Drawing For Experienced Beginners

1. Class Intro: Hello, everyone. I'm Marco Bucci, and I want to welcome you to my drawing class for Experienced beginners. You know, as an artist for 20 years now, professional for about 15 years, I mostly do paintings and finished illustrations that have color and value and shading and rendering. But for the first four years of my learning, it was strictly drawing. And I found that having strong drawing foundations really benefited me and bolstered my work, no matter what kind of medium or style I was adding to it, be it painting or animation or sculpting. The drawing foundations had to lie underneath, and that's what this class is all about. In fact, I've structured this class in the way that I learned drawing fundamentals. We're going to move through the chapters in the same way that I was introduced to these principles and concepts as I learned. I'll be showing you the fundamentals themselves through lectures and analyzing other work, and then I'll be showing you how to apply them by doing drawing demonstrations. And these demonstrations are also designed as homework assignments for you. You could either draw along with me or simply watch the lectures and then fashion your own homework assignments after what you see me doing. I'm excited for this class. Let's get going. 2. Warm Up Routine: So before we truly get started, I'm just going to spend a few minutes talking about warm ups and how I like to warm up. The main principle I adhere to when I do this stuff is I don't want to have any pressure at all, and what that means practically is, I don't want to have to draw anything. I mean, not anything literal, no characters, no environments, nothing like that. I just want to start making marks on the page. Okay. And the thing I want to encourage when it comes to your warm up is pick a brush that you like to draw with. My favorite brush is this kind of calligraphy type thing. I actually did find this brush in a Cliigraphy set. It's really not a traditional pencil style brush. I'd just like to fill the page with what I consider to be confident marks drawn in the way that I like to draw, which is choppy. My lines tend to be on the thicker side. I wouldn't say it's delicate, but it is deliberate. And this is just what I've learned over the years that I like. I like both the feel of it, you know, the tactile pressure that I put down on the stylus and the tablet, or if I'm drawing on paper, it's very much the same thing. And I also like the way it just looks on the paper. The physical way you draw and the marks you make probably also has a lot to do with your influences. I personally happen to be very influenced by animators. There's a beautiful drawing there by Glen Keen. Because of the nature of animation, the strokes tend to be rough, yet confident. As a result, you get these very clear, boldly stated shapes. When I do my warm ups, which by the way, I often do just with a cup of coffee in the morning, I do it to remind myself that this stuff is ultimately supposed to be fun and not at all stressful. I'm also reminded that mark making itself, as abstract as this is, can be an interesting thing to look at. I certainly find a lot of beauty in just the strokes of that Glen Keen drawing there. I can sense the confidence of the artist and almost the effectiveness of his thinking. That comes through to me just in the strokes. Those are the opposite of timid. That's where I want to be as an artist. I remember this little quote I read at a swimming pool of all places where I used to go swimming for exercise, and the quote was, you have to train the way you want to compete because you will compete the way you train. Now, drawing is not a competition, but the way you practice is very much going to be the way you draw. Even filtering down to your morning warm up routine, I want to encourage you to make the marks that you want to make that you feel comfortable making. Take the pressure off yourself. Don't feel the need to draw anything. Just start putting down some abstract shapes, abstract marks, circles, squares, whatever, one shape in front of another, one shape behind the next, different sizes, and create yourself a little piece of abstract art. Something that just gets your hand moving and your muscles warm a little bit. And once you're finished with this page, I never save them. I just close the canvas and we get to work. Let's do that right now. 3. My Workspace: Because I'm recording this class using digital tools, I'd like to quickly go over what I'm using, both in terms of hardware and software. I've got a standard dual monitor setup, which is nice because I can put reference on this monitor and then I draw looking at this monitor. Now, this is actually a Cintiq, which means I can draw on this surface directly. But I actually prefer to draw on my good old fashioned walk in Tools P. I've been using tablets like this since the year 2000, so I'm just really comfortable with it. I also like the fact that I can lean back a little bit and not be so close up to the screen. My styles holster is right there. If I have to switch to a mouse, I've got a wireless mouse right here. My keyboard is on a movable tray, so I can slide it in to sit closer, or if I'm using keyboard shortcuts, which I almost always am, I can move it out like this. Funny. On video, I can really tell that I got to dust off that keyboard. But okay, when it comes to what I'm actually looking at on my screen, it's pretty bare bones. This is what I'm looking at. This is Adobe Photoshop, by the way. Now, I don't necessarily recommend photoshop. I've just been using it since the late 90s, so I'm so used to it. But photoshops not cheap. You pay a monthly subscription for it. And to be honest, I think the only reason I stick with the Adobe products, other than the fact that I've been using them for so long, is that because I'm a teacher, they give me a teacher's discount on all Adobe products. If I didn't have that bundle price as a teacher, I'm not entirely sure I would stick with photoshop. If you use Photoshop, that's great. That's all you need. It's a great app for drawing and digital painting. So if you're wondering which app I would recommend if you're not using photoshop and you don't want to pay for it, I would recommend this piece of software. It's called Krita. You can see it in the top left corner there. It's known as a photoshop alternative, and it really does a great job. It's tailored toward digital art. It can do anything photoshop can do, but it's free. I've done some work in Krita. If I ever choose to abandon photoshop, Krita is probably the software I'll jump to. You've got your nice color picker over here, you've got your layers window here. You can quickly modify your interface by docking and undocking panels. It's also got a lot of nice brushes right out of the box with some very clear icons as to what the brush looks like. You can pull down this menu and access all kinds of different brush selections. You can build them into a favorites folder. Lots of good functionality with Krita. So back to Photoshop here, this is more of a surface overview of what I'm seeing because in this class, I'm actually not going to show you this whole interface. And the reason for that is I'm never actually doing anything special with the interface. I will almost always be working on just a single layer, as you can see here. I will almost always be using a dark color to draw with. Sometimes I'll use blue lines or red lines, and I'm just picking colors like that. Again, almost always, I'll be using this little calligraphy brush that you saw me use in the warm ups. This Caligraphy brush is part of the brush pack that comes with this class. The file format I provide can be loaded in photoshop, obviously, but also in Procreate, which is an iPad app, procreate another great app for drawing and painting, by the way. It can also be loaded up in clip studio paint. Unfortunately, the brush does not work in Krita because it's a different file format. One thing I'll often do in this class is draw things that go behind other things. So for example, you see this spherical form I just drew there? Well, if I wanted to draw a little square behind it, instead of just ending the square there, I will often draw it behind the object coming out like that and completing it that way. And then what I'd like to say is I'll ghost out what's behind. You'll hear me say the word ghosting a lot. It's a habit I have. What that means visually is I'll do something like this, kind of hiding what's behind and therefore invisible to us, but ghosting it. So it's not fully hidden, it's just well, ghosted. All I'm doing to achieve this ghosting effect is sampling the white pixels on the canvas or simply selecting a light color, and then very gently just going over the strokes, essentially painting white transparently over my strokes. The same thing could be achieved with layers, but layers will slow you down. If you are a beginner practicing your drawing, I recommend not using layers. Just use the one default layer that comes when you open a brand new canvas. Any app will just give you one basic layer to work on. In the event that I do use layers, I will be sure to mention it and show you. But don't be surprised if that actually never happens because as far as the lessons in this class goes, there's very little functionality for layers. No matter which app you use, the one thing I recommend is keeping your interface open and breathable, don't start cluttering it with 1 million panels like this. Really, the only three things you want to see are your layers if you're even using them. My layers window is always just sitting here on the right. It's just something that I've always done. Then I've got my little color picker here, which when I'm painting, I'd like to resize, so it's a bit bigger. But if I'm just drawing, which is generally black and white, I'll usually just shrink it way down, something like this, so it doesn't take up too much real estate. Then my canvas is as large as possible on the screen. Usually, it's something like this. Now, with photoshop, you can go fancy and make your canvas like this as big as the screen is. And you can absolutely do that if it makes you comfortable. But for me, I often just like to have it like this. I find that I like having the ability to monitor the entire canvas on my screen rather than having a super zoomed in view where I physically have to move my eyes from this point to this point. Again, to see down here, I'm moving my eyes a lot and I don't enjoy that. I like working like this where my eyes can take in the whole picture all at once. So my chosen presentation for this class, you will only see my canvas. I will be cropping out just the drawable surface of my canvas. That's because once again, I'm not using any special tricks or tools, just a basic pencil brush or in my case, a calligraphy brush. You can use whatever brush you want. Most artists when they're drawing use pencil brushes, similar to maybe a brush like this. It has a more grainy pencil look. Okay. And this brush is great. It just for some reason, I've always drawn with my calligraphy brush. I think because I can get a better sense of thick to thin lines, which is something that reminds me of my drawing with charcoal days where you hold the charcoal on its side and you can achieve a more calligraphic look with it. But whatever brush you're comfortable with, please use that. Don't feel the need to use a calligraphy brush just because I do. I'm only using this because that's what I'm comfortable with. And then, the last thing I like to have on my screen at all times is the tool bar, which in photoshop, I can collapse from a wider tool bar like this to a more vertical tool bar, and that just takes up less screen real estate, so I have more room for my canvas. As I mentioned earlier, my fingers are always hovering on the brush size hot keys on the keyboard. Instead of changing my brush size by going here, that's way too cumbersome to do that. You can hear me pressing keys. That's just my middle finger and index finger pressing the square bracket keys which are next door neighbors on the keyboard, so I can very quickly resize my brush on the fly. If I'm zoomed in for some reason, which in this class, I probably never will be. But sometimes when I'm painting or drawing a detail, I might be zoomed in. Because my index and middle finger are on the square bracket keys, my pinky can comfortably reach the space bar key, which is the universal shortcut for moving around your canvas. Then I'll just use the magnifying glass tool to zoom back out. Here is what this all looks like. This is how my left hand is all the time. Note that my ring finger is not actually doing anything, it's just resting there. Speaking of the keyboard, I don't use control Z to undo, and that's because I don't like to move my left hand at all. Instead, if I'm drawing with my stylus and I want to undo something, I have control Z mapped to my front rocker switch. To set this up, your tablet will come with its own little interface where you can map hot keys and buttons. The walk on one looks like this. For me, I just pick the device, which is my intos tablet. I select my pen. I would select Photoshop for the software. Then I can go here to the front rocker switch icon, which you can see is set to keystroke and you can see here it set to Control Z, which is undo. If you don't have a walk on tablet, you'll still have a screen very much like this where you can map hot keys accordingly. Let's see. The only other thing that maybe you should know, and I do find useful as I have to drag this in from my other screen. I like to have this navigator window. Again, it's open on my other monitor, and it's just a thumbnail view of the canvas, simulating standing ten feet away from your page. I find this mostly useful with painting because it simplifies a more complex piece. But as a force of habit, I do like to have this on my screen. But again, because I have dual monitors, I would put this on my other screen. If I didn't have a second screen for this class, I would not even use it. It's not worth the real estate. That's because you're going to be able to evaluate your drawings just by looking at the one canvas here. But if you do have two screens, I would throw the navigator window on that other screen. Again, different apps will generally have that navigator window. It just might not be called the navigator, I might be called something else. Sometimes at the end or middle of a drawing, I'll feel the need to resize things or move things around a little bit. For that, I'll just use the selection tool here. Let's say I wanted this dot to be bigger. I would just draw selection. Then in photoshop or any app, I can activate these little handles and move it around and scale it. You'll see me do this to resize a head commonly or make legs longer or shorter or make arms longer or shorter. It's things I do often to my drawings. It generally happens midway in or even at the end, when I notice something's a little bit off, but the drawing is good. It's just need to resize it a little bit. That's what I'll do. This is a very basic application of the software, which again, any digital painting app will allow you to do. Lastly, I think it goes without saying, but if you're using a tablet, make sure you enable pressure sensitivity, which generally is on by default. If you look at my color picker, I have a black color selected. But if I press lightly, the stroke shows up as a very light color. It's not near black yet. I can go over the stroke to darken it. Or if I wanted to, I can press harder on my tablet and get a pure black stroke or medium level and get a medium dark stroke. Again, that's all done by enabling pressure sensitivity in your software, which once again is probably on by default. If you're interested in a whole class about this thing, I do have a whole class called getting started with digital painting. It covers three popular softwares, Photoshop Creta, and procreate. It goes over this and much, much more in detail. But what you will be looking at is simply the canvas so you can focus on the drawing principles at hand and not the navigating of the software. That should do it. Let's get on with the class. 4. Chapter 1 - Gesture Drawing: The fundamentals are all equally important, but gesture is the thing that may transform your art the most. It was for me, and that's because gesture influences the mood of your work, and therefore, how people will feel when they see your art. Gesture also tends to be a bit less intuitive because it's an abstract form of drawing. And that can be a struggle to get your mind into, especially if you're used to just drawing literal lines and literal details. But if you have problems with your characters or figure poses looking stiff or lifeless or lacking weight or movement, gesture is probably the fundamental that's going to fix that. So let's take a look at it. To open this chapter, I'm first going to show you what gesture drawing looks like, or at least how I've learned to do gesture drawings. For me, first and foremost, a good gesture has to capture the mood and feel of a pose. Secondary to that, it should capture a sense of weight or movement or balance, you know, something that feels like this is a human being posing, not some robot or mannequin. They should also be done pretty quickly. As you can see here. My gestures take me about a minute, maybe a bit more if it's a complicated pose. The speed at which you gesture actually does play a role in the feeling that you can capture in the drawing. To do this, we need a system for what information we're looking for and an overall sequence in which to capture it. Let's start right now developing our gesture tool set. When it comes to gesture, I always like to start with the head. Let's do a quick little bit on that here before progressing into the whole body. Dovetailing nicely with our warm ups, the gesture for a head is basically a circle. However, let's make it more of an oval, an oval, of course, representing the fact that there's a jaw here. But then to fine tune this a little bit more, think of it as an oval mixed with a box like this. Again, keep these lines rough. We're not trying to draw a literal head, just something that can be a stand in for a head. This is great. Now, if you imagine there's an eye line here going horizontally and then a mid line going vertically, suddenly, we have a head that appears to be looking in a direction. Now, if you feel more comfortable actually drawing a circle first and then putting on the jaw attachment and then going over it, you can do that as well. It takes a bit longer, but it's still plenty quick. And then from here, you can get the midline vertically and the eyeline horizontally, and you still have the same effect. Gesture drawing is by and large, not a three D type of drawing. However, this eyeline thing I'm recommending does have a small element of three D to it. It's very easy, but I just want to quickly go over what's happening with this egg and two elastics. Depending on the angle at which we see the egg, the curvature of the elastics change thereby defining the angle. And it is a helpful exercise right away to practice drawing this. You could add this to your warm up routine if you like. The whole idea here is that the horizontal elastic, which I'm drawing with a blue line, represents the eye line, and the vertical elastic, which I'm drawing in red is simply a line running down the middle of the head. The end effect is you get something that appears to be looking in a certain direction, and this helps capture attitude or character in a gesture. So the first thing I do when I draw a gesture is block in that more rectangular egg shape, I throw in an eye line, which once again is really the only three D part of a gesture drawing. Remember that you can visualize this line as an elastic wrapping around the entire form. Of course, let's pair that with a vertical elastic, which gives our head a direction. Now, just to show you a less effective way of doing this. If I did the mid lines like this, you could do this, but the flatness will be of limited use later. It's also a bad habit to form. So just make sure your lines go around this hypothetical squarish egg. Okay, so the next thing about gesture is we have to connect a neck to this head. But a gestural neck. I don't want to start drawing like contours like this. That's not what a gesture is for. I recommend starting by keeping things down to single lines as much as possible. It doesn't have to connect to a skull or anything literal like that. It just comes down like that. It's amazing how even this drawing that I've got here, as crude as it is, I can sense a certain feel from it. It stimulates a physical sensation, I can move my body to match this feeling. Here's another gestural head. Maybe this one is from the side, the eyeline is here. The eyeline would go like this and the midline is actually over here. This being like a side view. Maybe here the neck comes out like this. I'm looking at the midpoint of this head and just throwing the neck down the middle like that. Now, there is a landmark to look for when you're gesturing down the neck, like the place to end the line, and that's the pit of the neck, right here. If I were drawing this gesture, this being the base of the head and gesturing down the neck, I would try and aim this line, so it ends where the pit of the neck is. You can feel this point on your own body. It's a little hollow there because it's between the two clavical bones. The term pit of the neck is quite a good description of this area, and it makes for a great landmark. You'll hear me use the term landmarks throughout this chapter specifically, and what I'm referring to when I say landmark, Is a clear distinct point on the body that we can aim for with our gestures. Because gestures are so flowy and abstract, landmarks help us put things roughly where they belong. Back to the pit of the neck, looking at a side view and just ignore this anatomy stuff, we can clearly see the pit of the neck right there. If I were gesturing through this head, I'd have my squarish oval shape here. For the neck, I would gesture downwards trying to end my line at this pit of the neck area right here. So a fantastic exercise you could try right now, is block yourself in a quick gestural head, find a midline. Obviously, this head is instantly pointing down or looking down, I should say. Let's see if we can find a neck gesture. How about if the neck went down like that? That creates one particular feel. But let's duplicate this and try a different one. I'll erase the neck that I have there. In this one. What if we had a more bent neck shape like this. We get a whole different feel to this pose. Maybe for this one, the head is looking upwards, like this. I love putting in these cross hairs or I should say, elastics. Instantly it describes a direction which contributes heavily to a certain feel. Maybe this neck just follows the head direction straight downwards. This landmark here being the pit of the neck. Now, feel free to circle landmarks or put an x through them. That has helped me in the past. It reminds me that, hey, this is an important point. It's a position I can relate other things to, which we'll see in a moment when I begin adding shoulders. And just to quickly duplicate this drawing, erasing the neck that's there. If we just gesture out a different neck and the pit of the neck, of course, is here now, the pose now has a completely different feel, and this is the power of gesture, creating that sense of feeling extremely quickly. Let's begin looking for shoulders now, which also heavily contribute to expression and feel. If I were gesturing this pose, I'd of course, start with the squarish roundish head shape that we've been looking at. Now, she has a slight tilt to her head. I want to capture that with this eye line. The eye line, by the way, going more or less in the center of the head. That's where the eyes are located. And because we have a straight on view here, let's get that line more or less in the middle. And now I'll use the vertical cross hair to define the middle of the head this way. Now I'm looking for the pit of the neck. Instead of gesturing, I'll actually find the landmark first. It's kind of here. I'll put a little dot there for a little x. Then I'll kind of pull this gestural line out from behind the head and down to this point. Now that I have that point, I can find the shoulders against it. As you can see, the shoulders are not on the same level. The shoulder on the right or her left is higher. So what you could do is simply try and landmark where you think that high shoulder is. I think it's about here. Then I can shoot a horizontal line across and then make sure my other shoulder is just a bit lower than that. Now, I don't actually do it that way. The way I do it is I use the clavicles or collarbones as a pathway to the shoulders. The clavicle sliding right up to this shoulder point. I find the shoulders by following that path. Then, of course, I'll find the other shoulder by following this path, but I still do put dots where I think those landmarks are. I am just ballparking these positions. This is not anatomy. