an example of having a little bit
excess water on the brush. Here, I have a lot of
water on the brush, and the water is sort of
pooling on the paper. And if I don't want that, then I can blot out some of the excess water
using a paper towel. It will pick up the water and
a little bit of the color. But when you use
the paper towel, you'll also not have
a lot of control, so the color might spread out to areas that you don't
necessarily plan to. For the gradient,
I'm going to try to apply the water brush in
two different directions. I'll start with applying the
water on the light side, on the left, and then move the water
towards the dark side. With the water, it's hard to get the effect
of even gradient. What happens is the water
brush picks up some of the color and keeps transferring that
color onto the paper. So it might start out
on the light side, but it will end up a
little bit darker. Then I'll try applying the water in the direction
from dark to light. In here, I almost lose
the sense of any gradient because the waterbrush picks up so much color at the beginning. I'll try making one
more gradient box. In this time, I'm going to
leave a part of it really, really light or I'm
actually going to leave a section of
it almost white. And then I'm going to
apply the water only to the light half of the box. And And then using the residual color that I
have on the water brush, I also push out some of
the water to the very, very white paper section. So this area is an example
of a softer gradient. And it's a little bit difficult
to see on the camera. But even on this section that's marked in between the two boxes where the paper was
completely white, there is a really, really soft light blue
color that is there. So I want to use this type of effect on the on the
puff and drawing. And I don't really want to have the effect where in
one of the gradients, I lost the gradient
because there was just too much color being
spread by the water brush. I can also affect a
little bit the texture of the drawing depending
on the direction that I make marks using
the water brush. The water brush on top
of the soft section just brightens the color, and it softens the
area a little bit.
6. Mark Making Demo 3: For the stippled area, I'll also try to make fairly random or fairly
loose brush strokes, and this contributes
to that sense of the randomness of
the pencil marks. And this softens
everything a little bit. It maybe gives
some indication of whether or it creates
a softer mood.
7. Designing the Drawing: In this lesson, we will learn a little bit about
how to design the drawing. We'll get an introduction to
a concept called the rule of thirds and we'll apply that to the composition
of the drawing, which will help
us to place focus on the intended
areas of the puffin, namely the bill
and the head area. The first illustration
depicts the role of thirds. A grid has been drawn separating
the frame into thirds, both horizontally
and vertically. Where the vertical lines
meet the horizontal lines, the pink circles represent
visual hotspots. These are places on
the drawing that are ideal to place elements
for visual focus, and they provide a more
dynamic composition or layout than simply placing the subject in the
middle of the page. In your drawings, you do not always need to follow
the rule of thirds, but it is a common
convention in photography, art and design, and it is a good tool to have
in your tool belt. The application of the rule
of thirds to the PAP and drawing our goal is to place emphasis on the bill and then the eyes or
basically the head area. Due to the posture
of the puffin, it is a little challenging
to align the eye or the bill specifically on a hot spot and still keep the whole
body within frame. The goal is to get the bill
and eye area as close to the target hotspot as possible while still
fitting the whole body, including the tail
feathers within the frame. There's also a
convention where if the animal is looking in
a particular direction, it is better to leave extra
white space in that direction by placing the subject more to the opposite side. In
this case, the left. The reason is that if the
animal were looking to the right and you place the animal on the right
side of the page, the viewer would follow the animal's line
of sight right off the page and perhaps get distracted away
from the drawing. This is a reason
why the puffin is placed to the left of
center in the drawing. One of the goals in
designing the drawing is to keep the viewers attention on the drawing for as
long as possible.
8. Breaking the Drawing into Shapes Demo 1: I'll be starting with a smaller
scale thumbnail sketch to get a sense of the layout of
the puffin within the frame. I'll start with the body oval because it fills
the greatest space. I'm adding the head oval and also the bill triangle and then connecting
the head to the body. I'll also add the
legs and the feet. I'll put in some very basic
shading for the black neck, the cap, and the back feathers.
9. Breaking the Drawing Into Shapes Demo 2: This is a continuation
of the shapes practice. It's just a drawing
on a larger scale. I'm marking out the bounds for the top of the head
and also the feet. Then I'll start off by
making the oval shape for the body because it is the
largest part of the puffin. Uh, I'll also add the oval head and the beak and then connect
the head to the body. I'll also work down to the
legs and add the feet. S.