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to capture the general relationships that create the feel. As you can see, if I now just continue to gesture here, following the rhythms of the body that I'm seeing, we absolutely have a feeling developing here. I'd like to switch gears now and talk about the type of lines you can encounter in a gesture drawing, there's really only three S curves, C curves, and straights. This pose here, of this girl jumping off the ground, contains all three, and it is quite common to find all three types of lines in a pose. The broadest line you can draw is called the line of action. It goes through the entire body describing the pose with a single line, and I'll draw right over this reference. In this case, the line of action is an S curve. You can see it conforms to the shape of an S. Now, this gestural line is not a literal S. It's elongated, very thin S. When we say S curves and C curves, that's just the closest letter it resembles. If you were to draw this first, you can actually pinpoint roughly where the pit of the neck is and gesture to the shoulders like we've talked about. If you landmark where those shoulders are, you can now draw separate lines for the arms. This arm on the left is very extended. She is pushing it down as she jumps. There's a muscle action driving that. Generally, a good line to show that type of action, someone really extending is a straight. I would say this arm is a straight. The other arm is more relaxed. It's going with the momentum of the jump. It's not really muscle driven, it's momentum driven. Generally, curves are more appropriate for that. This here is a C curve, which looks like a V, but it's just a C, drawn rotated 90 degrees. You can let that curve go right up into the hand as well. A good landmark actually is where the hand stops. Sometimes I will draw these little end points for where the hands are. Another great landmark to have is the top of the hip, which in this case is right there. Now, this represents the top of the hip bone. You know, where it crests. In fact, that area is called the iliac crest. I like to find it on one side. Now, the other side is hidden because we're seeing her in a kind of a three quarter slash side view. But just like the line of the shoulders, I'll follow this to the other side, put a little mark where that is as well. As it is hopefully becoming more clear, gesture is very much about relationships. You know, where is one part compared to another part? Anyway, just like how the shoulders began my gesture for the arms, I can use those hip points to begin my gesture for the legs. The front leg here is a pretty obvious S curve shape. This actually does look like the literal letter S. The back leg, much like her arm there is pretty straight, although I see a little tiny ever so slight S curve on that as well. Now, notice that I had that back leg blocked in with my line of action before, but now I've updated it. I've updated it because I now know more about that leg as a result of having gesture down to it. That's another important lesson about gesture. There is no finished line. It's supposed to be messy. You're feeling your way through the pose. Let's switch gears now and draw this pose without tracing. Of course, I am using the reference while I gesture here. There's the overall line of action, the S curve for the body, on top of which I can place the head using techniques we've already looked at, and I can find the pit of the neck roughly here. Then I'll gesture up the clavicle and find where that shoulder is. I know it's below the chin line, so if it helps, I'm imagining a line from the chin and making sure the shoulder is just beneath that. Feel free to literally draw this line if you like. Her other shoulder is below this shoulder. It's about here. Now I can reinforce my gesture down the body, exaggerating this curve a little bit, making sure that she's thrusting out with the chest. From here, I might switch to the arm that is extended, and I'll try and landmark where that hand is. You could even do a wedge shape like that. While I'm on the arms, I do like to find the other one. These horizontal plumb lines as they're called, help me. The tip of that hand is just above its shoulder, so it's about here, and then I can gesture that C curve I showed you. General proportion is important with the gesture, although it doesn't have to be exact. So assuming my proportions are roughly in the right place here, which is something that comes with practice and even I don't always get it, I'll use that hand to find where the hip is. That is the tip of the crest of the hip bone. It lines up with the forearm, maybe roughly about here horizontally, so I will put a little x to plot that landmark on my drawing. Then I might want to just gesture down to it. Now, this is not a contour for the back or anything. It's just adding to my gesture and from here, much like I did with the shoulder, the clavicle there. I like to include a line that indicates the orientation of the hips. That is the relationship from one crest to the other. The hip on the back side that we can't see is clearly lower than this one. It's probably about down here. I like to include a little curved line that shows me that relationship. By the way, it's actually quite useful to draw a line that goes through both shoulders, then draw a line that goes through both sides of the hips and compare the relationship of those two blue lines to your reference. I find those two blue lines there to be a pretty critical relationship in the gesture. Anyway, I can use the hip position to gesture down toward the knee. Sometimes it's helpful to landmark the knee, which I'll just draw a line. This is my stop line for where the knee is. Gesture there. Notice I'm using a lot of lines in my gesture. It's not this. This is stiff. It's flow. Think flow. I'm trying to evaluate the physical action of this pose, not my line quality. I could simply continue this curve, or I could find my stop point like I did for the knee. I can see that the bottom of her foot is more or less in line with the back here. I'll draw that, a little straight line there representing the shoe and gesture down to it. Tapering my curve off at the end to simulate where the feet are. There we go. Then the line of action I put in for the body takes care of that back leg, but just to complete this rhythm, there is that subtle S to it that I'm seeing and I'm running out of space on my canvas, but that's okay. We'll just find the bottom position of the foot and gesture down to it. I just realized I forgot to put in the eye line for the head, but that's okay. It's not necessary, but it does help. Then if you want, you can even find a gestural flow for the hair, which also conforms in this case to a bunch of C curves really. Then over here, it's an S curve. Then if you like, you can throw a little tone in there just to signify to yourself that this is where the hair goes. Having hair in there does actually help you measure and check your proportions. And there we go. That to me is a successful gesture drawing. It captures the feeling of this person thrusting up. It feels like the body is in motion. The proportions appear generally correct. Again, you don't need to fully evaluate that with a gesture, but this is a good drawing that I could continue to build off of, which is the whole point of gesture drawing. All right. Let's do another pose. Right away here, to expand on that oval slash box shape for the head, notice how I'm giving the lower left area a little point. That just represents the chin and jaw seen from a three quarter angle. Then with that eye line in there, it just further reinforces that the head is pointed in a certain direction. This time, I'll take a different colored line and draw those plumb lines that connect the two shoulders and two sides of the hip, taking specific note of the difference in angle between those two lines. In more dynamic poses, that is poses that have some action to them, not just straight up and down. You will very often find a difference in angle in those two lines. If you can capture it early, it'll do wonders for your drawing. So, I'll landmark the elbow here with a little dot and then gesture my way to it. Then from there, I can more easily find where the hand is. Notice how that whole arm is essentially a C curve, and even the hand is a mini C curve. Now I can do the same thing for the other arms gesture, which is also a C curve, except with slightly different angles. It's flatter where the forearm is resting. Now that I know where the arms are, I can get this sweeping S curve for the entire body. My blue plum line already shows me where the hips go. Now I can landmark the knee and gesture to that, maybe landmark the other knee, now that I have some reference to gauge it off of. Here, just feeling my way through the gesture. These lines I'm putting down are not contours, as you know. It's just me reaffirming to myself that, yep, this feels like the pose. Where her right hand is pressed up against the body, I'll use a straight for that, right there. Straits can also help show weight or pressing. Just going to quickly squiggle in the hair, which is not a necessary step at all. Here just landmarking where that hair ends. Here's another straight showing her left leg pressed against the cushion and then finding the foot hanging out the other side. Now, don't fall into the trap that I used to fall into in my early life drawing days. I had this bad habit where if the figure was sitting on a chair or interacting with any object, for some reason, I just wouldn't draw that object. But it's quite important that you do. It'll further confirm that your general proportions are accurate, like right here with these chair legs. I'm actually not thinking perspective. I'm simply measuring where the bottom of those legs intersect with the figure, then plotting those same points in my drawing. Notice how the chair is kept gestural as well. To me, this gesture drawing is a success because I can really feel the lean of the figure that she's leaning on the chair, relying on it for support. It feels like if I yanked that chair away, she would fall over, and that's what you want because that's the physical dynamic happening in the reference. Okay. Another seated pose here. The figure is balanced with one point on her right arm and the other point on that front leg. You can draw two lines up from the balance points and you'll usually find the head inside there. This is a useful tool for helping to guide you through the gesture. All right. So I've gestured down to the pit of the neck there, and now I'm using a different color, I guess, orange this time, to get that crucial angle relationship from the shoulders to the hips. That angle is extremely different here, and this pose just won't work if you don't capture that. I tend to use little C curves for the shoulders. That's just something habitual at this point, but the shoulders are curve, so I guess it makes sense. And here we go, the big S curve down the body. Notice that this time, I'm going for that S curve before the arms. In the last demonstration, I did the arms first. This is just to show that there's no specific order. Anyway, landmarking elbows and hands in relation to each other, also in relation to the s curve. This little plum line helps me evaluate the angle created by the two elbows. Always comparing that with the reference. Now, the hand here is bearing the weight of the pose, so I'll use a straight. The other hand is hanging limply, so I'll just extend the curve of the arm. I do often like to block out the middle section of the chest here, just as a way of keeping my proportions honest. Now I can start with the outer point of the hip line and gesture toward the knee. Immediately following that up with the other knee, whose position I can more reliably pinpoint now and just gesturing down the body to arrive at this leg, and here comes a nice straight where the lower leg meets the table. Then from here, I'm just aimlessly moving around the drawing gesturing through it. Again, just convincing myself that the feel is right. It might be useful to locate the general placement of her top. Even though this model is heavier set, that is not really important information to capture in a gesture. Those volumes, big, small, thick thin, that's something you build on top of the gesture, which we'll do in a future chapter. Anyway, she's sitting on a flat surface here. So let's make sure we draw that flat surface here in photoshop. I'm holding shift to draw a literal straight line, and this just helps me check to make sure the hands and the knees are in the right place. So I'm evaluating this drawing just like last time. It looks like the weight is being held by the back arm there, and if it were suddenly removed, she would fall over, and there's a nice flow through the rest of the pose that I think echoes the reference. This pose here is arguably made simpler by the fact that the clothing makes a very clear silhouette. However, I know from teaching experience that a lot of students would probably make this pose far too linear straight up and down and miss the subtle beautiful movement as a result. By the way, that little hook shape for the ear helps communicate this dramatic angle of the head. Gesturing down the body now, there is a subtle yet noticeable s curve happening. She is thrusting her upper body outward and her hips are set back, and that C curve helps capture all that. It helps set the stage for this arm, which is an extension of that thrust. And let's really capture that wrist, dramatically changing angle from the rest of the arm. There's a lot of emotion, a lot of action there. Here, just finding the other arm, using the same elbow landmark and comparisons that I always use against that hand. I'm trying to find the lower area of the breast line, which I think is a good reference point for this pose. From there, I can find where the hips are, and of course, their angle. Then gesture down, following my initial body C curve to approximate where the bottom of the dress is. See, I wouldn't waste my time trying to find that bottom point before. I needed the shoulders, then the arms, then the hips in place in order to find that point. So in a way, a gesture is a series of educated guesses, not blind guesses as to where things are. Notice this gesture drawing is a little more contour based than the previous ones. Now, I want to be clear. Those are not final contours, but because of the graphic nature of the clothing, it felt more appropriate here to use some of the outer lines as part of the gesture. And now with everything in, as I always do, just searching around the drawing, reinforcing things, evaluating that physical sensation that only I can feel because I'm the one drawing this. You will feel it when you draw like this, my promise. But even looking at this drawing as a third party observer, you should be able to sense the thrust of the body, the movement of the pose. I forgot to mention her weight is carried equally between both feet here. That means that the pose can't be too angular. Remember my little balance tip, plot two points where the balance points are, the two feet here, and draw vertically up from there, and the head should be located somewhere inside that area. Again, is the thrust there, is the energy there? Does it feel like she's reached a point of movement? Does it look like she couldn't hold this pose forever? It would cause too much discomfort, which means we've captured something in the moment. I think yes, all those answers are there. By extension, this is a successful gesture drawing. Let's try another one here. This is a tough pose because it appears straight up and down, just like the last one. I, in a sense, it is. After all, the head is right in the middle of the two feet. Things don't appear to veer left and right, too dramatically from that, but the movement is in the shoulder and hip relationship. Here I've just got the angle of the head in the pit of the neck. This is the same reference I used previously in this chapter. Now with the blue pencil, I'm blocking in the shoulders and hips or the angled lines that represent them. I'll throw the shoulders in there against the head, but then I'll immediately try and get the mid line. This time, stopping at the hips. I actually think I reversed that S curve compared to the reference, but that's okay. Let's see how this interpretation plays out. Now I'm back to standard procedure, and marking the middle of the arm, gesturing to that, land marking the hands, gesturing to that, finding an overall rhythm for the entire arm as a result. Rhythm, by the way, just meaning, is it an S curve, C curve or a straight? And then how are you manipulating those shapes? Are they thinner, wider, longer? For the legs here, again, I've gestured from the outside of the hips, not an actual contour line, as you know, but the gesture is not a stick figure. It's more abstract than that. It captures rhythm. A stick figure is too literal almost. The knees are roughly at the same point horizontally, so I'll make sure I capture that. Then that back foot flows almost into the front foot, although it stops a little higher because the entire leg is pushed back. Notice how the arm here basically flows into the hips rhythmically. Then from here, I'll just throw in some C curves for the hair. Now, she has on a flowing costume, and I do want to capture that as part of the gesture. I'll switch my color just so you can see what I'm doing. Again, is it a C curve S curve or a straight? I'm seeing it as a bunch of C curves. C curves that are then mirrored in this section here, the part that attaches to the belt, and the free flowing bit of drapery here is more of an S curve, I think. And I may as well map out where the top of the outfit is. It helps with proportion, after all. There we go. Our gesture has a sense of movement like she's walking toward us. That last figure brings an important posing concept to mind. You may be familiar with the term contraposto, one of those Latin art terms. It just means that most of the weights is being carried on one leg. And when that happens, that also means the hips are going to be quite rotated. I'm just making this up from imagination. I will get the shoulder line. This is a pose very similar to the last one except I'm going to exaggerate this gesture. Let's get a nice S curve there coming down the body. You can already sense the weight here. One hip is very high, the other hip is very low in comparison. The shoulders are somewhere around here, one high, one low, of course, in the opposite direction that the hips are high and low. The arm might flow this way. This arm might flow that way. This is a fashion model type walk. They shift their weight constantly from one hip to the other or one side of their hips to the other side. This type of contraposto weight distribution is also really popular in art history, baroque and renaissance. These are the two legs here. Maybe this leg is doing something like this, and this leg sitting there like that, feet are offset in perspective. Yeah, you get this kind gesture. Maybe it even flows like an S curve. Let's get rid of this. There we go. Maybe this foot here is not pointed the same direction as the other foot. Maybe it's more like to the front. Now, when you or I are just standing there waiting for a bus or talking to a friend, we shift our weight all the time. It's very common for someone to just place their weight on one side of the hip. In this case, the weight is placed here, which means that this entire legs rhythm is generally straighter. In fact, I can make this leg, really straight to show that there's weight placed on it. Okay and then maybe I can get rid of this leg. You can see the usefulness of gesture, how quickly I can iterate on these poses. Because the right leg or the leg on the left here is free of the weight, this leg can be doing anything. It could be like this. It could be like this. There's no weight on it. It's free to roam. Contraposto, the secret to it lies in the shoulder and hip dynamic, and the more extreme you push it, the more that weight will be apparent. 5. More Gestures: Let's take a look at this beautiful painting by Steve Houston. His work is chalk full of gestural rhythms. He's a great artist to study from, if your goal is to paint characters or figures with good gestures and poses. Let me lay a sheet of transparency over this and we'll do a bit of gesture tracing. We'll start with the broadest line, the line of action, and we'll go right from the top of the head. It to me is an S curve, but an S curve with the most dramatic part right there. That's the steepest angled part of the S curve. Then it more gradually tapers down to the feet. Now, that's all well and good, but let me erase that for a second. I'd like to maybe elevate the line of action concept a little bit here. Let's look at either side of the figure. First, we'll start with this side. The line of action here is a very dramatic S curve. It's very much like the mid line, more dramatic. But look at the line at the back. This line is a much more drawn out rhythm. It's still an S curve, but its character is very different. This back gesture line, if we can call it that, also feeds into the arms rhythm, the arm being an offshoot of it. What I like about gesturing both sides of the body like this is it accounts for where the feet are. You almost start getting a sense that this could be a three dimensional drawing. It's not. It's still an abstract two D drawing. But the thing I find a bit less useful about a single line of action down the middle of the body is that it's a little bit more difficult to extrapolate and build perspective on this because this is just a single line in space. I like having two lines that play off each other. Let's go ahead and draw a gesture of this for real. This being a profile view, I like to put in the ear and that ear instantly gives me the orientation of the head. It's just a C curve. I'm not actually trying to draw an ear. Now, the pit of the neck is of limited use. It's about there. What is still helpful about it is I can trace up the clavicle and find the shoulder, which is about here. But then right away, this rhythm from the back of the skull coming down the form is really, really important to me in this pose. It's such a strong obvious progression or rhythm that I really want to put it in. Then this S curve tapers down somewhere over here. Again, I have no idea where the bottom is at this point. It's somewhere here, but I have to find it later, like building a jigsaw puzzle. I want to get all the pieces in these areas before I find the pieces over here. Now, the front of the figure is doing more of this as we've determined, going this and I'm trying to work both rhythms against each other here. Remember, these are not contours. Just free yourself of the idea that you're drawing something finished. A gesture is abstract. Another great landmark I haven't talked about yet is the base of the sternum. This point is right here on the rib cage or right at the base in between the two pectoral muscles. Because the sternum is relatively close to the head, it's a pretty easy landmark to evaluate. I think it's about here on my drawing. I remember, especially in my early days of drawing, I use the sternum in every gesture because of its close proximity to the head. From the sternum, I can find the middle of the arm, which is a bit lower. It's about there, and I can start gesturing down this arm. Again, the arms rhythm being an offshoot of the back rhythm. And before I find the hand, I might want to find where the belt line is. I think it's about here. And then compared to that, the hand is about here. I'll gesture down to this form. Now I want to erase this overzealous initial rhythm I put in because the arm is more responsible for that part of the gesture. It's okay that I was over zealous to start with. It got me started. For this reason, I actually do recommend drawing gestures with pretty light lines because by nature, a gesture is a searching tool, you are necessarily going to make lines that prove to need updating later. Now, the painting doesn't really show us the feet, but we can infer where they are. This leg is coming out and somewhere landing over here, and the other leg is pushed back more with the foot landing somewhere over here. Again, I'm just drawing the base of those feet, using flattened s curves to indicate that the weight is really pressed down on those feet. Now, for the buckets, I'm just going to get the C curve for the handle and maybe landmark where the bottom of the bucket is, maybe the curve of the top. This is where maybe a different color would come in handy. I'll try switching to say a green or something like that. I'm not trying to draw the bucket literally. I'm just trying to show where it might be, and I can compare that to the other bucket. This is the bottom of the other bucket. And the top of the other bucket. A gesture gets proportion and indications of depth and perspective. These two buckets being different points and perspective, they will be located in two dimensions at different spots. The bottom of this bucket is higher than the bottom of that bucket. That's perspective information, and the gesture does capture some of that. It's just not technical perspective. It's more about placement. Gesture shouldn't take you longer than say 2 minutes. In fact, I remember when I was doing a lot of life drawing early on in my drawing days. Our life drawing sessions would open up with a series of 20 32nd gestures. Then we would move to 1 minute poses, then two minute poses, then three minute poses. Because of that, I learned to gesture very quickly, and that is something I would foster in your learning. If you're working digitally at your computer, the temptation is just to take your time. But with gestures, I would actually encourage setting a little timer and be generous. Set it for 3 minutes at first. Maybe even 5 minutes if this is new to you, and then see if you can crunch it down and ultimately get yourself down to say 1 minute. If you are having trouble estimating the placement of things with a gesture, it may come in handy to have a chart like this open or even memorize it. It's not that difficult to memorize this information. This is all about measuring the figure in head lengths. If I were to just draw Marquee selection over this head, if I then created another head length here, we have the sternum, and that's handy. In an upright figure, the sternum is one head length below the chin. Another head length will get you to the navel, and if I put that head length here, Right in the middle is the iliac crest of the hips, that high point that we've been landmarking. Then if you go 5.5 heads, you get the knees. Then of course, the entire figure to the feet is about 7.5 heads tall. Now, those are general proportions for an adult. Obviously, if you're drawing a child or a teenager, these head based proportions will vary. For example, the common measurement for an infant is four heads tall. Maybe an eight year old would be about six heads tall. Adults can range between 7.5 to eight heads tall. Those measurements help you, I recommend just doing them live, meaning take a painting like this, measure the head with your marquee tool, assuming you're working digitally or just take a ruler if you're working traditionally. Just move the selection and see where it lines up. Look, there's the sternum. It's actually a little bit higher than that, but that's because this figure is not standing perfectly upright. There's a bit of compression in the shoulders causing the sternum to raise a little bit. Then another head length will essentially get you to the belt line, which also intersects with the wrist. If you find your gestures are just way off proportionally, I do recommend taking the time to make these head length measurements and then landmark your gesture accordingly. But I also do think your goal should be to be able to work without that. Just be able to do it by eye. Like most things, it just takes practice and time. I'd like to go a bit deeper with the nuts and bolts on how I draw gestures. We've seen this pose before, but right now, I just want to focus on this arm. Now, it's possible to landmark where the shoulder is, landmark where the wrist is, and find a line of action, which is a C curve along this arm. If you include the hand, then it becomes an S curve. Again, that's useful. But just like we did with that contraposto example a moment ago, I like to look at the rhythms of both contours of the arm or of any form that I happen to be gesturing. It could be a figure or a tree or whatever. To do another one of my gesture trace overs, which I do find very useful, by the way, if we were to just look at this contour, what is that rhythm? Can I gesture my way through that? It's like an S curve. And let's include that dramatic hooking curve here. It's like a C curve just for the hand. Now, quite often, I find that the rhythm of one contour is different than the rhythm of its opposing contour. For example, the lower arm is straight here, and then it scoops up here and goes down with a dramatic S curve. This gestural rhythm on the bottom of the arm is different than this gestural rhythm on the top of the arm. If I were gesture drawing this arm, I'm going to see if I can find those differences. The main thing to keep in mind is I'm not trying to draw contours. Even though this looks like a contour drawing, it's still very much exploring and finding rhythms. But what's nice about this is it becomes very easy to extrapolate and build form from here. Whereas if all I had were a line of action of the arm, down the middle, you still have to do a lot of work to turn that into three D. Just so you know, the next chapter of this class will be doing just that. So when you're looking at a figure like this, I would try and find the rhythm of this part and then find the opposing rhythm of that part. Just to erase that for a moment. If you like, you could, of course, find the overall line of action, and then say from there, if you mark to the shoulder line and from those shoulders, build out the gesture on either side. This back being a bit straighter and this front being a bit more C curvy. Now I have all this space to play in. I could find things like the lower area of the breast, the hip line, and I have all the space to play within. For those of you brand new to this, here's a quick exercise that'll help retrain your muscles a little bit. Draw a line, say an S curve like this. Now try and gesture draw that with two different rhythms. Something like this. Go through it and then try and find a counter rhythm on the other side that complements it that doesn't just mirror it, but it runs through the same rhythm in like a flowing winding river, something that's interesting. Doing it like this will prove to be very unhelpful because it's very rare that you would ever use lines like that in your actual drawing. Very similar and parallel lines like that tend to appear boring. Instead, train yourself to find rhythms and counter rhythms. What I just did there is thicker there and thinner there. Then maybe it tapers back out, and maybe this one takes a bit of time to catch up to that, thinner thicker, and it just feels more organic. Get used to drawing this way. Not only will it help you find energy in your gestures and poses, but you'll find all applications of this type of drawing and thinking in nature because nature has counter rhythms like this all the time. While I'm here, I would just like to reiterate that the whole point of gesture is to be free and moving. Maybe you can hear my stylist. Big strokes, make them long and sweeping. Try not to do this. This type of drawing is usually destined to look too mechanical and not very interesting, especially when it comes to characters and figures, anything that needs to have movement or weight, get into the habit of when you draw one line, you immediately are looking for a counter rhythm line to it and you work your way through the form and through the space this way. I really recommend working that type of thinking into your practice. All right. Let's invent a few figures here. I'm imagining a dancing pose, female figure. Dancing poses are great practice because there's a lot of movement. Having done the Disney Nutcracker book, I had to paint a lot of dancers. Using pretty dramatic C curves to represent bent arms there. Of course, I started with the head before that. Here's the line for the upper torso, gesturing now down from the shoulders and really trying to enforce where those hips are. As you can tell, shoulders and hips are of utmost importance to me to the start of a gesture. Then down from the hips, of course, I can find the legs. I'm going to put her weight on the left leg. That means this right leg here can be free to do what it wants. And I'll use more of a straight rhythm for the left leg as it's holding that weight. Because I'm inventing this, I'm getting lost. The middle section of this gesture is ugly. The rhythms don't seem to be connecting or flowing. I'm erasing the offending areas and seeing if I can redesign them or continue my search for them. It's when I throw in this curve for the hips that it starts to feel found. I finally feel like I'm correct there. Then that bolsters my confidence to gesture down the weight bearing leg and then compare that to the other leg and then back to the first leg and so on. With gesture, clarity on one part of the pose will give you clarity on the next part. I'll call this one finished. Let's do another one. Another dancing pose. This time may be seen more from the side profile. Whenever someone ties their hair in a bun on the back of their head, I always try and gesture that. Just because it's rhythmically easy to get, then here we go with some outstretched arms. Both arms will be outstretched, but I want to find slightly different rhythms for each one, just for the sake of interest. A big thrusting C curve for the torso with its apex at the chest. This is typical of dance moves. Of course, there's the all important hips and angle of the hips. I always seem to run out of canvas space, resizing it, working my way down now to the legs. Again, it's helpful to decide early, where are the balance points. This time, it's both feet. She'll be in the middle of a grand maneuver, so the feet are spaced far apart, but they both are carrying weight. The most weight, however, is on the back foot, her right, which means the head is going to veer more toward that. The head wants to be naturally in line with where the weight is. It's just an instinctual way we learn to move and I guess to work with gravity. Notice I drew a little line between the feet. That just helps me understand the relative placement since these feet are placed so far apart. Yeah, this pose is looking good. That's a finished gesture drawing. Gesture drawing is at the heart of how animators work. Look at these beautiful gestures and blockings by Glenn Keen. There's so much character, and yet the drawings are pretty abstract. I love Mickey's pose here. Look at this dramatic S curve. Of course, you can build his head on that with his characteristic ears and a little mouse snout here. Okay. And suddenly, we have a really interesting pose happening. Now, where would the shoulder be? Maybe it's pushing up into the head here, and maybe the arm is coming down. Maybe that back arm is going back he is trying to use his arms to balance out the body. Because this is such an extreme pose balance wise, maybe the legs would want to come back this way to further help balance the body. It's just really fun to explore this stuff. The scrooge on the lower left there gains so much action. Let me just block in the eyes, so you can see what I'm looking at and the beak two, I guess. But yeah, the character gains so much action with this shoulder pushing way up into the head, and the opposing shoulder being up high as well, which makes the arm raised really high up here. And here's a hand. And the other arm is not drawn, but maybe it's doing something gesture like this. Maybe Scrooge is angry. He's talking and he's gesturing with his hands. His back is really arched like this, big dramatic C curve. Cartoons are really excellent ways to practice your gesture because that's what cartoons are. They exaggerate gesture. They are free of skeletons and muscles to an extent, or at the very least, they're much more malleable than a realistic human form is. As a result, you can take many more liberties with the posing of a cartoon character. I'm not going to be shy about it. I love cartoons. I've practically made my living on cartoons. But for those of you who don't want to draw cartoons, I do still think they're valuable practice, especially when it comes to gesture drawing. Back to normal human beings here. Let's do one last gesture to help close out the chapter. We'll get the eye line in. This will just be a summary of everything we've learned. Let's get the vertical line in. Instantly get that direction. Notice because we can see her jaw in a three quarter angle, I've left that little point there. Let's find the pit of the neck, gesturing down the middle of the neck to find it about there. Just grab a different color to my brush. This shoulder is way up high, it intersects right like where the nose would be. Then this shoulder is down low about in line with the pit of the neck. I'll draw a nice plumb line there, connecting them. You know what, the line of the hips is roughly parallel. I'll put that in. Typically, parallel shoulders and hips can result in a boring or static pose, but this pose is anything but that, and that's due to the lean of the body. I'll gesture a C curve. Actually, it's a flattened S curve down from the shoulders to the hips, following the same procedure I always do. I can actually see the sternum through the top there. It's about here, and if I want, I can throw in This is almost an elastic band line here around the chest, and I can do the same thing actually around the hips. This is just expanding on the egg elastic principle, applying it to different parts of the body. I got to be careful though, I'm bridging into three D stuff here. That'll be next chapter, but we're almost at the next chapter, so this is actually good. Now that I have that information, let's start at the shoulder and gesture our way through the arm. It's a giant C curve as arms often are, at least when they're bent, and that wrist just breaks into a straight right there. You can barely see it, but it's there. Then I'll try and find a counter rhythm down the arm, something I'm seeing on the inside contour of the arm there. Then I do like to ping pong from one part of the body to another. If I just did the arm, I'll now flip over to the other arm. The elbow of that arm is about here, which is about in line with the wrist on the first arm. I'll gesture my way down to it. And then this arm is straight, the forearm that is straight, but the wrist breaks into a C curve like that and overlaps this arm, somewhere here. Right away, we're getting some good action in this gesture. The pace I'm drawing at, by the way, feels about right if you're just starting out. If I weren't talking, I would be drawing about double as fast. But I do find it helpful to think your way through the process with a inner monologue. Again, especially if you're just starting out with the stuff, you don't want to stress yourself out with the addition of speed. The requirement should really be efficiency and with efficiency comes speed. Putting lines down that means something. In this case, rhythmic lines. There's a lot of lines in my drawing, but all those lines are in search of the same thing, rhythm and flow. I've mentioned a few times the whole idea about putting the head where the point of balance is. This pose really tests that. She is very close to being off balance. What I'm going to do is draw a plumb line down from the head, and I know that because she still is in balance, but just on the border of that, I pretty much know that 1 ft should basically be right below the head. Because if she went any further, she would start being off balance and she would have to fall and catch herself. It's a safe bet to put 1 ft there. That is the foot carrying most of the weight. The other foot might be somewhere over here. You know what? I'm not even going to ballpark that. I'm not going to bother landmarking it. Even this point here, by the way, is not even where I think the foot is. I'm just trying to show you where the balance point is. I'll just erase it so no one gets confused. Okay. Back to the hips. Let's throw in a little gestural rhythm that feeds into this beautiful S curvy rhythm here. This is where you can start thinking proportion. It's quite difficult for me to anticipate where the foot is. It's too far away from the rest of my drawing. Instead, I'll erase this just to show you how I would maybe actually go about doing it. Let's split the leg in half and landmark the knee. I think that knee is about here. It's much easier to landmark things when they're closer to the rest of your drawing. I'll gesture down to that knee and now I can find a distance that's the same as this distance to get me down to the foot. You notice my initial line that I had in there that I erased was too long. And that is a common habit that I had when I did a lot of gestures when I was starting out. I would make the legs too long. I would get really excited and draw these grand gestural legs and suddenly the legs looked like they were some alien form. I had to really pair back on that as I continued to explore my own gesture drawing. The other knee is in line with the first one, so that's easy. It makes this C curve rhythm, and this is maybe another C curve on the other side. Then it has this awkward hitch to it. Maybe another pair of s curves. Then this foot right where we anticipate it is at the bottom of our blue plumb line that we drew a minute ago. There we go. Now we have a complete gesture for this pose. At this point, you could call it finished and move on, or if you want to just throw in where you think the hair is a curve, S curve. At this point, I'm just exploring the drawing, just making sure that things feel right. Maybe we can get the contours of her open top there. Maybe even figure out where the ankle is where that strap on her boot is. Make sure we understand where the feet are in relation to each other. In this case, they're pretty horizontal. There's not a whole lot of difference in perspective there. But it is helpful to plumb line the feet. There we go. I feel like we've captured a nice pose here. Feels like she's using the correct amount of muscle to hold herself up. Still balanced, but on the brink of being off balanced. With that comes the end of this gesture chapter. But our adventures with gesture are far from over. They will come back in future lessons, especially as we start combining fundamentals together. 6. Chapter 2 - Form and 3D Space: Okay. Were gesture was maybe a little less intuitive at first. This chapter will be more instantly familiar. We're drawing three D forms in three D space. But equally importantly, this chapter is about developing tools to see the two D surface as a three D space. Before we even draw anything, these are tools that help you rewire how you see, which is a critical skill for any drawing or drawing application you want to do. Just a fair warning. This chapter is a little drier and more intricate than the last one. There's a little more to it. It's also longer. Take it in pieces and try and structure assignments for yourself along the way. Okay. Here we go. Okay. All right. In the previous chapter, we had this primer on drawing the egg. If this were an egg, we had wrapped those elastic bands around it. This would be elastic band number one, wrapping around the egg horizontally, and elastic band number two, coming down the egg vertically like this, wrapping around the bottom. We are going to thoroughly expand on this concept in this chapter, which is all about drawing volumes, which is just another way of saying drawing three dimensional forms. It's important to know that this elastic band wraps around the back of the egg where we can't see it, but just because we can't see it is not an excuse to not know exactly where it is. I like to use a dotted line to separate what's visible from what's not visible. Of course, the same is true with the vertical rubber band, and we now have the appearance of a very three dimensional object. This really forms the basis for this chapter. Now, right away, though, let's not limit this to just an egg. But what if we had a flattened egg where the top is egg like, but the bottom is flat like this, almost like a pair shape. I just said the word shape, which implies two dimensions, but this chapter is all about drawing in three dimensions. The elastic band principle, if we can call it that, is our primary tool for visualizing things not as two D shapes, but as three D forms. I'm trying to visualize how an elastic band would wrap itself around this pypothetical form. What I just drew is like the egg. But here there's a belly. I would wrap around that belly. Then, of course, the discipline here in this chapter is to visualize how it wraps around the back of this form. Assuming there would be an equal belly on the other side, it would wrap around it like this. We can grab a different color and throw in our elastic band wrapping around it this way. This is a very narrow ellipse, an ellipse meaning a circle and perspective. I'll expand on that right away. But for now, we can apply this elastic band principle to any form, which really helps us visualize it as a three dimensional object. What's nice about this is it represents three dimensions and we don't need shading. Shading is great. However, in my opinion, the goal of good draftsmanship and drawing as a discipline is to be able to represent three dimensions without the need for shading or rendering because lines are inherently flat things. If you can make those look three D, you are well on your way. Now, on the subject of ellipses, let me just draw a circle here, and I want to visualize this as a three D form, of course. I have to put a elastic band around it, but let me do that. How do I know what the curvature of the elastic band should be? For example, should the curvature be narrow like this or should the curvature be wide like this? Well, that depends on the angle that you're viewing it at. If I were drawing that elastic band to intersect the sphere here, The curve will be almost at its broadest because it's near the outside of the form. That means it's going to look pretty close to what the silhouette is, which in this case is a circle. Of course, going around the back of the sphere would be the exact same type of curve. Now, if I wanted to put that elastic band here, well, suddenly, that circle becomes very compressed and a compressed circle is called an ellipse. What's very important to us is an ellipse is a circle in perspective. I think it would be quite helpful to show you this in an actual three D program. I'm in Blender, which is a three D program. You can see I've made a circle and I'm able to move the camera around just so you can see what we're looking at. Now, let me just make a flat view. This looks like a circle. However, I'm going to now rotate this in perspective. Let me just show you what I'm going to do with a three quarter angle. I'm going to rotate the circle around like this and I'll do it from a flat view. Here we go. I'm going to rotate this circle, as you can see, the circle as it rotates becomes a ever ever squished ellipse. To the point where if I were to view that ellipse dead straight on, it just becomes a line and then comes back around the other side. Now, of course, it's not always going to be a circle that we're evaluating. I'll modify this, so it looks like the other shape we just drew. Now if I rotate this around, you can see that it also compresses just like the ellipse did, but the belly shape at the bottom adds a bit of complexity here. However, much like the ellipse, it would simply conform to a line when seen dead on. If you're new to this concept of making two D objects into three D forms, I really recommend practicing the elastic band principle with very simple roundish shapes. Here's another variation on one. So I'll pick a spot to draw my elastic band somewhere close to when I do this, I'm comparing the curvature of this elastic band against the curvature of the silhouette. My elastic band being located more in the middle of the object has to be a compressed version of the silhouette. Here we go. Something like this, maybe it wraps around. You don't always have to wrap it around to the back and this one, let's just leave the elastic band wrapping around the front and we'll just leave the back invisible like it would be in real life. But here's the next exercise. Now let's put an elastic band here. The trick here is this curvature has to be somewhere in between this elastic band and the silhouette. It has to navigate that middle space. It's a bit tricky. But this is how you can test yourself to make sure that you are keeping these elastic bands in check. The curvature of this belly area is pretty wide here at the silhouette, and then it compresses here. I'll make sure that my elastic band has enough compression, but not quite as much as the silhouette and then enough expansion, but not quite as much as the silhouette. There we go. It looks like these cross sections are tracking. Cross sections, elastic bands, they refer to the same thing. Let's put an elastic band out here. Again, look at the curvature of the silhouette and then look at the curvature of my elastic band or my cross section. If I say the word elastic band too many times, I'll start to be annoying. Cross section, I might revert to something like this. Now, I'm a big believer in free handing things. I am not a computer. I'm not a three D program. I have to use my eyes to literally eyeball this. If we were to build the shape in three D, I'm sure the cross section would be a bit different than what I'm drawing, but I'm just making sure it looks right. That's the key to determining success in this particular study. Let's do the same exercise now with horizontal cross sections. I'll put a elastic band or cross section crossing here. Again, I'm comparing it to the curvature of the silhouette. This being close to the silhouette, it's going to have that same type of curvature is not quite as broad. It's going to be around like that. If I were to find the middle of the object about here, assuming this is where our eye line is, that curve is going to be very flat, maybe just a line, if it were dead center, something like this, which is funny even though I just basically drew a straight line, it looks three D in context of the other lines. Then down here at the base of the belly, as I draw this, again, I am drawing it off of the curvature of the bottom silhouette here. It has to be close to that because it's close to the contour. But not quite as round. I'm just trying to thread this needle here. This, believe it or not, this simple principle is the main fundamental that good draftsmen have. That is a strong ability to see the two D page as a three D. You may not always need to draw this. In fact, when I draw now, I very rarely draw these cross sections. I will draw a few and you'll see me do this later in the class, but always I have the cross sections in mind. When I was brand new to the stuff, you better believe I always drew them. My figures and studies were just littered with cross sections, which proved to be extremely helpful for my development, and I recommend you do it as well. This is undeniably a three D form here. It has gained a dimension, it's no longer a two D shape. We can't talk about drawing forms too long without mentioning perspective. After all, if we're drawing a three D form, it has to exist in some perspective. Now, I will be sprinkling perspective into this class in tidbits. I want you to learn things as you need them rather than dumping it on you all at once. The first concept I want you to be aware of is the eye line or horizon line. This is something that eluded me for a while, simply because no one ever told me this. You see this red line here, that's the horizon line. Now, when I was starting out practicing perspective, I just vaguely thought that the horizon line was where the horizon is and that's true. But what I didn't connect is that the horizon line is in line with your eyes or with the cameras lens, and what that means from a practical standpoint is if the object you're drawing, for example, this cube, if it sits below the horizon or below the eye line, you are going to see the top face of it because your eyes are above the cube. If that cube rises above the horizon or above the eye line, you're going to see the bottom face of the cube because now it's above our eyes. If the top of that cube were tangential with the horizon, you basically lose all depth. The top of that cube looks like a straight line. Even if I were to move the cube over here and we can see the side face. Because the top of the cube intersects the horizon line perfectly, we don't see any three D information on that top plane. Of course, the same would be true with the bottom plane. If the bottom plane were in line or tangential with the horizon, then the bottom of that cube would look like a straight line and we lose depth. Now, many of you might have heard the concept of vanishing points. And you might be wondering, what does this have to do with vanishing points? Nothing. I'm not talking about vanishing points at all right now. This is simply a property of the horizon line or line. Again, the only thing I want you to take home from this is that when you see an object below the horizon, you can see the top face of it, and when you see the object above the horizon, you see the bottom face of it. Here is a circle in perspective, so it's an ellipse, as we've talked about. Of course, the same principle applies to ellipses. This ellipse is seen below the horizon line, so we can see the top face of it. Now, watch what happens as I slowly progress this ellipse toward the horizon, see it's flattening out. The closer it gets to the horizon, the less depth we're going to see because that ellipse is getting squished to ultimately become a flat line right there when it's in line or tangential to the horizon. But then as that ellipse continues to rise above the horizon line or above the eye line, we can start seeing the bottom face of it. And the higher it goes, the more unsquished the ellipse gets. Okay. Now our ellipse has become a full cylinder. A cylinder is just two ellipses, one on the top one on the bottom with vertical lines connecting them. It's a very basic and quite useful form, as we'll see. Because the cylinder is now sitting below the horizon line, we can see the top ellipse, and if I moved it up above the horizon line, we now see the face of the bottom ellipse. If I move the cylinder between the horizon line, notice how the curves go on the two ellipses. The top one curving upwards, and the bottom one curving downwards. That's because the top ellipse is above the horizon line and the bottom ellipse is below the horizon line. If the cylinder were down here, well, now both ellipses are below the horizon line. Yet they still have different curvatures because they are different degrees of distance below the horizon line. This is extremely useful to be aware of all the time as you draw. Now we can recall these and observe them with a keener eye. Remember when I drew this blue line right there and I specifically mentioned it looks flat. Well, now we know why it looks flat. I put the horizon line right here. That's just how I arranged it in my mind. This part of the object is above the horizon, which is why the ellipse bows upward, just like we saw with the cylinder. Of course, if we were to complete that ellipse, we would see the bottom face of it. That's also why the bottom ellipse, this guy here, bows downward. It's