10. Light and Shadow: In this illustration, there is a light source that is above and to the
right of the sphere. Where the light hits the
sphere most directly, the light will be reflected and appear most brightly
on the sphere. Note that this
creates a round form. The right upper area of the
sphere is the light side. The sections of the sphere where light does not hit directly
will be in shadow. Note that on the
side of the sphere opposite to where the light
shows off the brightest, it's actually not
the darkest part. This is due to some
light bouncing off the ground surface like a table, for instance, and reflecting
onto the back of the sphere. In our drawing,
we will not focus too much on this
bounced reflection, but it is something you may see in other photos or in life. In the photo of the puffin, the body of the puffin
is similar to a sphere, but a little bit more ovoid, somewhere in between a
sphere and a football. But the way that the
light and shadow falls on the white part of the body will be
somewhat similar. I've drawn an oval shape around the body and there
is a circular form towards the top
where the light is reflecting the brightest
off the white feathers. The light source would
be above the puffin and between the puffin
and the viewer or us. Below the circular shape, the shadow will
become increasingly darker as you start
looking towards the ground and
it'll start off as a pretty light gradient
or light gray color. Note that on the ground
behind the puffin, there is a pretty
dark cast shadow, and this is fairly
circular in form. The face of the puffin is
slightly doughnut shaped. Also, there's
sometimes a little bit of gray coloring on the face. I don't want to copy all of
the gray and shadow onto the drawing because I want the focus on the face
to be on the eye, and I want the face to be
kept look relatively clean. To that end, I will
add a little bit of soft dimension to the
lower part of the face, but keep the upper part
of the face fairly white. These are some additional tips. Note that it could
be simpler to see the light and shadow effects in a photo by converting
it to black and white. This can be a good way to
look at the overall values of the image or the light and
dark levels in the image. It can also be useful during
this stage to sometimes step a few feet away from
the drawing and look at it from a big
picture perspective. This can help prevent getting into too detailed work early on, which may muddy the image
rather than clarify it. It can also help with
looking at proportions, and then it can also provide
information about whether the light and shadow
is clearly depicted.
11. Light and Shadow Demo: I'm starting to fill in the
darkest areas like the head, the neck, the back,
and the tail. The back is just a tiny bit shaggy to indicate the
texture of feathers. There is some shadow on one leg. And then for the three D
aspect of the puffins body, I'm going to start
lightly indicating a semicircle where the shadow on the body starts
as a gradient. Then I'll start to fill in the darkest areas of the shadow on the lower
part of the body. Overall, the shadow follows
a fairly circular form. If it makes it easier for
you to do the shading, you can also rotate
your paper around so that you're making our marks in the direction that feels
comfortable to your hand. I'm not moving the
paper a lot myself because I don't want the drawing to go out of
the frame of the camera. I'm going to go back in to add some more contrast in the
black feather section. I felt like after I added
the shadow gradient to the lower body that the black area didn't
look dark enough. The black feathers on the
top of the head, the neck, and the back should be
the darkest mark possible with my pencil and also the darkest
sections of the drawing. With the gradient, the shadow on the lower
part of the body, I want it to gradually darken down as it
moves down the belly, but I still want
the shading to be pretty soft or a
fairly subtle shading because the shadow is appearing on it's a section where it's the white
feathers of the body. So the color in the photo is pretty light
to a medium gray. And the reason why
the softness of that shading and
the roundness of the body feels
important to convey, other than that is the
actual shape of the body is I want to
accentuate and always keep into the viewer's
mind how soft this bird is because it really is a very,
very adorable bird. And I also want to give
some shading on the face to indicate that the cheek area of the faces a rounded cheek. So even the cheek in the
face looks very soft.