below the horizon line. And if we were to complete this ellipse, we would see the top face. Every object you draw has a relation with the theoretical horizon line. Again, it's also called the eye line. Let's look at this object here. Where's the eye line here. Well, this one's interesting. Let's look at the bottom of the object right here. This time, we can see the bottom of the object. If I were to wrap an ellipse around here, it would look like this. We could see the bottom face. That means that this object is entirely above the horizon line. The horizon line for this object would be somewhere down here. Which means we're looking up at it, which also means that if we were to draw the ellipse, we would see the bottom face. How about this simple sphere right here? This one is pretty simple. I put the horizon line essentially right in the middle. If I were to draw a cross section in the middle of the sphere, it would be a straight line because this line would be lying tangential to the horizon line. If I were to draw an ellipse going across the sphere up here, well, this one bows upward because it's above the horizon line, and we can see the bottom face of it. Likewise, down here, it would bow downward. Because we're below the horizon line and we can see the top face of that ellipse. Switching now to this object here, look at the blue ellipse. This ellipse tells you where the horizon line is. We're just barely seeing the top face of the ellipse. We know the horizon line is just above that, probably somewhere around here. If I were to draw an ellipse at this part of the object, it would more or less be a flat line. Now, this is all something I had in my mind as I drew. I didn't map this out. You don't have to map it out. But if you don't know this information about the y line and being able to see the top or bottom face of the ellipse or whatever shape the cross section is, you can see how you'd be at a huge disadvantage when it comes to describing three D forms. And as we'll see in a later chapter in this class, this concept has huge implications in designing sets and scenes and backgrounds. Okay. The next step in this chapter is to draw some basic three D forms, we're going to start simple but quickly get more advanced with it and we'll end up applying it to figures and characters. Because you are a experienced beginner, you probably know how to draw a box. Something like this. You should intrinsically know now that this box is seen below the horizon line. The horizon line would be somewhere up here. Again, why is that? Well, simply because we can see the top face of the box. You notice the lines of the box are not parallel. If we were to trace them back, Roughly, they converge somewhere on the horizon line. Let's put the point right there. It doesn't matter that we're technically exact right now. This bottom line of the box here would also roughly converge at that point. This is a vanishing point. It's the crux of how we make something look three D on a two D plane. It's just a point on the horizon, which is infinitely far away where parallel lines will converge. Because our cube is made of parallel lines, we can easily apply this perspective principle. We'll be using vanishing points, horizon lines, and perspective grids in a future chapter. But in this chapter, where we're getting used to drawing singular three D forms in space, it's much more useful to eyeball this stuff. That's simply because we don't want to get bogged down with technical stuff too soon. In my opinion, that's something that will stunt your art. There is a time for technical stuff, of course. It's just a bit later. I'll draw another box here. Let's do this one also below the horizon line, and make sure when you're drawing these boxes. Again, boxes have parallel lines that the lines appear to converge at a common point in space, the vanishing point. Now, the human brain is very forgiving here. If you're off by a millimeter or even a quarter inch, it's okay. With this box, I even did that with the vertical lines. The point they converge at would be far below your computer monitor, several feet below. As you can see, the point is way down here. This helps enforce the idea that we're looking down at the box. But you don't have to do that. There are no rules. You can keep these vertical lines parallel. It just gives your perspective a slightly different. The next logical thing to get used to here is rotating a box in space. First, I'm just drawing a box, a rectangular box here. All the same principles apply. These lines converging somewhere off in the distance to a horizon line. This time, the vanishing point would be off the page. Now one thing about that, remember how the vertical vanishing point we just saw was way off the page. That kind of thing is much more rare with horizontal lines. The vanishing point for these lines can be off the page, which it is here, but it's usually going to be somewhere in the vicinity. The vanishing points for vertical lines, whether you're looking up or down, those are almost always quite a bit off the page. But again, we will cover that in a future chapter. We have our box, which I'll just move over here. Let's draw that same box, a bit rotated in space. I'll start with this line and this line. They're going to get a different angle to them, and this top face is going to be more foreshortened. As it rotates up. Then of course, because we've rotated it, the vertical lines are not so vertical anymore. They're a bit more diagonal. Feel our way down there. Notice how I'm drawing gesturally even with these three D forms. That is the line quality is gestural. It's like the warm up chapter. I never go away from drawing this way. Then this bottom line would be down here. Again, this top line and bottom line and this line would converge somewhere off the page to a vanishing point, and then let's just complete the box like this. I'm just noticing that this box appears thinner than my first one. So no problem. I shall make the edit, something like this. This box is a bit taller, too. The line should be about here. We can just erase that. There we go. We've just rotated this form in space. All right. Let's put a box beneath this one, but have it rotated the other way. Something like this. Again, you really sell the rotation with these vertical lines now being diagonal. The more diagonal they are, the more rotated the box will appear. Once again, this line and this line and this line here will converge somewhere at a point in space, at least the appearance of convergence. I'm sure if you traced those, I would be off, but that's okay. Again, the human brain, very forgiving. Now, let's not forget the elastic band principle. Going over the form because this is a box, it's straight lines. It just simply aligns with the planes of the box. By the way, the term I actually use for these is surprisingly not elastic bands or cross sections. I call these cross contours. They're contour lines that are cross sections. Cross contours. Let's officially update our verbiage to that. Cross contours. Now, when I cross contour forms, and I'll cross contour this one here, I find it very useful to start with the center line. If you know where the center of your forms are, that's often quite helpful in figures and characters and stuff because our bodies are symmetrical and the characters you design will have symmetrical bodies, probably, at least most of the time. Developing the habit of locating the center line of your forms is really useful. It's helpful for placing features like eyes, having a line for things like noses, or the center of heads and chests and legs and whatever. If you are practicing this, putting your elastic bands around your forms, cross contouring them, maybe you can start with the middle of your forms for this middle line here. I have to make sure it also follows the same perspective and same for this line here. Again I'm eyeballing it. As long as it looks accurate, I will take that as okay for this. There will be times that I'm more strict about it, but again, that's a future chapter thing. Here's a challenge here, this face. Where is the middle of that face? There is a trick to this. If you were to take two points and draw a line connecting them, then draw a line connecting the other two points, where that line crosses is your middle point. It's a good little tip for figuring out tricky foreshortened perspectives, figuring out where the middle is. Of course, you could do the same thing for this face, although this one probably is a bit easier to eyeball. Just connect the two points and we instantly see where the middle is. So helpful tip to know, but I want to encourage you. Once again, learn to do this by eye, even if it means minor technical inaccuracies. My theory there is minor technical inaccuracies can be fixed as needed, as you clean up things later in the process, if that's a step you want to go to. But if you are overly technical at the start, it's very difficult to draw with any sense of feel. Okay. But having said that, we are still talking about technical considerations here involving form and perspective. Back in Blender, here is a cylinder, as you know, a cylinder is made of several ellipses, in blender here, I can add an ellipse to the cylinder, and as I scrub it along the form, you can see it's changing its curvature with the perspective. Over here, it's narrower and the further away we get from the camera's lens, it gets wider and wider and wider. Of course, if you go all the way to the end, it matches the silhouettes of the cylinder. If I were to move that cylinder this way, There is a point right there. The end of the cylinder, this part here has aligned with the cameras view, or if we were physically standing here, the end of the cylinder would fall between our two eyes. Therefore, we don't have any depth information on this face. It just looks like a straight line. I'll make the cylinder a little bigger here so that it spans to the right of our eyes and to the left of our eyes or to the right and left of the cameras lens in this case. Now if I go to add a ring around the cylinder and slide it around here. We can see over at this side it's curvature bends right, and then right about here, it passes our position of the camera or right where our feet would be planted. Then as we pass to the left of the camera's view, the ellipse bulges out to the left. As you know, that curvature gets wider and wider as we go away until ultimately it meets the silhouette. When you practice drawing three D forms, you should also practice drawing cylinders. I would say cylinders are harder to draw than boxes because you have to be aware of the constantly changing curvature. Remember to keep the drawings loose. We're not trying to draw like robots or stencils or anything like that. The cylinder appears concave here, but that's okay. What's mostly of interest to me is the tracking of the ellipses. It's always a helpful thing to draw behind to the areas that would be otherwise invisible to our view. You can do this with a dotted line or a faint line, whatever. In this case, to push home the idea that this ellipse is wider from left to right, than this ellipse is. What this immediately does is it implies a perspective grid. See, I have just implied a grid that goes like this. As you practice with these forms and principles that I'm showing you here, it's amazing how easily you can invoke in the viewer's mind the sense of three D space on a two D plane. Let's grab the cylinder here and just make it a bit smaller, so I have a bit more room to draw. Let's extend the cylinder way over here, and I'll ghost out this backline so it looks like it's going into behind the cylinder. So because this cylinder is so long, before we put the end cap on it, what I'm thinking in my head is where is that line straight? And of course, I'm using my first two ellipses to help me gauge this. So I'm kind of tracking the width progression between them. And as we saw in Blender, it's somewhere around here from this view. This is where the ellipse would appear just like a straight line, and I can draw my way to that point and then go all the way out. And here, again, just based on the progression that I'm observing, that ellipse would probably have a bend like this. Something narrower than the other side in terms of how bulged out it is. But something like this, almost a mirror image of this ellipse as it's about the same distance away from the midline, and you can always do your due diligence and indicate the full ellipse like that. There we have a very mindful three D form. It's the stuff you don't hear artists talk about when they're drawing these forms. This information generally stays in your head, although you have to draw it to practice it. I promise I will start drawing real things with these forms very soon in this chapter, but we need to spend time here because I having taught arts for more than ten years now. I think this is my 13th year as an art teacher, I can't tell you the number of times. I've seen students not hold themselves accountable to this information when they draw. Either because they don't know it. Maybe it hasn't been properly explained to them, or they do know it, but they ignore it in the pursuit of drawing cool characters or something like that or cool poses or whatever. But if you don't know this stuff and aren't able to draw it with your eyes closed, any hope of getting a convincing and cohesive sense of depth will be torpedoed. If your sense of gesture is your weak link, that will undermine the feel of your work. But if your sense of form is your weak link, that'll undermine the believability of your work. You know, obviously, all the fundamentals have to be in place for good drawing, but they all do different things and therefore have different visual impacts. If you find yourself guessing too much on where the ellipses would be for a cylinder, just draw yourself a simple perspective grid. I've got myself a two point perspective grid. Again, I'll be drawing with these grids more in detail in the future chapter. Right now, a grid like this is easy to plot, and I tried to make all the radiating lines roughly equal in distance between each other. I just did this by, didn't use any special tricks for that. Let's say I want to draw an ellipse here and an ellipse here. Well, what I could do is I could use my x trick, just draw an x between the four points, which gives me the middle of the ellipse. Then I can rough in the base of the ellipse into its appropriate square. This by default gives me the correct difference in the two ellipses. Then what I can do is just maybe extend these lines to go up. For both cylinders. Now, we're turning these ellipses into cylinders. Now for the tops of them, these are ellipses as well, but I don't have any vanishing point lines drawn here. I'll just eyeball it. Now, we know the horizon line is here, and this point is closer to the horizon line than this point. So this top ellipse needs to be more foreshortened. That is less like a circle and more like an oval. I'm merging a developing intuition with the technical knowledge behind it. Yes, if you want to, you could go ahead and draw vanishing points to these areas like this and then give yourself the x and put the cylinder exactly in the right spot. But I like to again, evaluate it just by i, so long as this ellipse is obviously narrower than this ellipse or more foreshortened, your perspective is probably going to work. The reason I'm so adamant on doing things by i, and here I am, by the way, just doing the same thing on this cylinder. They're a little lop sided, but that's okay. Anyway, the reason I'm adamant on doing this by, There's actually two reasons. One, the human brain is not a good technical checker. Your viewer is not a program that can check you on this. A ballpark is fine. In fact, a ballpark often has more feel to it. Secondly, when you're drawing characters and figures moving through the three D space of your illustrations, say like this example here, a beautiful drawing by Jens Clauson's. Let me just move this over here. Look at the bottom of her legs. If I just cut off the feet for a second. Excuse me Jens for doing this to your beautiful artwork, we essentially have the same thing I just drew two cylinders in perspective. Those cylinders go back to some invisible vanishing point way over there, and these two feet traced back to some vanishing point somewhere over here. I don't know exactly where those points are. I'm just inventing a grid where the lines converge at a theoretical vanishing point. This grid having two vanishing points, one for each direction. If I were to further this one, it would be something like this. You can almost think of this perspective grid as like a tiled floor. In fact, I used to put tiled floors in my illustrations a lot because it helped me just embed the perspective information into the scene. It was a bit of an artistic fundamentals cheat that I used to do a lot. Anyway, now I can ask myself where the horizon line is. Well, where is our eye line? If we were to project a line straight out from our theoretical eyeballs or the cameras lens, I think it would intersect her right about there. We're looking up at the buttocks, I think, and we're definitely looking up at her head. I think we're level with the figure right here. These perspective lines would merge with a vanishing point somewhere over here, I guess. You can see now I'm off on my grid, but that's okay. It was close enough. I'll do a quick little repair job here, getting a little more accountable to these points. So that means if I were to recreate a little study of just the leg cylinders, replacing the leg anatomy with basic cylinders. The top of the cylinder is up here and we're looking up at it, so it's form is convex, it bends upward. This would be the area behind, which I'll just ghost out here. The cylinder would come down. Again, I don't care about the leg anatomy right now. I'm just drawing a cylinder. Let's just place the bottom of our cylinder leg right here. This ellipse, of course, we're looking down at, so we're bending it out this way. This being the back of it. And the other leg or cylinders. These aren't legs, they're cylinders right now. I would start about here. Now, I'll use this perspective information to point to where I want to end it. S right here, I'd like to draw a line that relates my two legs together and my two forms in space. Then I'll just draw my cylinder down and ballpark where its ellipse is. To recap, the horizon line helps you determine how convex something is. That is how much the ellipse bends out to describe the form. You know, like this. Obviously, when we're close to the horizon line like here, this ellipse here would just barely be seen from the top, just barely. Then of course, above the horizon line, this ellipse would just barely be seen from the bottom. That's what I have in mind as I'm drawing. The horizon line helps me determine that my little haphazard completely ballparked perspective grid helps me find the relationship in this case of the bottoms of the two cylinders, ensuring they line up on the same floor, let's say. This is how you can really check your work. For example, I see an error in my own demonstration. This cylinder is too high compared to this one, and how do I know that? Well, if I use this vanishing point and I plot a line up there, the top of this cylinder should actually be down, let's say here. And the top of this cylinder, assuming the legs are the same size, which they are on a figure, the top of this cylinder should be up here. Getting those placements in space correct is of paramount importance for this fundamental, the fundamental of drawing three D forms. Without this knowledge, your characters will always appear flat at worst, like a cardboard cutout, or at best, like you're viewing them through a extremely telephoto lens, something that minimizes perspective. 7. Freehanding Objects in 3D Space: So let's go back to Jens lassens. I'm a big fan of his if you haven't guessed. A study you could do here that doesn't even involve any drawing is simply an exercise in seeing the space that these three D forms exist in. The first question I'll ask myself is, where is the horizon line? Which means, where is the eye line? Another way to imagine that is let's say I were standing here seeing this girl physically in space. If I were to just move my head forward in a straight line, where would my eyes collide with her? I think they would collide somewhere down here. This is where my head would bang into her leg, right about there, which gives me my horizon line, of course, which means that everything above the horizon line we're looking up at, which in this case, is confirmed by the fact that we can see the underside of her skirt. This is an ellipse that we're seeing the bottom of. Also, look at her sleeve here, the opening of her sleeve, this is an ellipse, we're seeing the bottom of it. If we converted her legs to cylinders, which the legs are very close to cylinders, by the way, with a little shape information applied, shapes is the next chapter. The bottom of the cylinders would be like this, very similar to what we just saw in the last example. Okay, so all that information can be gotten with the horizon line only. Next step would be, where's the vanishing point? Again, I have no idea. There's not enough information in this drawing to tell exactly where the vanishing point is. I mean, even Jens Clauson's couldn't tell you. There aren't enough points to fully extrapolate from. However, because we do have two feet that we know are planted on the ground, we can plot two points here. We know that both of those points are on the same line that converge back to a vanishing point. So all I have to do is extrapolate that line. It's somewhere over here. The vanishing point is somewhere in there, which means now that I have that point, I can continue to extrapolate and boom, I have the perspective of this scene. Now going the other way, where's the vanishing point over here? That is actually more difficult to find because we don't really have two points that are on the same line. This vanishing point could be about here and you can draw lines out to test it like that. Or the point, I mean, could be there and you can draw points like this. But the closer your two vanishing points get to each other, the more skewed or fish the lens will be. This drawing doesn't appear very fishy to me. If I needed more perspective information in this drawing, I would probably just be safe and put the vanishing point somewhere out there. Then if I were to test that by drawing lines here, you get a grid that looks like this, and this looks about right. Again, think of it like a tiled floor. If these are tiles I'm drawing, does it look like this figure is standing on this tiled floor? To me, it looks passible Now, again, it's possible to do all of that in your head. You don't have to draw a single thing. But if this information is new to you, if you're not used to doing this, go ahead and find artwork you like, character designs like this where both feet are planted on the floor because that gives you a cue for the perspective and see if you can extrapolate back to the perspective grid. It's a super helpful visualization exercise. You know, let's do that one more time on a very different perspective. Here's a beautiful illustration by Max Grech. Probably pronouncing that last name incorrectly, but here we go. You probably will have to scale these down because vanishing points tend to be far away from the figure off the page usually. For this, that's certainly the case. Again, vanishing points are only close together when you have a very fish eye perspective. Think like Kim Jug type stuff. But this appears to be shot with a normal iPhone if this character were real. Just from a high up perspective. The camera is obviously high above Wolverine here. Let's put him right there. Then what I do is just make a new layer. Let's ask ourselves the same question. Where is the horizon line? Well, this one's more difficult because we are fully above the character. The horizon line is somewhere up here. A quick point on that. This used to confuse me an awful lot. The fact that we're looking down has no bearing on the horizon line. It's all about the distance off the ground that our eyes are at. Because we're looking down at the character, we know that our eyes must be physically above the character. The horizon line is somewhere up here. So how can we more reliably track it? I can't just guess. Is it there? Is it there? I really have no idea. The only way I can know where that horizon line is is to actually trace it via vanishing points. Again, we have two feet planted on the ground. Now, this foot here is missing. Well, I'm not missing. It's cropped off by the frame, but we know it's somewhere here. If we were to extend this drawing, that foot is somewhere down here. Which means we now have two points, point number one and point number two, which we can, of course, draw our line through here. Okay. There we go. Now, this still doesn't fully help us. I'm not saying the horizon line is there. With the example before with the girl, I could say where the horizon line was because I had the added information of where my eye line would collide with the figure, which meant I had a horizon line. Here I don't have that. My eyes would sail right over him. In this case, I need a second line to also go back to a vanishing point and where those two lines converge would be where the horizon line is. So where can I get that second line? Well, I have the hips. Point number one would be there, point number two would be there. Let's throw a line through that and look at that. The lines converge right there. Let me just erase that. This is my theoretical working vanishing point. I can also now shoot a line through the shoulders. Now, here's another added difficulty. These shoulders are twisted. Wolverine is cocking that shoulder back. But if that shoulder were not cocked back, like if he were just posing naturally, just straight shoulders, that shoulder would be somewhere here and it more or less lines up with my new found perspective grid. I'll undo what I just did, though, so we can see the full drawing. I'm going to say yes, the horizon line is indeed right there. Give or take a millimeter or two. Again, ballpark is totally cool. Now for the second vanishing point, and just like last time, this one is harder to find because once again, we don't really have two points moving in this direction. You two points that are on the same perspective line, so I'm going to have to take a guess. I can take an educated guess because this is not a fish eye perspective or anything, I know the vanishing point is not going to be too close to the other one. But there is some dynamism to this perspective, there's a lot of depth to it. It's definitely not a telephoto lens shooting the scene. That means the vanishing point is not going to be too far that way, either. Because the farther away the vanishing points, the more telephoto or flat the perspective. I'll estimate it somewhere over here. I'll use the points I've already drawn on the figure, the feet, the hips to kind of shoot some lines through the scene. Again, if this were a tiled floor that Wolverine was standing on, in the snow, somehow, would that work. Here the painting itself is obscuring my perspective grid. I can't see it, on a layer, I'm just going to do this. Ghosted out. Yeah, this looks about right to me. That perspective grid appears just by eye to be in the right place. You could even combine this with drawing some basic boxes. Like for example, if you look at the top of his shoulders, as we'll see coming up in the next section, the top of the shoulders can be simplified into the top plane of a box. Here I'm drawing that top plane of the box, connecting the shoulders. Now, remember, his shoulders are cocked and rotated, that is rotated off axis with the feet. That means the box will have its own vanishing points. It'll still go to the horizon line, but it'll have its own separate vanishing points due to its rotation. But this top plane of the box I just drew does appear to make sense with our perspective grid. It's below the horizon line, so we can see the top face of the box. If I were to use my perspective grid to draw a box form where the hips are. Again, just using my straight perspective grid here. Drawing just the top plane of a box. That appears to roughly align with Wolverine's hips. Again, his hips might be twisted a bit. My box is simply straight on with the perspective grid, but the angle of view appears to be correct. You could even draw the top plane of a box where the two feet are like this. You can now track visually the three partial boxes we've just drawn and do they appear to line up with the character and they do. At least close enough. Again, we're not computer programs, doesn't have to be exactly perfect. It probably couldn't be. Remember, this is a human being doing this illustration. It's probably not exactly perfect either. Which is, of course, the beauty of the whole thing, but that's a whole other conversation. Okay. I want to switch gears a little bit from vanishing points and horizon lines and perspective grids and things like that. Let's talk a little bit more about wrapping our heads around drawing three D forms in three D space. This is a quick little rendering I mocked up in Blender, just a very simple three D object. It's basically two spheres that are melted together. Looking at this, there is obviously a sphere here and another sphere beneath it down here. Those two spheres melt together in a contour that looks like this. But here's the problem. If I isolate that contour, suddenly it's flat, there's no indication that this is a three D form. The only way we know it's a three D form is because we saw where it came from. But if I hit all that, this just looks like a flat meaningless shape. How do we give something like that three D form without going in and shading everything? Shading is in the realm of painting, which is great. Painting has its own fundamentals for showing three D form, but we want to do this with drawing. The principle I want to introduce to you is what my teacher always called the accordion effect. Here's what it is. First, I'm just going to get rid of this drawing. When thinking about representing two forms that overlap in three D space, don't think about the contour. Think about the forms first. This being the sphere that's on top, I can ghost in the bottom, then the sphere that's beneath and I'll ghost that in for now, something like this. Because this top one is in front of the bottom one, we need a way to show that, and this is the accordion effect. Watch this. Instead of making the contour simply do this. Again, that's flat, I'll continue this contour through the other sphere. Then here's the accordion, right there. It's a little pinch. Then from behind that pinch out comes the bottom sphere. It's the same with the other side as well because the sphere is in front of the bottom one all the way around. We can continue this in a little pinch and then out from behind the pinch and even feel free to start your stroke behind it. I'm drawing behind the form right now, just lightly. Then as I get in here, I'll darken the stroke and connect these areas. Suddenly, without any shading, just with lines, line drawing, this feels like a three dimensional form. Oh, it's called the accordion effect, named after these little undulations that expand on one side and are compressed or pinched on the other side. This is just what my teacher called it. I'm not sure if it's actually called this more globally, but it's stuck with me for 20 years, so it must be effective. This accordion effect, pound for pound is maybe the most useful drawing tool I have ever come across. It's such an effective way of showing one form in front of another. Remember, you can combine this with cross contouring, the elastic band principle. I'll wrap an elastic band around the middle of this form. Is down, it dips in a bit where the spheres are overlapping and then it comes out again for the bottom sphere, something like this. Up here at the top, it should probably wrap around more like that. Then on the other side, the cross contour comes over top of the sphere this way, wraps around it, disappears a bit here because this is where it would be wrapping underneath that sphere, and then it comes out, of course, again for the bottom sphere, merging at that bottom sphere. Now, because I can see the top face of this sphere, I know we're looking down at this object. A cross contour here would be bulging out like this. Wrapping around, and a cross contour here would be very much more wrapping out. It's curvature would be more pronounced. Again, these cross contours are just there as tools to further your understanding and enhance your three D vision, if you want to put it that way. But with the accordion effect, you don't even really need to do the cross contours, if you don't want to. I'll just draw a cylinder here like this. Let's draw another cylinder intersecting it going up, almost like a upper arm and a forearm thing. The cylinder going like this. Okay. So these two cylinders are overlapping. Well, this looks messy and unclear. How would I draw that using the accordion effect? Well, first of all, let's just get rid of all this stuff. If this cylinder here is in front, all we got to do is make sure this contour comes down and then we overlap it with this accordion effect, and then out from behind it comes the upper arm, if this is a short form for an arm, whatever this form is. Then I guess if this were an arm, the elbow would be about there, so we can go through it like that. What that accordion effect implies, with that one little line is that this is a three D form that's sitting on top of another three D form that's behind it. With the accordion effect in the right place, you don't need to draw any cross contours or anything like that. Just this simple overlap says it. I like to exaggerate the overlap. See, I didn't draw it like this. I was not timid in just doing a little tiny overlap. No, I extended the contour down, extended the accordion effect line, and then out from behind it. You can see my ghost line up here. And then out from behind it comes the form in the back. And it looks immediately three D. On a practical level, this accordion effect thing is really apparent on torsos and hips. Torsoes and hips can be thought of as two spherical forms. In this case, it's more of an egg shaped form for the rib cage and more of a flattened, almost spherical like structure for the hips. Anyway, if you think of drawing a bag containing these two forms, well, in this pose, this bag is stretched on this side. And squashed on this side, and this is where the accordion effect can come into play. Let me just move this over here so I can draw on a blank sheet of paper, what I just drew over the figure. I'll block in my first form. Again, this would represent the rib cage area, the upper torso, and then this form represents the hips or waist area right down to the crotch. There is often a squash and stretch relationship between these two areas. In many non static poses, you'll find this. Anyway, how do we draw this? How do we wrap these forms in a bag? Well, this side is stretched. The stretch side is always the easier side and this side here is squished but we have to figure out where to put the accordion. The first thing I'll do is just ghost out the two forms here. This is why people draw lightly when they're blocking things in. What form is on top of what? Well, because we're looking up at this particular figure, it's the hips that are in front of the torso. I will carry my line through. Now here's the accordion effect. Then we go back up for the back of this figure like this. This is a very good representation of what this pose is doing. Of course, now I could start finding cylinders for the arms. I could start finding cylinders for the legs. Look at this. We have a figure drawing evolving in front of our very eyes, using these simple simple tools. Aha, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. You might have noticed I didn't use a perspective grid for that little figure analysis. Why did I just suddenly abandon it? There's one more really important fundamental thing to get to before we start drawing figures and characters with these tools. Here I've got a basic one point perspective grid. By the way, the difference between one point perspective and two point perspective is obviously these blue lines are all going toward the vanishing point. If I were to add lines in the other direction without using a vanishing point, they just are straight like this. Again, we'll be drawing backgrounds and environments using perspective grids in a later chapter. Stay tuned. Drawing forms in perspective is all well and good. Here's a little box coming in here. Just following the grid made by a vanishing point. I can trace this line here, connect in like this. For this top corner, I trace it, it's about there, connected up vertically, and there's my box. Drawing forms with grids is really only good when you want those forms to align to a plane. For example, here, I've aligned this box to the ground plane. If I want to draw another box on the ground plane, I could obviously use that same perspective grid, and here is another box on the ground plane. Let's just draw another one over here. This one can have its top above the horizon line, so we don't see its top plane. We see it just going like this. Trace these lines using the vanishing point to find the lines for the correct perspective, and there we go. These three boxes are all in a cohesive space because they're all positioned on the floor and that floor can be tracked back to a vanishing point. But there's limitations here. For example, all these boxes are rotated the same way. What happens if I want to rotate the box 45 degrees, like this? Well, now, this box is using a different vanishing point. I have to invent another vanishing point for this box to make sense. That vanishing point would be somewhere, you know, off the side of the page. I'd basically have to invent a two point perspective grid now for this box to make sense. And well, what if I want to take this box and rotate it? I want this box to be rotated, maybe a little less than 45 degrees, something like this? How do I manage the vanishing point now? I have to invent yet another vanishing point? This vanishing point may be over here, let's say, something like that? This vanishing point would be here? Could see how if you just start rotating your objects, suddenly you're going to have ten vanishing points. While you could keep track of that, I suppose, first of all, that's no fun. Second of all, it takes the life away from a drawing if you're constantly tracking technical vanishing points. Even to add to all this, what if I drew a box up here that's rotated like this, rotated on two different axes. Where does this vanishing point go? Well, this vanishing point is not going to be on the horizon line at all because this box is divorced from the plane that the vanishing point defines. If I were to just start tracing these lines down, this vanishing point is somewhere way off the screen down that way. It becomes pretty obvious why I'm so in favor of learning to see space a little more intuitively. Even if that means favoring a ballpark approach over technical perfection. Oh, and by the way, we would be able to see the bottom plane of this box because it's above the horizon line and also rotated up a little bit. There's two reasons we would see the bottom plane. But again, this box would actually require two additional vanishing points. One way down there as I just talked about, and a whole other one way down here somewhere. The takeaway is perspective grids, while they do have their uses are a little too limited when it comes to drawing figures and characters, where things like arms and legs and torsoes are going to be rotated 1 million different directions. So the thing I do is first I'm always aware of where the theoretical horizon line is, and this time I'm not even going to draw it. Although I'll tell you, I'm just going to think about it being right there. But instead of actually drawing it, just think like this box is above the horizon lines. We're going to see the bottom face of it. Don't do this. That would be a mistake. We can't see the bottom face. It's got to be like this because it's above the horizon line. We can see the bottom face. I don't really it's not that I don't care about vanishing points. It's just I'm ballparking them and I'm content to do that. If something looks wrong, like these lines maybe look a little too long. Bring them down, mentally making sure that this angle is a bit different from this angle because they have to converge somewhere around here. Again, I don't know exactly where. As long as it's somewhere down there, we're okay. That is, we're okay for this exercise. Some environments will demand more clear adhesion to vanishing points, say like a city or something. But here, we're just trying to get our brains to think in three D space. Anyway, depending on the type of perspective you want, you can just make lines going in this direction just straight here in photoshop and holding shift. I notice I'm way off on this line. That's okay. Just quickly correct it. And that will simulate a one point perspective when you just hold shift and just for fun, pick a face and shade it in. Now, if I want to draw that same box below the horizon line, well, it's got to be down here, because I know the horizon line is probably somewhere there. So let's put it here. Let's just approximate the different angles of these lines here, converging to a vanishing point somewhere on the horizon line. The angle of this line here should be a lot steeper, so I'll go like that. Because again, it's got to track its way all the way back here. Then I will finish that box and just pick a face, shade it. This is not lighting by any stretch, it's just dimensionality to our three dimensional objects here. But now let's do something trickier. Let's draw a box that sits on top of this surface. I'll try and figure this out. It's going to be approaching the horizon line, so I will strike that line pretty straight. Then here it's below the horizon line, so I'll hit it like that. And that box is essentially going to be rotated on this one. Here's where I make my first correction. It's rotated. That means these lines need to be rotated like this. I'm showing you the stages at which I figure things out, developing your intuition for this thing. The box has a straight top, so we go down. This line is just too curvy for my own liking, let's erase it, make it a bit straighter. This line here should roughly be parallel with that line. I'll make those edits, and we can shade the bottom here and bring this bottom face down. Now, the line that goes here, that line is sitting on the ground, so it should line up with that theoretical vanishing point somewhere over here. That line needs to be like this because it's again, sitting on the ground, the same ground plane that this box is on and the same plane that this box is sitting above. This top box here is not on the ground plane, but it does reference the ground plane. It sits above it and it's rotated the same as the one below, so it accesses the same vanishing points. There we go. There's our box that's leaning on the other box. If you want to just throw the most rudimentary bit of shading underneath to show a bit of a shadow there. That's fine same here. This shadow actually does have some more perspective information though. It shows where the box is touching the ground. In other words, this point, I'm roughly lining up with this area right here. That tells the viewer that this box sits just a few inches behind or whatever the scale is, a few inches behind this box. Those small differences are, of course, extremely valuable in communicating a cohesive space. I'm just going to tweak actually the bottom of this to foreshorten that bottom plane even more. So it looks like it's sitting on the box properly. There we go. As you can see, even though I have a lot of experience drawing in three D space, I still figure things out as I go. It's just the fundamental theory stuff exists in my head. Hopefully by this point in this chapter, I've given you a sufficient window into what's going on in my head so that you can also try this exercise yourself. Let's do another box that's rotated in some weird way up here. Again, am I above or below the horizon line, I am above the horizon line. The box is going to be rotated like this, which means we're just barely going to see that top face. This is interesting. Even though the box is above the horizon line, we're still seeing the top face there. Why is that? Well, it's simple. It's because it's rotated toward us. Vanishing points and horizon lines won't really help us draw this box because the rotation is throwing everything off. The horizon line, the vanishing points don't really matter here. Now, these lines will converge somewhere. It won't be on the horizon line. It'll be somewhere else. But they do converge, which means you still got to be mindful of your relative angles, making sure that these lines would converge if you carried the lines further. Then we'll carry this up. Throw a line there. Now, these two lines here should be roughly parallel. I will adjust that. Then once again, this back line here references the same theoretical vanishing point that these two lines do, which are altogether different than the other boxes vanishing points because this one is rotated in a weird way. Then just pick a face, shade it in one value, and I forgot to do that here. Let's just shade that in as well. It just helps with the dimensionality of these things. We'll see it put to use more when we start drawing figures in just a moment. Let's do an easy one and put a ball back here behind this box. Now the thing you have to just think about is where would the ball be striking the floor? Well, if it's behind this box, then the point that it hits the floor needs to be somewhere here. Just like this point was about here on this box, indicating that the leaning box is a few inches back recessed from the front of this box. Same thing with the sphere. The point that it hits the floor, has to be somewhere about here. It's just behind this box. My thinking here is if I were to ghost my lines behind this box, something like this and draw down, where would this box end? It would end at this point here. If this ball is going to be behind this box, well, it has to hit the ground somewhere above this point somewhere over here, or else it would be it would be sharing the same three D space as the box, which of course is impossible. Let's put that ball right there. Now, a ball has no planes. Well, that's actually not true. A ball has many planes, too many to draw. The multitude of small planes is what makes it look round. Right now, this just looks like a circle. But if we wanted to, we could just throw in a elastic band or a cross contour type thing, just to give the viewer an indication that this is a three D object. If you wanted to continue our basic shading, you could simply throw in a half moon shape to show that this is a ball. Again, this is not rendering by any stretch. It's just throwing a basic value in there with the soft edge, of course, because this is a sphere, not a box. You can see how the space appears cohesive. Do the same thing with cylinders now. How about a cylinder that's resting on the ground plane coming forward. This line I'm drawing here needs to correspond if it's in the same rotation as the box that is, it needs to correspond to the same vanishing points as all this stuff. That vanishing point is somewhere around here. I'm mentally tracing it back in my mind. All those lines I just drew just exist in my head. I'm putting them on paper just so you can see them. But this is largely a cognitive exercise of seeing space, conditioning your brain to see the two D flat surface as a three D space. The top of the cylinder has a different angle than the bottom because again, vanishing point is going to force that, and then we have our ellipse on the other side. Now, this cylinder is small enough and far enough away from the horizon line that both of those ellipses are probably going to appear roughly the same, not enough to really bother with. And if you wanted to, you could throw in intermediary ellipses to show your understanding of the form. I always find it helpful as a housekeeping thing just to ghost out lines that are behind the object. Keep the line partially visible. That helps train your brain into further seeing three D space, but just ghost it out a little bit. In this case, the cylinder appears in front of the box. Then for a cylinder, if you wanted to shade the same left face that we've been doing, the way to go about that is to think of the cylinder as actually a box. If the box looked like this, the face we'd be shading would be here. Just imagine a box encompassing the cylinder. And then just shade where that face of that box would be. A cylinder is round just like a sphere. Let's soften this edge. I'll even get my nice little smudge tool out for this. The last thing we'll do on this demonstration is put a cylinder traversing the horizon line. It starts below it and ends somewhere here above it. Look at how I'm blocking in the two ellipses, and I'm just blocking in the parts of the ellipse we can see. If I wanted to be thorough and ghost in the backs, they would look like this, but we're not going to see those parts. Then a cn is a toppled cylinder a little bit. It's not quite straight. Okay goes down. Again, look how I'm drawing choppy, the way I always draw, the way I showed in my warm up. That's the way I like to draw. So I guess the point here is, draw the way you want to draw what feels right to you? And this is where everybody's going to differ. It may be useful to show where the horizon line here is with a contour that goes straight. Now, that looks a little awkward by itself. You probably should throw in some adjacent ones just to show the viewer or in this case, you are the viewer, to show yourself to get your own brain conditioned into seeing space like this. If that cylinder were to extend further up, the ellipse would even become more pronounced in its curvature. This one, I'll just draw the ellipse straight, no cylinder attached and see if we can get this to look like it's sitting in the same space. Can do the same thing down here, although I shouldn't put it there. Let's do another one here, see if you can get the cylinder or the ellipse, in this case, to look like it is sitting on the floor, this ellipse, relative to this ellipse, relative to that ellipse, relative to all these tracking the curvature of each. This assignment, we're drawing all these objects in the same space. And this truly is a great assignment. It's something I did. I filled sketchbook pages doing this. What's nice is even though this particular demonstration has taken me 15 minutes to show you. That's just because I'm talking. You could do this in 5 minutes. You could do this while sipping a coffee at your desk in the morning, but the payoff is great. If you can't construct space, it will be immediately apparent to you and you can go back to things like vanishing points and stuff like that. You can almost think of vanishing points being like training wheels, and I don't mean that in a bad way at all. But this exercise will tell you if you still need to use vanishing points or if you have progressed to the next stage where you can ballpark things but make it convincing. Okay. All right. And as a final addition to this chapter, before we get into drawing figures, that is before we start applying it to figures and characters, we need to be able to twist and bend geometry in space. Let's just draw a face of a box, which just looks like a flat rectangle in perspective like this. We just drew a bunch of those, so I don't need to explain what's happening here. But what if we took this point and brought it out here and kept this point the same. Basically, we have this Now we're going to keep this point and this point the same. What happens now is we got to go back to that point and find this final contour that connects this down to this. Now, these lines are curved this time, simply because the object is bending, and then of course, the bottom one is just going like that. I'll just remove the dark box here. You can see what we've drawn. It's a twisted form in space. For these it's handy just to pick a face and shade it just like we did before. This is a playing card that has been bent in convincing three D space. Sometimes it's helpful just to draw a curve, say like this. But imagining this is again, like a playing card that we're bending in space and say, well, maybe then the perspective would go like this, like this, meaning vanishing point somewhere out there, same with this, vanishing point somewhere out there, and then we can connect them. But this is a bit of a mental hurdle. Where does this line go? Does it go like this? No. It's got to go behind the object and come back down. That is, assuming we're keeping that other point on the ground, which is helpful for this exercise, at least to start, keep it on the ground, and then you can track your way through the form. Again, pick a face, give it some shadow. Moving those to the side. How about if we try one going the other way? This time, I'll draw the bottom two points first, and then this side contour goes this way. Obviously, we're going to see the top of the form here, the bottom of the form there. Actually, I'll just make the back a dotted line, which is always a good habit to get into, by the way, because it is very helpful to draw what's behind things, but you want to give yourself a demarcation style that shows that it is behind something. Then here we can attach the other side. This is a bridge shape or something. Then, pick a face, usually the face that points under, if you can find one, and give that a dark value. Okay. How about one now that curves in a similar way, but not all the way around, not as bridge like as the other one. In this one, if there's a vanishing point somewhere up here, that point is going to control. All of these lines. Now, that vanishing point is way too close because look at this. I'd be so far off there. The closer the vanishing point gets to your object, the more skewed the perspective. That vanishing point is just wrong. I'll undo all that. The vanishing point would be far off the page, but I still want to make sure that these would converge to it in theory if you traced them back there. Again, ballparking is okay. Then just find where the other side of the object is somewhere about there, and draw down, and there you go. Hey, we might as well cross contour down the center of the object. I feel like I haven't done that in a while. Let's bring that practice back. The way I drew this bottom contour, almost looks like a piece of clothing like flapping in the wind or something. If I were to draw a cross contour here, maybe this cross contour would actually go inwards as though it were a towel or something hanging from a clothes line. But this cross contour up here would be more straight. Like maybe the towel is resting on a hard ledge up there. And just play with this. How about if we miked our first one, but maybe gave it more of a bend, like this. It's bent out more. But on this one, how at this point here, it also turned under. Now we have to see this as this side also turns under, there's my dotted line showing the back of it. We have to see this. We can just shade that in, maybe shade this in, maybe just further ghost out this line here. I've skewed the proportions of this little box face, but that's okay. This is all about testing forms in space. 