12. Filling in Details: In this demo, I'll be adding in some of the details
of the puffin. When I'm filling in the bill, I want to focus on the
inner part of the bill, where there's a section
of dark purple, and it's outlined by a bright yellow section
in the photograph. This is an area that has
really high contrast. So in order to maintain that high
contrast in the drawing, I'm going to leave the outline
section as the white of the paper rather than fill it in to indicate the yellow coloring. I just want as much of a dark section against a
light section as possible. And then for the outer part
of the bill, in the photo, it's mostly a bright
pinkish orange color, and I'm planning to shade it in, but I'll try to shade
it in a bit more soft or a bit more light than I've done for the
inner bill area. In the photo, I can also see that on the outer
section of the bill, there's some bridges that
look like darker lines, and I'll try to indicate those, but I don't want to put a lot of emphasis
on it because I still want the main focal
point of the bill to be that intersection with
the high contrast. I'm planning to go
to the I section, but because it's pretty small
and it's fairly detailed, I'm going to sharpen my pencil. I planning the eye section, I am thinking to
make the triangle shape slightly larger than what it is in the photo
because I want to have a pretty high
emphasis on the eye. There's a little bit of a dark line or dark plumage at the
bottom of the triangle. Then there's also a line coming out from the
back of the eye, and I'm going to curve that line just a
slight bit to indicate a curve in the head or the
face area of the puffin. The eyeball is fairly round. I don't draw the entire circle, but I indicate the round section that I can fit
within the triangle. And while I'm filling
in the eyeball, I'm going to leave a small
white circular section towards the upper left of
it to indicate a highlight. And I want that highlight to catch the eye of the viewer and to keep visual interest to add visual
interest to the eye. In the photo, there's some red section in the
background of the eye, like between the eyeball and the triangular,
background of the eye. I'm not going to fill
in in the drawing for that red section because
I want to keep the eye fairly high contrast and just easy to see the difference between the triangle
and the eyeball. In the photo, there is an
orange floret on the face, and I don't want it
to become too much of a focal point or a
distraction from the eye and the other parts
of the face or the bill. So all I'm going to do is create an outline for it to
indicate that it's there, but I'm not planning
to fill it in because I want to
keep the face area fairly clean and white and just make it feel soft
more than anything else. I am filling in the grayish area for the feathering
below the floret, and I'm also adding just
a little bit more of that gradient on the cheek. I'll go in towards the leg and the feet area,
although in the photo, I can see that there are sections of the feet that support the webbing
that have highlights. I'm not planning to put
in too much detail into the feet because the more
detail that you put in, the more attention that the viewer will give
to that section. And I feel like I
want the feet to be there but not really
important to the drawing. So I'll add in the shading, but I'm trying to shade
it fairly loosely. Lastly, I'll go back in to
the neck and the back area and add just a little bit of texture that will indicate
the feathers of the puffin. I think on the back area, they're coming out just slightly jagged and maybe slightly
a little bit too regular. But I can go back in afterwards and sort of soften up that feather texture and those lines with
the water brush.
13. Adding Background and Water: I'm starting to put in some of the ground underneath
the puffin. And I am partly using
the photo reference. In the photo, there's a rock that the puffin is standing on. But I'm going to tweak
it a little bit to be a little bit more soft ground
with grasses growing on it. I'm filling in the cast shadow underneath and a little
bit behind the puffin. Hh. There's a lot of light that is
reflected off the front and the upper right side
of the puffins breast. And I want to just indicate a slight
contrast against that. So it makes the white
section pop a little bit more since there's just a lot of white on the
page in that area. So I'm lightly shading in
just a little bit of color. On the lower right
section of the ground, I'm adding in some grasses.