8. Forms and Figures: All right. So we're ready to take everything we've learned so far in Chapter two, and I will try and specifically keep this to Chapter two. So I've called up our friend from Chapter one here. I've put a little piece of virtual tracing paper over her. In fact, back in my early days and about 2001, when I started learning this, we used physical tracing paper over photos of models like this, and we did exactly this exercise. Namely, using boxes and boxes only to construct and properly show the form of this figure. I'll start with the easiest box, which I think is the torso, which for our purposes, goes from the shoulders to let's say the belly button area. If we think of a horizon line on her, that is if we're looking at her through a camera lens and we moved that camera lens straightforward, where would we collide with her? Probably somewhere around here is our horizon line, which means the box up here, we're looking very much up at. I'm going to draw it like this, using the width of the shoulder to determine the width of the box. And here is what we're looking at. It's a rotated bent box that goes down here. Because we're looking up at it, remember it's above the horizon line, we're much more likely to see the bottom plane of that box. I will draw this box like this. Now quick side note up here. That box is very similar to the magic carpet stuff we were just talking about. In fact, I even drew one that looked just like this. All you got to do with this exercise is just add the third dimension to it. Simply give it some thickness in this case, and do that. There you go. I messed this one up and didn't show the bottom plane, but that's easy enough to fix. Just do this. And there we go. That's what we're looking at. Of course, remember our gesture ran down the middle of the form like this. It was like a big C curve, and that's all I'm doing to this box. I'm making the box conform to a C curve. Let's draw another box for her hips. Her hips and shoulders are roughly in alignment in this pose. That means that the hip and shoulder boxes are also going to be roughly in alignment. Now in terms of where to end this box, it's somewhere here. Now, remember, we're getting closer to the horizon line at this point, so there's not going to be quite as much of an up view at the box. Let me just shade in the bottom plane of this rib cage box or this torso box, just so we can maybe see that difference a little bit better. This box is going to be like this, a little bit less visible on the bottom plane there. But still visible there because we're above the horizon line. We're looking up at the hips and I'm just going to ghost out this part of the box because this is where the leg is going to go. Now let me just bring back the whole model here. Looking at that leg, can we see the bottom plane or the top plane? Because you can't really see both at once. You have to pick one. We're seeing the bottom plane. It's so easy to tell because you can see a shadow there underneath. When I construct my box on top of this, the box goes, I'm not going to use the shorts line. I'm going to pretend that the box starts up here. The box looks like this. And we can see the bottom plane like this. We can just barely see the front of the knee. This front of the box looks like this. Of course, the box is tapered. It's wider here and narrower here, just due to the structure of the leg. The knee is much smaller than the hips. I'm going to erase this line because it's too far down. It needs to be a lot closer this bottom plane. There we go. Shade that in. Just for fun, I can shade this plane in as well. I can ask myself the same question about the bottom half of the leg. I think we can just barely see the bottom plane of it due to its rotation. So what I will do here is have a box that's like this where we can just barely see that bottom plane like that. I'll even shade it in right now, get that done early, and we can't see this side of the ankle. So it's kind of like this. That's what this box looks like. The back leg is hidden. So let's move up to the arm. Once again, I'll ghost out this part of the torso box because I'll be drawing over it. But leave it in. Leave it somewhat visible. Again, that all helps when it comes to training your brain to see in three dimensions. Now, again, we're way above the horizon line, so there's no way I'm going to see the top plane of this box, but what planes am I going to see? Well, I think the corner of the box would be here. Again, I'm just looking at the shadows, going back to the figure. I'm just looking at this shadow here. That tells me that there's a plane change there. So if I'm simplifying things down to a box where there's only so many planes, I pretty much know that I need to have a plane change on this part of the arm. In this case, I can do the whole arm because it's a straight arm. I can do it all in one box, but if I wanted to break the box into two, I would just do that. Of course, the shoulder is wider than the wrist and wider than the elbow. The whole box gets tapered. Let's just throw this in a tone. While we're here, let's throw this side of this box in a tone. Hopefully, you can see the three D effect we're getting already or the three D understanding that we're getting. I'll hide the figure in a second once I'm done, and we can see the full results of our study. Now, hands are incredibly complicated, but you can boil them down to boxes. Essentially the palm area that we see here. This is the dorsal side of the palm, the part that faces up, is just a tapered box. We're just barely able to see the bottom plane of it. Then those fingers are clenched. They're bending under the hand. I'm not even going to bother with them. I can just leave this drawing alone like that, I think. Let's get the other arm in. In this case, we can see the top plane of the arm. It's like that. The forearm is hiding the end of this box, but I think it's somewhere like this. Okay I'll shade in this part of the box. By the way, let me just pause here and remind you, you can see why I'm not using vanishing points. Every single box would have different vanishing points and it's just not even worth it. But the horizon line concept is helpful. Anyway, let's get this forearm in. This is tricky. Let me go back to the model. What plane of the box can we see? Again, always look to see if there's shadows. There's a shadow on this part of the arm, just barely. That means the form is turning and we're able to see this plane getting shadow. That means that we need to be able to see this plane of the box ever so slightly because that's the size of the shadow that we were seeing. Now, we're not able to see the bottom of the elbow, so we're not able to see the bottom plane of the box. It's also a way above the horizon line, so that adds up as well. Let me once again ghost out this box, draw this box over it. There we go. There's our box. Then again, the hand, you can just make a tapered box for the palm part, and the fingers too, it's like it's the same thing. It's just a box you can see the bottom plane of. You know what, don't even worry about the thumb. Just group it all in as one boxy massive fingers. Two things left. The head, which I've oddly left out. Usually, I start with the head, I guess, not this time. But the head is pretty easy. They can be broken down into a box as well. The corner of the box is where the temple is right there and where the corner of the eye is and the corner of the chin. You can draw this continuous edge that connects those things. It is a bit bent. That box can be a little bit bent, if you want it to be. Now, we can see the underside of her jaw. Let me just hide this again. We can see the underside of her jaw extremely clearly. Again, why? Well, mostly because we're below the horizon line. Actually, that's the exclusive reason. She's not looking down or up or anything like that. Her head is pretty straight. The only reason we're able to see under it is because her head is above the horizon line. We need to make sure that our box goes this way. And we are able to see that bottom plane of the box, and we'll just end the box up here. Now, we're not able to see the top plane of the box for the same reason. It's too far above the horizon line for that. The next is pretty simple. We can see that front plane of it. It's like this. Let's just shade that in. Obviously, don't worry about the hair, leave it out. And as a last step, let's get that back leg in. I'll ask myself once again, what planes can we see? It is a pretty flat on view of the leg. But I'm pretty sure the way I see it anyway, we can see the plane change on this side. It's very narrow. What I will do is start with this line, which I know is continuous because we can't see the backside of the box. So it's like this. Then I'll get to where I think this is and then there's the barest glimpse of this plane. Here goes down to the ankle. We'll shade that in. I'll erase it here, so it goes behind that leg. Oh, and the feet, of course. Let's just end this box here. The feet are classically drawn as tapered boxes. Tapered box meaning if you had a box form like this, the foot instead would be like this a a wedge shape. In here, you can almost always trace the contour of the foot from the back to the bottom. And then that wedge, we can just barely see the top plaintiff her shoe. It's like, here's the wedge like that. Let's just shade this face in. As far as picking which face to shade, it doesn't matter. Just pick one. And you notice, I'm not even consistent with it. Like over here, I shaded the left face, over here, I shaded the right face. It doesn't matter. We're not doing lighting here. This is like educational shading, if you want to call it that. It's just to help clarify plane changes, not to show lighting. Way, this foot, same thing, let's just trace the outer borders of the shoe there. Then once again, just like the first shoe, we can see the well, I guess what's the bottom plane now because her foot is oriented this way, and then we can shade it in. There we go. That's it. We're done. Just to see the full results of our work. There we go. It's definitely not the most appealing drawing in the world, but it is extremely three dimensional. Everything feels like it fits together in space. Because I traced over the model, I got the same gesture that the model actually had in the photograph. That'll be a bit harder to come by when we're not tracing, but we'll get there in just a second. I forgot to shade in this part of the head box, so let's put that in. I would call this a more advanced version of the exercises we've already been doing. It's only more advanced because they conform to a figure. But drawing these boxes individually in space is not more advanced than what we've been doing. That's the beauty of it. Here's a page from GlenVilpu's book, the Vilpou drawing manual. Now, I was not taught directly by GnVilpu but my teacher was one of his protegees, let's say. My earliest drawing days, I learned in the Glen Vilpou method, which really informs the way I teach today. I'm looking at the figure at the very bottom there. The nice thing about learning to draw with boxes is first of all, you don't need to do a comprehensive full figure study. You can just start playing around with rotating forms and building them together in space, going box by box here because you only have to deal with six faces, of which only a few are visible at any given angle. This box drawing technique is probably the maybe aside from gesture that most revolutionized my drawing. This is the thing that made me understand that drawing doesn't have to be you putting down finished lines every time, that there is a structure to be had first. I'm drawing this box that covers the torso. This is a really interesting twisted box. I first like to start with getting the faces that aren't overlapped or cut off or anything. The two faces I've drawn, the top face here and the side face here. They're both fully visible, save for the top face getting cut off by the head, I guess, but we can pretty easily imagine where that goes. I'm drawing behind the form to find the other side of that box. The other side of that box is right here. That's where the corner is. Notice that contra line doesn't come down like that. That gives the box too much volume on this side here. That contra needs to bend back, and therefore it comes out from behind like this, and then we connect it like that. These shapes are starting to look a bit odd without just a bit of basic shading. Even Glenvilpu there did his shading at this stage. He just did it with hatching with a pen, and there's a very limited bit of this backplane we can also see due to the twisting. There we go. If we wanted to, we could gently shade in that backplane as well. The glen Fporawing does not include hips or maybe the torso covers the hips. I'm going to draw a little hip box here, which comes out like this, I think. There we go. Let's shade in the top face and the side face. Then now we can find the leg and this leg is not bent or anything like that, so it's easy to draw. Just make sure that you are connecting your lines to theoretical vanishing points in the distance. See this line here has an angle and this top line here is an angle, that's different. That means they will appear to be existing in a perspective, a cohesive three D space. I'm modifying this figure a little bit from the glen drawing, by the way. Vpu has added a bit of a calf muscle box here, which is an interesting addition. We will go with that on ours as well. There we go. Let's shade in the front face, top face. The Vpu drawing doesn't even have the other leg, but let's put it in here. Sometimes it's nice to maybe gesture where you want it to go somewhere like that, just the simplest outline, sorry, not outline, the simplest indication of what's going to be there. From there, it's not difficult to construct a box. Again, I'm thinking about the horizon line. Where would the horizon line be on this figure? I think it's up here somewhere. If we were to project our eyes straight toward the figure, where would it collide? I think it's up there. I'm just realizing I made a perspective error. This neck is pushed too far back on the shoulders. It's also a bit too small, let's make it a bit bigger, bring it down about here. Okay. There we go. Anyway, because we are below the horizon line here, it should be very clear to see the top plane of that box, especially since the box is not rotated upward or anything. Let's pick some faces in here to shade. Shading always makes the drawing look just that little bit more graphic and appealing and maybe even a bit more three D. And we'll get just the lower leg coming down, say like this, ending like that, we're going to be able to see the bottom plane of this box because of the rotation of the box. We're not going to be able to see the top plane. I'm going to modify my lines here. Then the foot is that wedge shape, that's like this. There we go. Shade in some of our planes as we always do. I'll keep it consistent this time. How about that? Shade in the side planes. And of course, I didn't shade in that side plane. That's okay. I don't think I have the perspective to draw the foot going down because it wouldn't work. I could draw the vanishing point in perspective grid, but I just know that the perspective grid goes like this on this guy, something like that. So because of the way I've drawn this foot, this foot can't do what it's doing in the pups. It needs to be on the ground, that is flat on the ground, like this, and that allows the perspective grid to line up properly. If I wanted the foot to be doing what it's doing in the Glen Vpu drawing, I would have had to reposition this foot to be much lower. That foot would have to be down here. Let's just leave this figure armless. I want to direct your thinking that the point of this chapter is not to draw finished figures all the time. Just start practicing the rotation of boxes in the form of a figure because that always helps you keep things like proportion in mind and motion and things like that. Drawing just plain boxes without context is good. It's a good practice, but you should graduate to figures pretty soon and not just stay in abstract box land forever. This is a good figure. I can feel the pose. I could pose my own body this way if I wanted to. I like the twisting action going on, and I even changed the reference a little bit, and that's always a good thing as well. Because with reference, there's a tendency to copy. If you can change the reference, it just means that you're engaging in the material that much more. If you're ever in a bind as to finding poses to draw, just search for Spider Man. He's probably the best posed superhero that there is at least for drawing practice. His poses are both human yet really flexible as to create a lot of movement, and he's not overly muscled either. He's a lean guy. Drawing Spider Man is actually pretty good for study. This is his head box with a little cross hair in there. Notice how on a box, the cross hair is just go straight, unlike the egg, which went around. The cross hair on a box just go straight because after all, the box is flat on each side. This box is interesting. It's pretty straight on. I can only see two planes, the top and the side there. You can maybe see this plane. I wonder if that can go there. If it is there, it's a very foreshortened plane. Of course, the neck is hidden by the fact that the head is tilted down. But let's get this top of the shoulders box, which ends here. It crosses the head and neck area and ends about here. When I say ends about here, I'm just doing this by comparing to the original. This point appears to be the intersection point that I see in the reference itself. The wider you make this box, the more built the figure will be. If you're drawing the incredible hulk, you would really extend this box out for huge shoulders. This is all a proportion game as well, and drawing boxes will get you to draw good proportions in time. Now, we can't really see the arc of his back because his front arm is covering it, but he's posed like this. I think I'll end this box here because I want to make room for a hip box like this. That box is rotated like this, going out this way. The hips are different. The hips appear rotated this way. When I draw this hip box, I have to make sure it is slightly different in rotation. I let me just get rid of this arrow. The hip box looks more like this. I'll shade the top to separate it from the torso. The hip box looks more like this. It's occurring to me that maybe I made my torso box just a bit too long, so I'll just cut into it like this. There we go, so I don't lose too much volume in the hip box. Let's give these guys just a bit of basic shading as we go, shading down the right side in this case. Now, one leg is way out there and the other leg is way over here. What's interesting about this leg is it's quite foreshortened, meaning it's coming toward us in space. As I always do, I'm going to ghost out what's behind it. Let's draw a box that goes from here. And we're just barely able to see the top plane of that leg as it goes up, and that leg is quite foreshortened. What I'm going to do is ignore the muscle. There's quite a bit of muscle there in his hamstring area. I'm going to ignore that and just get a foreshortened leg like this. That knee appears quite big in comparison to that same box at the waist because that leg is really coming forward. You'll find this a lot with superhero art pushing that foreshortening. I've pushed it here even further in my study of it. It's not quite this foreshortened in the reference. Then I would say that lower leg comes down like this. This time we're able to see a pretty clear side and front plane. I'll do the glen Vpu thing and go out for the calf muscle, ghost out what's behind here, and the foot is just that, again, that wedge shape. Notice how the pose appears to be filled with energy. There's a certain amount of torque and twist in this pose. Largely, that is thanks to that initial torso box we put in, but it's actually more than that. It's the relationship of rotation between the torso box, the hip box. Then, of course, the dynamic nature of this pose is really helped by this leg being super foreshortened. Let's get the other leg here. This leg is not foreshortened. And I think we can see the top plane of it. Kind of like this. The only reason it looks like we can see the bottom plane of the leg in the reference is because a leg is not a box, it's more round. As it turns under, we're starting to get a shadow. But if I were to convert this to a box, I can't at the same time, see the top plane and the bottom plane. Unless the box is twisted or something, which this isn't. So I have to choose one plane to see. And just based on where I think the horizon line is on this pose, which is up here. Maybe it's a bit lower, maybe about the shoulder level. But anyway, well enough above the leg that we're going to be able to see that top plane. Again, the horizon line stuff is really helpful when it comes to constructing figures out of basic geometry like this. Let's shade in the side plane here. Now, I can't see the lower leg here in the reference. It's cut off by the frame, but it looks like it's coming out somewhere about here. I have to keep in mind my perspective grid for where this foot is going to be. Because we know that this leg is coming forward, there has to be enough perspective room for this angle to happen. If this leg were too low and this angle were straight, suddenly, that means this lower leg is twice as long as it should be. Because this leg is further back in space, it also has to be higher in two D space, because if this were the horizon line, the closer you are to the horizon line, the further back you are in space. I'll put the leg somewhere about here. That also probably means, by the way that this box is too big. I'm going to shrink it and maybe put it like that. I'll just invent this box that goes down here where you can see a clear side plane, which I'll shade in now. Okay. You know what? That doesn't work. It looks like the leg is broken. Let's get rid of that. This is good. I could have edited that mistake out of this video, but I make mistakes like that all the time, particularly when not drawing from reference. So it's important that I show you that as well. The bottom of this leg would come from underneath the first box like this, we'd see less of the front plane to match the amount we see of the top plane there. So we'd see less of the front plane, more of the side plane. Okay. And that foot would fall somewhere in there, which leaves a good healthy amount of perspective for us. By the way, one little trick that I use a lot even my finished art is just put a little cast shadow under the figure from foot to foot, like this. It's not there to be a shadow as much as it is to show the perspective, the perspective grid line that would exist there. Then the viewer's brain by itself fills in the horizon line because we're just so used to seeing things in perspective. And if we have the horizon line and we have this line, suddenly, our brain is able to fill in a perspective grid. It's magic that way. Here, I'm just tweaking little things about the pose. Of course, I didn't draw any arms. Let's put those arms in. Here's a shoulder or the deltoid, which is part of the shoulder. And that arm comes down and it's going to hit the ground somewhere just behind the front foot, somewhere about here, like heel level, this arm is extended straight, so I'll just use one box for this all the way down. That arm is getting a bit long. I'll make sure I end it about there. I'm differing from the reference a little bit because I've added my own foreshortening of that leg. I've made that leg come out pretty far farther than the reference. Now for the palm and fingers, which just like a tapered box similar to the foot. Unfortunately, all of my nice boxes behind this arm have to go. Because they are behind the arm. But what's good about this is I was accountable to them, I know where they are in space, even though we can't see them. That's a truism of drawing in general. A good artist will know where things are that are not visible in the frame. That just makes the drawing or the painting or whatever the illustration more cohesive all the way around. You feel like there's more there that the artist knows that isn't necessarily visible to the viewer. The viewer will feel when that's the case and we trust your art more. Now, this back arm is foreshortened the other way, moving away from us, I should say. This box goes like this. Maybe I should pause right here and say, a foreshortened box is simply a box that it's exaggerated. The difference in size between the two ends is exaggerated. This is a foreshortened box. It looks like it's coming more directly toward us or directly moving away from us. The thing to keep in mind with foreshortening is because you're dealing with compressed space, this box I just drew was actually very long. If you want the box to be shorter, you have to make sure that you shorten it. That's why it's called foreshortening. It's shorter depth wise, because it's coming toward us so aggressively, every little millimeter of depth it has represents quite a bit of dimensional space. You just got to be mindful that you cut it off at the correct spot, which can be done and learned through experimentation. This arm here is foreshortened, not as much as the box I just drew as the example. But I do have to make sure that these lines are a bit exaggerated in their angles. So it looks like it's moving away from us. And we'll shade one face as we always do. Then we'll get that forearm, which is a nice straight box. This one should be pretty easy. This box is not foreshortened. Because it's not foreshortened, it appears longer this way than this box did this way because this box is foreshortened, this box is not. Shade this in the hand, much like the foot is a wedge shape like this. If you wanted to draw a few fingers, you could imagine them as another box sitting beneath the hand. I'll just throw a little thumb box in here at the bottom because it will look strange. Once again, my head is too small. This is actually a common problem that I have. I always make heads too big or too small. It's rarely ever that I get it perfect the first time. If I'm working on paper, I have to be extra careful, especially if I'm working in watercolor or something. But generally, once I have the body and I do have to resize my heads. I'll throw that there and it can go a bit down. The more down it goes, the more it looks like that neck is really flexing and he's able to through his dexterity, bring that head down like a stretch or something. There we go. There's our finished Spider Man box drawing. 9. Deconstructing Pro Character Design: A few demonstrations ago, I didn't start out with boxes when I drew that sample figure, the dancer. Instead, I started out with ovals, two ovals, one for the upper torso and one for the hips. And I'm thinking you might be confused as to why I suddenly switched to boxes. What's the material difference here? Well, it's not much. The thing about these round forms is you can draw them a bit quicker and to make them dimensional, of course, you can very easily shoot your cross contours down and I can even develop a twist in this one by doing this. I can do all this without having to figure out the planes of a box. This works because the cross contour is a center line defining the center of these forms. If I were now to construct a box on these, it's pretty clear how this box should go. This one has a minor twist to it. It's not a twist, actually, it's just a bend. It's bending laterally, bending this way, not twisting. And this box here for the hips. Now, the hips can't bend, they're static. They can rotate, but they can't bend like the top box is there. There's no spine there to bend, so it's a flat box. But the orientation of this box goes out this way, whereas the chest is going out that way. Whether you draw these bean or round shapes or boxes doesn't really matter. I do recommend starting with boxes, though, depending on what stage you're at with your drawing because boxes have that inherent dimension to them, and they tend to be a bit easier to evaluate. But I'll just get rid of these box strokes here, leaving behind just the round forms. One thing boxes don't really do for you is they don't really encourage the whole squash and stretch thing. Like boxes don't look fleshy at all. They're very mechanical. You might want to graduate into drawings that have a little bit more elasticity. There's that accordion principle there that we talked about. With this, we can start seeing the effect of more of a human torso pretty quickly here. I know where the center lines are so I can go around these forms here. Instead of say boxes for arms, I'll turn this box into a cylinder that goes around like this. I'm just inventing this, by the way, if it wasn't obvious, and I can start finding a pose. Maybe this person is gesturing outward like this. Now, when I draw these cylinders, you can still think about the box. If I'm looking at the cylinder here. Well, there's a point there, a point at the bottom, and all you have to do is imagine an invisible point right there, which makes the box. A cylinder is really not different from a box. It's an iteration of a box. It's helpful to be able to see it both ways because some forms will ask for box forms, and it can be fluid, like for example, an elbow is fairly square. What you might want to do is turn your cylinders into boxes right at the elbow joint. Let me just get rid of some of this extra noise here so we can be clear about what we're doing. Yeah, you might want to turn your cylinders into boxes right at the elbow joint or at the knee joint, for example, is another common one so that we can get a sense of rigidity there and maybe even at the wrist, where those bones are closer to the surface, and we can really see how the blocky form of the wrist works and that can lead into say a hand or something. Even up on this wrist, let's find that knowing where that box corner is, we can find some approximation for where the hand is. Now, for the legs, we can simply construct cylinders coming down here. Maybe this leg goes down this way to maintain the figures balance, like we talked about in the gesture. Here for the knee, you might want to split this cylinder into a box on the way down to the knee here because knees are very boxy joints. Wherever the bones are close to the surface of the skin, you'll tend to see a more boxy form, something with harder edges. But then we can reconvert it back into a cylinder really quickly and gesture our way down this form, constructing the round cylinder form as we go. Okay. And we'll make the foot kind of standing on the sort of tiptoe kind of thing. And this leg, which goes behind the other leg, it comes down here, and this foot is going to be more seen in three quarter view. I think it's a good idea to start inventing figures during your reference study as well, intertwined them, where you start running into problems is where you need to patch up your study. For example, if I'm trying to fit the neck onto the top of this box here and if you're having trouble with that, you don't know where the neck goes, that just means you need to study more from reference. Then once you do those studies, try and plug those studies into something from imagination and then see how far you get. Even do a study from reference and then try and draw it again from your head, seeing what you remember from your studies. We need a head box and maybe the head is tilted this way. Now for the head, I do favor a box. Because the head is actually quite box like. I have another class called understanding and painting the head. One of the core concepts in that class is something I always come back to anyway is how the head is like a box, and it truly is. Even in this quick rough drawing, we have a figure that is twisting in space, limbs articulating in different directions. It's an awkward pose. I let this pose evolve as I went. I didn't plan this pose when I started. It's a awkward pose, but it does have proportion direction. It's got some movement to it. I initially drew this figure too large for the frame, and as a result, I made the legs too short. I'm just adjusting that now. That's okay. Fixing your mistakes is just as good, if not better than getting it right the first time. It's not realistic to expect yourself to get it right the first time. The more you draw, the more you'll get in the zone and the more apt you will be to get things right the first time. But the whole point of study is to make mistakes, find where you're making those mistakes, and then correct them. Then that leads to better and better decisions being made from the outset. We could even think about how some basic clothing would wrap around the forms like a tank top would wrap around the box slash egg form, whatever you choose to do. And we'll just make this a skin tight tank top right now because skin tight clothing acts like cross contours defining the forms as they wrap around in certain directions. If this were a belly top, it would probably wrap around like this. And you can just quickly shade in the clothing forms just for clarity here. All right. This figure construction exercise represents the next step in your three D forms drawing journey, trying to construct a figure from your imagination. Don't worry if the pose is awkward like this. After all, we're not using gesture yet. We're not combining those yet. Place your concern instead about making sure things look connected, like they share the same three dimensional space, they live in the same environment and that the overall proportions are okay, the leg doesn't appear too thick or too thin or too wide, things like that. Here is a fantastic example by Glenville Pu. One thing I really like is he constructs the torso with the box like we've done a bunch of times already, but he combines it with the concept of the squash and stretch principle by anticipating the box's squish right in here as the flesh presses it upwards, and then he's got the box for the hips here, rotated heavily this way. And that box comes around and down, and then it's very faint in the drawing a bit low res, but you can see a gesture line connecting them. In this case, there is no twist. The two forms are still both pointing outwards. It's just there's a heavy bend, a bend being this lateral move. A twist would be if the torso box was oriented in a totally different orientation than the hip box. This would be a twist, basically shoulders and therefore upper torso pointing this way and hips pointing that way. That's a twist. We are not dealing with that though in this drawing. Let me just put that up here for reference. This drawing simply has a bend. What I like about this though is he's drawn the next stage and given you that fleshy feel of a stomach here, a belly button, you can see how accessible this would be to add anatomical details or clothing or muscles or whatever the figure has that you happen to be drawing. And also notice he's using cylinders for the legs. He starts with a cylinder coming down more square, and then for the inner thigh, he adds a bit of mass to it connecting it with the cylinder going this way. My line over here is way too far in. It needs to come out here. What I like about this is there's a cylinder, but it's converted into a box form for the knee. Then we have another cylinder form that converts itself to a box form. If I were to finish the cylinder, it would be about there. And because the knee is bent, that means that this cylinder overlaps the upper leg comes down like this. Let me just ghost out what's behind as I always do. And that foot is tucked in under the crotch area, so we have this kind thing. I love how Glenvillp has indicated that boxy knee. It this big box form that really does a good job of selling the rigidity of the knee joint. My knee box joint looks a bit high because I didn't include the leg muscle there. There's a shoulder that starts here, that arm comes down in a cylinder. This arm is slightly bent, so we'll stop the cylinder there at the elbow, sorry, and we'll box off the elbow. While I'm here, I'll just ghost this stuff out. We'll box off the elbow so we can make clear that this is a more rigid joint there and that box comes in a little bit as the arm bends. Then the cylinder form continues behind the leg here. We should always know where it ends. Remember, we should know what's invisible. That arm needs to end somewhere about here, and if there is a hand, it would be laying somewhere in here in line with the buttox area. And then we can go ahead and try and fit a neck. The neck more or less fits into the top of the torso box in these figure constructions, and the head is like a box comes up. For this study, we'll be content at just leaving it as a box. It's a box that bows outward for the face. When you put in your eye line, make sure it's in the middle of that box, the nose, and eye line. If you want it to be a bit fancy, you can cut in on a three quarter view to indicate the eye socket and cheek bone, creating this little V pocket there. You can even shoot a little mark halfway down from the eye socket to the chin and that's where your nose is. We're instantly starting to build on these structures. And did I make that head too big? I think I did. Let's just bring this down. I have more accuracy when I'm not talking. I swear. Now, the Glenville podran cuts off at the lower leg, but we can put it in. We even know there is a calf muscle there, so we can approximate a little bulge out for the calf muscle, and there is no bulge out on this side, at least it's not as much. In fact, this side is laying flat on the floor, so I'll use a straight. And you notice we have this perspective grid, right? Because this perspective is pretty tame, that is, it's not anywhere near fish eye or anything extreme like that. We can pretty safely assume that this vanishing point is somewhere way off the page. I'm tracing these lines to a hypothetical vanishing point that is somewhere way off the page, and that means I know that this foot is correctly placed somewhere around here. Okay. If you can, I do recommend getting yourself into a life drawing classroom where there's an actual model posing. The model could be nude or just barely clothed or even fully clothed, maybe with some tight clothes so you can actually draw these body forms. But this is the thing that will really help you get reps in. Of course, you can get reps in drawing from other drawings and from photos like I've been doing in this class. But I know that it's been super helpful for me over the years, whenever possible to get myself into an actual life drawing situation. There's just something a bit more direct visual connection between you and these forms that's a bit harder to simulate with drawing from photos and other drawings. Anyway, there's our finished study. So we've drawn a few human figures. Let's now apply all these techniques to a cartoon design. This being a piece of character art from the Pixar film onward, drawn by Matt alti. Now, because this is a cartoon, which is a caricature of normal human form. I got to make sure I'm careful when I block in these initial gestures and lay ins and forms, and the eyes are up high, so I'll put this cross contour in here. I am using a bit of gesture to initially figure this out. This is the first time I've combined gesture in this chapter with the three D form stuff. The body conforms to a pretty clear C curve, the whole way down. The feet are somewhere down here. There's a bit of perspective, which I'll plumb line right now between the feet. Just reminding myself that this line is the floor plane that he's standing on. I already know I'm drawing this too big, so I'll shrink it down a little bit. His arm is somewhere up here doing something like that, and the other arm is doing something like this. Landmarking where the hands are. Now I can landmark where I think the belt line is and the tilt of the waist, which is pretty straight, and I'll also landmark or just preliminarily plot out the shoulder line, which is also fairly straight. The dynamic nature of this pose comes in the form of this C curved chest. He's thrusting out his chest in a proud display of whatever it is he's holding. I haven't actually seen this movie, so I'm not sure what he's holding. Some magic scepter. I don't know. Let's start constructing forms. I'm not going to use boxes. I'm going to use my oval forms. You may have seen other artists use this, what they'll tell you is this is actually a blocking or approximation of the rib cage. The rib cage being primarily responsible for the form we have in our chest. The rib cage is the largest volume we have under our skin there. What Glen ilku would even do is he would plot where the sternum is right about here. We saw this early on in the gesture chapter, but here, Glenilpu would actually take it further and plot out the shape of the rib cage itself, a general shape, of course. The reason that's useful is, I don't really care where the ribs are. That's not going to help me in this drawing. But knowing where the rib cage is as a volume tells me where the fleshy area of the stomach is versus where it meets the harder hip bones here. I know from a character design standpoint that I can play with a lot of squash and stretch in this area. The belly can come out here, which it does in the design. There can be a bit of squash here, which there also is in the design. But for now I'll edit those lines out because I don't want to get ahead of myself. We have these volumes for the hips. It's a squashed oval form, that's how I'm seeing it. Because this guy's proportions are overall condensed, it's not regular adult proportions, it's somewhere between a teenager and an adult. I'm going to make the hips a bit closer to the rest of the torso. Now, my midline was blocked in with my gesture and I do that often. I use my gesture that initial C curve as a midline, and that is true here. But I'm going to erase this stuff because it's becoming unclear what this is. I want to keep this to do with forms, not gesture and those initial lines were gesture block ins. I want to keep this form feeling consistent. This is where it wraps under right here for the crotch area. Okay. Perfect. At least I think we're on the right track. Now what we can do is maybe block in where this arm is. My gestural landmark of the hand is pretty accurate, I think. I'll make the wrist cylinder about there. And I'll draw that cylinder up connecting it like this. The arm is a little bit angled, and then I will draw the other side of the cylinder. Now, the actual character, the shape of that arm is more out like this than it comes back in, but that's a shape thing. This chapter is not about shape. The next chapter is. This chapter is about three D forms. Let's keep that at the forefront of our mind. I'll draw some cross contours here to help me understand what the flow of these forms is, the ellipses that we're seeing. There we go. Now the hand can just be a boxy form for now. Something like this. I can even shade in a small plane here on the side of the cylinder. Now, let's get the legs in. The legs are always branching off the bottom of the hips. There's a cylinder here and it comes down. Again, I don't care that he's wearing shorts. I can overlay that later. Now, this cylinder is interesting. It bulges outward at the end, usually people's ankles taper in. This character ankles taper out. The bottom of that cylinder is here. To drop behind that cylinder would be like that and behind this top cylinder would be like that. And that's actually a little bit too broad. It probably would be a lot narrower, something like this. Then the foot is also a squashed cylinder, something like that. It's pretty continuous with the ankle. Something like that. Those legs look a little too long, I can adjust that later. Let's just get the other leg in first. The cylinder is the opposite of the first one, and I'll landmark or plot ahead to where I want to go with it, lining myself up with the two ankles, and then I'll just draw the outer contours of the cylinder, which is easy enough. And now for the foot, we've got a cylinder and a squashed cylinder here. That again, just like the other foot is pretty continuous with the rest of the leg. We've got this. I think what I'll do at this point just to keep myself on track is just scale this down to where I think it should go, something in that range. Now the other arm is behind his body, but it is very useful to know where that shoulder would be somewhere about here, the ellipse for that shoulder, coming down to where the elbow bends here. There's that cylinder, now we have a wider cylinder for the forearm coming up like this. Look at this. Here's our chance to box it off for the wrist, which leads into the hand, which is also quite boxy. That hand is pretty foreshortened, it's coming right toward us. It's like this. Then what I can do here is just again, box off the rest of the fingers. We don't need to worry about finger articulations in this level of our drawing journey. This is the fundamental part. When you are anywhere in the beginner to entering the intermediate level, your drawing should be much your drawing practice should be much more concerned with sound fundamentals than little details. That's true even at the professional level. The only thing that makes a professional difference, a professional will be able to think of this stuff and just keep it in their mind as they draw more finished strokes. A professional may be able to put in details right away because they know the understructure that they're working on top of even if they didn't draw it. Now's the time to notice that this arm is too far floating to the left, it's rotated up and it's over here. Intersecting the head a little bit more. We'll landmark where the nose is, like this, drawing my own little boxy form for the nose, like my own little wedge shape there. I'm certainly not interested in drawing the whole character's face in all of its design. We'll get to more of that in later chapters, but I do want to understand where his neck is and his neck is this big cylinder that almost connects to the jaw. It's like this. While I'm here, let's determine where the side of the box is for the head. It's like this if I had to approximate it like a rounded squishy box for the head. He's wearing some clothing, and this is interesting. The clothing is a great way to wrap elastic bands around our model. His vest wraps around the arm like this. Because it hangs off the body, it comes back and wraps around the rib cage, and we're looking up at this garment. This is like an ellipse that we're seeing the underside of there. Whenever you're seeing the underside of something like this ellipse, it's a no brainer to just shade it in dark to make it look like we're seeing the underside of that. Then we go around and I know my proportions are a bit different than the design, but again, that's okay. This vest is a bit longer in the original drawing. It's in the right general ballpark for this type of study. Now, this part, again, wraps around the rib cage. Let me undo that line. You notice I didn't do this. It doesn't go down straight. That would be flat. That would be ignoring the volume of the rib cage you put in. It has to go around that form, and this is bothering me. Let me just fix this. It needs to be a bit longer. What I can actually do is go all the way around with it like this. And then I can find my other side that way. Of course, the other side of the vest wraps around and we can just barely see its curvature from this angle. And he's got that collar which folds out. This reminds me of the twisted box planes we were drawing in the previous section. It twists around like a little bridge form. Again, just like we were drawing, wraps under. Because it wraps under, let's just shade this darker, just like we did with the ellipse over here. He's got a T shirt. But to draw that T shirt, we're going to have to fill in some contour stuff right in this area. But we have our forms to do that, and we know there's a bit of squash here so we can get a little accordion effect for the squash as it feeds down into the hips. Then what we'll do is we'll just wrap an ellipse right around because he's thrusting his chest out, the shirt is pushed outward here. This is not in the drawing, but we might be able to see just barely underneath that ellipse. And then the stomach comes out. Then the belt line of his shorts. The top of his shorts are an ellipse the other way. See if I can pick a bright green color so we can see it. Now this is right near the horizon line. If I were to imagine a horizon line on him, it's right in here. That's why we get the upward ellipse on the shirt and the downward ellipse on the belt line, although the belt line is closer to straight because it's right near that horizon line. The T shirt ellipse is more angled upward because he's thrusting his body upward. Let me just do one thing here. The legs are still a bit elongated. I just want to bring this in. That pelvis is really, really squished in this design, the proportions have been changed. It's much more of a squat shape. Then for the bottom of the shorts, let's just ballpark or landmark where they're going to end right about there. Maybe the other side right about here. This is just an ellipse. The ellipse goes a bit downward because we're below the horizon line now is a bit down and we have this pair of shorts here. I think this ellipse actually does go up because the leg is rotated subtly toward us. This cylinder might have the ellipses going this way. At least that's how I'm reading it. Then the other ellipse for the other side of the shorts is here and it comes up. At the crotch area, and there we go. We've overlaid these forms on there. Okay. So again, I know this doesn't exactly look like a pair of shorts. This is not actually how you draw shorts. It's the breakdown of forms that exists that you need to keep in mind if you were to be drawing this character. And of course, it's not just this character we're studying. We're practicing fundamentals that can apply to any drawing. Now what I can do is find similar ellipses for the socks, which are like this. Because of the rotation of the legs, this informs the direction of the ellipses. Just for fun, I'll put in the shoe laces area. The shoe laces are interesting because they just wrap around the form. The wrap around the top plane of the shoe. Shoes are actually really fun to draw for that reason. So many details of the shoe are just things that describe the basic form of not just these shoes of real shoes. Of course, let's not forget the thing he's holding, whatever that thing is. One of these days, I'll get around to watching this movie, and I'll just make it a cylinder from there to there. We'll shade it in just to differentiate it from the rest of the figure. He's got those cuffs around his wrist. Obviously, the cuffs are just a cylinder, a literal cylinder wrapping around the wrist, showing you the dimension. Let's get a mid line down the head, something like this. It goes up for the nose down, and then down. What that mid line can help you with is the placement of eyebrows. The break of the eyebrow coincides with the temple, which is this plane we've defined here already. That's where the break of the eyebrow is this eyebrow here would break around the corner of the head that we can't see. We have something like this. I'm not going to bother with the hair, but it extends past his head, something like that. Again, this is not the time to draw hair. We'll get into that in shape in Chapter three, which we're just about to get into. Oh, and he has a short sleeved shirt on. Let's get a cylinder here or an ellipse, I should say, that extends past the arm and curls up a little bit. Then that can just come down feeding into the vest. It's useful to draw different types of clothing in different colors like a vest in blue and a shirt in red and shorts in green, so you're fully separating your forms. It's like naming your layers. It's boring and tedious, but it helps with organization. There we go. I feel like I'm finally done this study. Now, you can see the difference between my drawing and the actual final drawing of the original artist is that the final drawing has stylistic flare. There's more interesting shapes happening. There are all these little details that really help sell this character's identity. My drawing is simply not concerned with any of that. I actively don't want stylistic shapes here. I want basic forms, and on that level, I would say that these two drawings, save for a few proportional differences, maybe, are very, very close. I would probably also guess that the artist who drew this, again, I'm pretty sure it was Matt alti did not actually have to draw what I just drew. But they did have to think about it. It's impossible to draw this well without thinking about these forms. You just will never get a design that's this consistent and graphically appealing and perspectively sound without these fundamentals being in place. All right. To end this chapter with perhaps one final piece of inspiration, I want to show you what mastery of three D form looks like. What you're seeing is individual frames of rough animation on scar by animator Andres Deja. As I scrub through these drawings, I'm sure you can detect that box like structure of scars head. The thing I specifically want you to look at here is how well Andreas Deja is able to rotate that box to ultimately craft an appealing performance for this character. Let me grab one still frame, say this frame here. Then I'll grab another still frame just a bit later, that one there. I'll bring both of these frames into photoshop to draw over. Starting with this one, if I were to draw the box over this head. It's a curved top, let's say. Then it tracks down the nose and the other side of that top face of the box is about here. Then we come down like this for the muzzle and in like that. The mouth would be a separate box shape that I'm not going to worry about right now. We're just looking at this top box. That's for that frame. Let's now draw the box on this frame. Again, it comes up this way, meets the brow, tracks along the nose, and it's a very narrow plane this time and coming down something like this. And back up there. It's like a brick. Less of a box. It's more like a brick. It's a box form though Now let's hide the drawings. We're just seeing those boxes on a white background, and I'll just move these out of the way. Look at the subtle difference in rotation. It's the same volume, the same brick, but this one is rotated like this and this one's rotated up a little bit, like that. Not to mention the fact that there's a whole character drawn on top of that box, but this is really the level of subtlety you can achieve when you gain confidence or even mastery over this drawing fundamental. I'm not saying you have to be an animator to do this. But imagine drawing your own characters, let's say, your own original characters for a book or a concept art, the ability to discern and therefore choose between subtle rotations like this. That's the subtlety and character and acting and posing. That's what will make someone really say, Wow. You know how to draw. It's this level of scrutiny over the three D forms, being able to differentiate from this rotation versus that rotation, and therefore, being able to iterate your drawing accordingly to find the best pose, let's say. Hopefully this inspires you as much as it inspires me. With that, we will end Chapter two and move on to Chapter three, where we'll talk about shape and design. 