These are fictitious. They don't really
appear in the photo, but I felt like the line of the rock that
the puffin is standing on, it's going to draw the viewer's eye down to the
corner and off the page. So I want to add something just for a little bit of texture
and a little bit of visual indicating to
indication to move the viewer's eye a
little bit back into the picture and back into the direction of
the puffin's body. So I'm just going to
really lightly indicate additional grasses as though the puffin is standing
on a bit of earth, something that's a little
bit more like dirt and there's just grasses growing sporadically
around the ground. And then also just for
additional visual interest. I'm I'm doing stippling, in a fairly random format, adding dots and
little random lines to the ground to make it feel a little bit
more like dirt or a little bit more random, like you would see
the ground outside. Now I'm going to take
the water brush, and I'm going to
squeeze the barrel of the brush so that
just a little bit of water comes onto the brush, and then I'm going to dab a
little bit of it off because I don't want that
brush to be too wet. I'm going into the head
area of the puffin, and I'm going to try
to be fairly careful about maintaining a clean line. And what I find using
the water brush is that it seems like the water the brush gets a
little bit wetter as as I'm making brush
strokes on the page. So I kind of need to
watch out for that. I would prefer to make
short strokes using the water brush than
really long strokes. And there, I feel
like I was trying to use the brush to dab up a
little bit of excess water. But the water ran a little
bit on the paper a little bit more than I wanted
it to because I want to keep a fairly clean line
on the top of the head. But I can go back and clean
that up a little bit, just using the watercolor
pencil at the end. And for the feather texture at the back of the neck and also along the
back of the puffin, I want the feather edges
to be relatively clean. So the more wet the
waterbrush tip, the more blurry the
color will become. So I try cleaning off the tip of the brush by pushing out water and rubbing the
tip against the sponge. And then I dab the tip a little bit before I start
applying it to the paper. And when I'm coloring in
the feather sections, I try to start at the feather tip and then go
where it's the most narrow. And then I tried to go into
the larger area of color because the brush will become a little bit more wet as I
press it onto the paper. And when I'm applying the
brush onto the paper, I'm actually not squeezing
the barrel at all. I'm just allowing
the water that's on the brush tip at that time to come in contact
with the paper. And I don't feel like
even if I don't press on the barrel while I'm
touching the paper, I don't feel like
the tip of the brush gets really dry as
opposed to when you're using a regular
watercolor brush, paint brush, the tip will
dry out a lot faster. And on the feet, I'm
just really kind of more loosely putting water on
the color for the webbing. For the gradient and the
shadow on the puffin's body, I am making the brushstrokes in a semicircular sort of pattern because I want to
keep that sense of the shadow being
in a circular shape. And when I run the brush over the colored sections where I've shaded in with
watercolor pencil, the brush will accumulate
just a little bit, like a faint amount of color. And so even when I start rubbing the
brush over the white, there's a really, really
pale blue that gets applied. And so this helps me
to create a sense of a softer gradient over the middle upper
section of the body. Even if the shadow gradient isn't super smooth as
maybe I would like, I can just start it off with
the water and then I can go back in with the
watercolor pencil and blend out the
gradient a little bit more to make it feel a little bit more
like even gradient. Then for the grass, I
also want to soften up those lines and
diffuse out the color. I'm gluing over the grasses just in a really quick manner. For the cheek gradient, I'm starting on the
darker section, and then I'm moving up
through the lighter section. And I'm allowing the brush to carry color even up a little bit onto the white section of the page so that I
can get a softer, rounder feeling to that cheek. And I'm only going to
apply the water brush to the inside
section of the bill. I don't want to put it onto the white outline
around the bill. And I think I'm not going to put it on the outer section of the bill just to keep that
shading relatively light. I'm going to come
back in now with my watercolor pencil and just draw a little
bit outside of that section on the
top of the head where I felt like the
water ran a little bit, and I couldn't I couldn't
dab it with the towel.
14. Conclusion: Congratulations. You made it
to the end of the course. In this lesson, we will be going over a summary of the
previous lessons. We started out making observations from
the photo reference, and from our list of notes, we made some
priorities about what should be the visual
focus of the drawing. Also did some
experimental mark making, and this was to get
a sense of kind of physical and
emotional effects we could get from media. This was in our case, the watercolor pencil
and water brush. And in addition, we gained a sense of some
tips and tricks of what was effective using both the pencil and the brush and what was maybe
less effective. We also learned how to lay out the drawing using visual
design principles. And then we learned to break down the photo reference into
simpler geometric shapes. We also applied
ideas of light and shadow to create a more
three D form for the birth. We added some smaller details, and then we also added some background and
texture and ground. Finally, we added the water
brush and saw how that affected it changed a bit of the line and the
color of the drawing. If you feel like
you haven't been able to go through
all of the lessons, then I would invite you to go back to any lesson at any time. And after you're done
with your final project, I would encourage you to upload the file and share it
both in the class forum, as well as on social media. That way, you'll be
able to connect with other students as well as
the artistic community. Thank you for joining
me in this class, and I hope to see you again.
Carol Chung, Illustrator Educator