10. Chapter 3 - Shape and Design: Shape is probably the most fun of the drawing fundamentals because it's where we begin to wrap everything together for final presentation. There are so many things you can do with shape, so many different ways to use it, depending on your own aesthetics and style, really. But there are certain principles that tend to work across genres and styles, and we'll be focusing on those and how you can manipulate them and use them in your own work creatively. To show how they work, I'll be applying them over several different styles and examples. Let's dive in. I imagine most of you who are watching this class have seen my YouTube channel. That's probably how you found me in the first place. And on my YouTube channel, I have lots of videos about shape. So I imagine you've probably heard me talk about them before. This will be a deeper dive into shape than anything you've seen on my YouTube channel. But as far as a structure is concerned, I want to do something that I've never really done before, and that is, I want to compare amateur art to professional art. And before anyone wonders, this drawing on the left was drawn by one of my best friends. He drew it when he was a young kid. I think he was ten or 11 years old. And he still has them, and one day we were hanging out and he was showing me his old artwork. And I asked him if he would give me permission to use it in one of my videos, specifically as an example of things not to do. And he was more than happy to agree. I'll keep him anonymous, although he's not even a practicing artist today anymore, but I'd like to compare some of the shaped decisions made in this drawing with some of the shape decisions made in this drawing. I think that will provide a very clear checklist of things to do and to look for in your work. This drawing, by the way, is by Alessandro Barbuci, graphic novelist who did the Skydll series. The similarity in the last name is merely a coincidence. And I specifically chose one of it looks like a convention sketch. You can see it's signed to someone. This is clearly not a finished illustration that appears in his books, but a quick sketch that he probably drew in a few minutes. I chose that because it'll help bolster the idea that professionals think a certain way as compared to a non professional. Let's start with probably the most important thing I ever learned about shapes, and I'm sure you've heard this before. Keep it simple. The way you evaluate a simple shape is, I call it the kindergarten principle. If you gave a child a pair of scissors, could they cut out the shape. Let's start by looking at the leg here. I'll just trace it. This shape, as I trace it, you can probably see it just on the screen, but I can certainly feel it in my hand. There is a beautiful flow to it. It's a flowing river. I'm swept along by the current of this shape as it flows off the pen. I was just describing the feel of it there, but if you just look visually, there are not a whole lot of changes. The changes happen on a broad level. For example, it's thicker there and thinner there. It doesn't go from thick to thin to thick to thin. No, it's more of a sweeping change from top to bottom, thick to thin. Theoretical child with a pair of scissors, it wouldn't take much dexterity with that tool to literally cut this shape out of a piece of paper. To me, this passes the test of a simple shape. Now let's look at something that fails the test. Let's take a look at the dress area down here. Watch as I trace this shape. You see what I'm already having to do. I have to change the direction of my stroke ten different times to replicate the contour of the shape of the dress there. If I bring this over, you can starkly see the difference, right? That line I just drew there, you wouldn't call it simple at all. And you would never give that to a child to cut out. They wouldn't be able to do it. Geez, I wouldn't be able to do it. There's too many undulations, and you might ask, well, what's wrong with undulations? My answer to that would be, while they're not inherently bad, they don't help this type of art. The arts we're here to learn. They don't help you. They actively harm you. Because it creates too much information for the brain to process. You see a drawing is made of several shapes, even a simple drawing like this. Let's literally start counting them right now, we're all on the same page. There's a shape for the arm, a shape for this side of the chest, a shape for that side of the chest, a shape for the top, a shape for the stomach. There's a shape right in here, separated by these two lines. There's the shape for the leg we looked at, the shape for the back leg there, shape for the boot, shape for the lower leg. Sometimes things are broken into sub shapes. Like that whole hair form is a big shape. But then there are all these smaller little sub shapes in it. That are all equally contributing to the final piece. That hair might have five or six different shapes in it while being contained in one larger shape. There are a lot of shapes to look at in any given drawing. Keep in mind, this is a very simple drawing with relatively few shapes in it. Imagine now how many shapes are in this piece. This being a finished cover for one of the sky doll books. We're probably up in the hundreds of shapes for sure, if not thousands, when you start zooming in and counting not only like these big shapes here that are very easy to see. And by the way, look how beautifully simple that shape is. But no, that's just the bigger shapes. Then you have all the little shapes you're putting in there. For example, the shadow shape on the stomach that goes like this, this all being part of the shadow. This is also a shape and look how simple it is. But again, we're just talking about numbers of shapes here. All the little details that you put into a finished piece start contributing shapes. Like the little wrinkles in the clothing here. There's three shapes right there, four, five, six. Every little wrinkle in the clothing in this area is a little shape that your brain is required to process upon seeing this image, right down to this little detail in the arm, how it's like a robotic arm. It's got this little connection point here creating this little tiny shape that I'm coloring in blue right now. That little shape there requires just as much attention and oversight as the big sword like shape here. Simply because if it's a shape on your drawing, the viewer has to read it, and probably the easiest thing to ignore in your art is adding shapes to your work without oversight. Again, getting back to this, my whole thing, the thing I constantly judge my own work on, my own shapes on is if I'm going to add all these necessary shapes to my work, are they simple enough for the brain to read instantly because our brain is designed to read shapes. This is how our vision just works. We analyze shapes really, really quickly in order to discern what we're looking at. For example, I'm sure you instantly recognize that as Leonardo Dicaprio. But look how small that picture is. Morgan Weisling a painter I learned a lot from, called this the Yearbook principle because the photos in our high school year books are so tiny, yet we recognize everybody effortlessly. What you want to do in your art is create shapes that are recognizable that quickly. If I were to boil it down to a simple shape like a little square here, This is as simple as I could possibly draw this square. 9.9 out of ten times, that's the way to go. In general, there's no real good reason to draw the square like this. Now, I know that there are no rules to this. Maybe you want to draw a square that's refracted in water and maybe it looks like that. But I consider specific situations like that exceptions that prove the rule. In general, you want to find the simplest statement for your shapes. That's a catch all way to ensure that you're creating readable shapes. And if you're creating readable shapes shape after shape, you're on your way to a successful drawing. Going back to my friends drawing on the left there. The other thing not to do is over use symmetry. For example, the torso and waste is a very symmetrical shape, the breast area here, very symmetrical shapes. Look at this arm. I've heard people call this the marshmallow Look. I've also heard it called the sausage link effect, which I think is better. Creating too much symmetry appears to be a natural function of our muscles. I don't think I've ever encountered a beginning student who doesn't do this. Including me when I was new to this. For some reason, it's programmed into our brain to create symmetrical shapes. Let's look at the barbuci art on the right now. Let's look at that arm shape again. I'll try and draw it here. It flows up like this in a little curve before coming to a point at the elbow. It's actually a bit straighter here. Here we go. Something like that for that side. Notice the wide point of the shape is there. The other side has the wide point there. I will draw the other side of this arm shape. And it goes like this. Again, the wide point being here. Then the bottom of the arm tucks in like this. So what we have to contend with when we're drawing this arm, and this is true of many, many shapes you'll draw as part of body parts or landscapes or tons of other things is shapes will have symmetrical aspects to them. The triceps muscle in this arm is causing the bulging to happen here. Bulging on both sides in this case. But a little secret about nature is nature almost never makes symmetrical shapes. Almost never. What nature does instead is a principle that I like to call offset symmetry. Here you see how I identified the two wide points of the shape. The axis of that symmetry is not straight but tilted. It's offset symmetry. Let's go back to the leg that we already looked at. You can see how the two widest points of the leg which cross this line here are offset. We can see the exact same thing in the lower leg here. The two widest points crossing this line. For some reason, doing your shapes this way with offset symmetry is more pleasing to the eye. Probably because that's how nature generally works. Look no further than human anatomy. You can start by looking where the widest points of the shapes are. I hesitate to say the word always. But most of the time, these points are off axis, not perpendicular to the shape. And notice how these diagonal lines cross each other. Even that off axis nature is not repeated generally. What you're more likely to see in nature is one symmetry going like that, the other one going like that, et cetera. That is neighboring symmetries generally don't repeat. Over here on the deltoid muscle, it's like this. I guess this points to another principle which is change is generally good with your shapes, or maybe I should say non repetition. Avoiding repetition is generally good with your shapes. For example, if you find yourself making the sausage link effect in your shapes like this. This becomes uninteresting very quickly, and I think it's because since there's no change, your brain doesn't have to engage really, and when that happens, the art that you're making becomes forgettable because your viewer is actively not engaged in it. Notice I didn't say the word ugly. I'm not saying symmetrical shapes are ugly, they're just forgettable. To fix the sausage link effect, try and find ways of introducing difference in the shape. Difference in these three sections I just drew. But also now on the other side, how can I create the difference I did on the top contour, but without repeating the top contour? This bottom shape I just drew keeps you guessing much more than the top one. And therefore, I would argue it's more engaging. I've offset my axis here, here, and here. In this case, this line kind repeats with this line, but it's broken up by that line, so it's okay. If I really wanted to be a stickler for this stuff, which I often am, by the way, I do heavy editing of my own shapes in my work. First of all, I might make this opening here a bit offset itself, so it lies somewhere there and not in the middle like it was, and then maybe it's like this. Now, this is just a principle I'm showing you. I'm not actually trying to draw any literal thing with these shapes. Of course, we'll get into some drawing demos very soon, and I'll mention to you when I'm using this principle. But because you use shapes to draw everything in your work, you'll find avenues to use this principle all the time. If you're not mindful of it, you'll probably start creating symmetry, especially if you're more on the beginner side of drawing. The more advanced you get, the more this muscle memory will have been altered, and you'll almost never see a very good artist making symmetry by default. They'll have done the work to change that inner programming. The other thing to think about when you're drawing symmetry and shapes. If we're looking at this lower leg again, let me just trace my way down this side of the shape. Let me just show you over here. This is the one side of the leg. Now, I could easily move this line over to the other side, offset the symmetry, creating that off axis look I've been talking about. This is okay. You could do that, but shapes are generally best not drawn like that, not made from the same line twice. This line has a different type of flow to it, a different type of design. And just like in gesture, I'm still thinking about C curve S curve and straight. Those are the three types of universal lines, the combination of which creates what we call design. And what I'm drawing now is more of an S curve. It's a subtle flattened S curve, whereas this front line is a subtle C curve. So we still get the offset symmetry going this way, the widest point meaning the widest point on a diagonal. But the two sides of the shape, the contour is also drawn with different types of lines. This type of thinking is so embedded in a professional's mind. Look at this shape here, how the arm connects to the torso. Let me just erase that. Notice how Barbucci did not draw it like this. This is a symmetrical shape. Even though it's off axis in symmetry, it's made from the same line twice, just mirror images of itself, forming a tilted letter V, which is the same on both sides. But no, Barbuci didn't do that. He drew this. One line on this side, an S curve, and then a very different type of line, a C curve on the other side. We still have the offset symmetry going that way, and we have our two different types of line. Also, the bottom point of the shape right there is not in the middle. If we just struck a line upward, it's favored on one side. Moving over here now, we can see the exact opposite in effect. Let's look at this area of the skirt, I guess. The first thing to see is that these shapes are essentially symmetrical. They go like that. But even within that, there's not a lot of oversight being had here, this side of the shape goes like that and this side, like that. This to me is still the same line twice. Human error has made them slightly different, but they're not different enough to be recognizable as a design choice. It's just the opposite. They're close enough that it just looks like an error. So a strong design choice is when your change is intentional. So going back to the barbuci drawing, there are certain parts of the body that are symmetrical like the head, for example. The head is split down the middle and it's generally symmetrical on either side of that. But there are shape decisions being made here that offset even that. Look at how the hair is framing the head. There are different enough decisions being made with how these lines go that introduce things like offset symmetry, introduce different types of lines on each side, and then that helps in disguise the symmetry inside the head while still having it there because it needs to be there for the head. It helps enhance it. While we're here, we can look at that beautiful hair shape. First of all, let's appreciate how simple it is on a kindergarten principal level, cutting it out with a pair of scissors. These simple lines made of C curves, S curves, and straights are just so easy to read. Then you can look at the widest points of the hair as compared to say, where the face is, here and here, you have that diagonal crossing of symmetry, the off axis thing. In this case, the hair isn't really symmetrical at all. This area here is pretty different than this area here, but yet the widest points of the shape cross on a diagonal. It's just something you'll see time and time again in a professional artists work. As well as in nature. Okay. 11. Adding Shapes on top of Simple Forms: So I'm a big fan of the movie Lilo and Stitch for many reasons, but on a shape level, the design sense and overall aesthetic in that movie really highlights a certain shape principle that I want to show you. This is a stylistic idea, and for the purposes of this lesson, let's just call it shape DNA and simply put, the shapes in Lilo and Stitch are round. Round is the DNA of the design throughout the movie. I want to draw Lilo here. It's the bottom drawing I'm looking at, by the way. With specific attention to how I'm employing these shaped decisions. Even right away, as I've just laid in the head shape, the nose and mouth, everything is rounded. To different degrees. That's a Chris Sanders thing. Chris Sanders was the production designer and director and overall inspiration for Lilo and Stitch. He imbued the production with this drawing style, his natural drawing style, really, that is just full of round shapes. The hair has this curve here. That's an S curve I just drew. Here's a C curve. Going back to the jaw now to refine it, here's a C curve. I remember reading the style guide for this movie. That is notes from Chris Sanders on how to draw like him because that was the assignment that the animators had for this movie, The movie had to look like Chris Sanders drew it. There's this image that stuck in my head. Just imagine a square shape. Well, what would happen if you stuck a straw into that square and blue on the straw. Well the square would puff up and inflate into a more bulbous square like that with the straw. According to the style guide, that's how the character should be drawn. As though there were a straw inserted into their shapes and someone blue on the straw inflating them up. That gets you started. But the thing we still have to keep in mind is not to create symmetry, repetition, which can actually be quite difficult, especially when you only have one type of shape. Especially with round shapes, we are at risk of creating the sausage link effect, particularly with Lilo's arms and legs, and we don't want to do that. I've been drawing for a few minutes without pointing out anything specific. Let me do that right now. Look at this shape right in here, this wave of hair. When I draw it in red like that, it almost looks like a muscle. It's offset like this, off axis, this shape here. Is off axis like that. The two thicknesses of those shapes are different. The thickness here is smaller than the thickness there. This shape right in here is currently made with two straights. Chris Sanders would refine that into being a gentle C curve, which then flows right up into this curve, which creates an S curve, and then going up into this S curve. Now, it's impossible for me to draw without employing some gestures. Let me throw that in. Where are her hands going to landmark them about there, landmark the other hand a bit higher. Even that gesture is offset. These principles can be found in everything. The bottom of her body is somewhere here. It's like a head length and a half down or maybe just even one head length down, then her leg is out here, and this leg is somewhere up here, landmarking where the foot is and landmarking where that foot is. Immediately, I have the pose. That's all gesture stuff. The main thing you'll notice now is I'm not drawing construction like we did in Chapter two. I could do that, but I feel like we've been over that. I'm trying to introduce something new here. Of course, in my head, I'm very aware that there is a cylinder here for the forearm that gets constructed like this. But this time, I'm going to keep that in my head. Instead, what I'm drawing is the shape. But this is probably the right time for me to stop and explain something important. When it comes to interfacing form and shape. If I'm constructing say her left leg, the leg that's outstretched at the bottom there, I would simply draw a cylinder that looks like this to split that cylinder in half, this is where the knee would be located. There's the cylinder that we would have drawn in Chapter two. But I'm not drawing that. I'm drawing the shape that fits over that. If you imagine this cylinder as your foundation, the actual shape you're drawing, you can think of it as a redesigning of the contours of the cylinder. And specifically, contours that have more design to them, employing C curves S curves and straights. That very closely adheres to the basic form, but because we're drawing shapes now, we don't have to draw a perfect cylinder. We deviate from these things. You can think of the shape as clothing that goes on the fundamental form. Just like clothing, it hides what's underneath. When we walk around day to day with our clothes on, no one can see our naked bodies underneath, I suppose. The same is true with shape. The shape is what is on top, but it needs to imply what's underneath. That's a good shape design. If you choose to draw the basic forms, it's a very logical next step to simply now put the shapes on top of them. I'm encouraging you though to imagine these forms in your head. I'm drawing her main torso here, and it's this interesting egg shape. Let me outline it in red for you. The egg shape I'm talking about goes like this. And notice how it is not symmetrical. It's kind of a deformed bean shape. It's an egg with some character or a bean or an egg, whatever you want to call it. The gesture line of the pose itself, the C curve, that helps offset it from left to right. But you notice it's got that offset axis. It's also wider at the bottom than it is at the top, that all ensures that that shape is kept as interesting as possible. Now I'm drawing the leg that's raised. Here's what I don't want to do. I don't want to make that contour and then repeat it here. This is not a strong shape decision. In fact, there's even a specific note about this in the il stitch style guide. You can see in here how stitches arms are drawn with the sausage effect, those symmetrical shapes. Then look at how they recommend drawing the shapes. You got a nice little subtle C curve almost straight there, mixed with an S curve, although the S curve has a little fluff right at the elbow. Now, that little fluff right there is interesting because you might think it violates my simple shapes rule by having too many little undulations. But because that shape is so simple otherwise, I think you can easily support that little bit of extra literal fluff there. Back to Lo, I'm going to erase that line. Okay I'll ghost out the bean shape of her body underneath. I know I want to offset that and it's probably going to be something like this. Now, in this case, it's the same curve twice. It's still a C curve twice. I'm going to make sure I make the choice that is the most clearly a design choice, making them different enough that it looks like a clear design choice. I need to get rid of my gestural mark because the foot is a little bit lower than I initially planned. Just a little bit. Look at this. Even the toes are these little cute little round shapes. Here's the accordion principle where the leg bends and that body will wrap right around there. I need a little bit more width on that leg. Let's Okay. Let's get that. I could even put a little accordion principle right in there, accordion effect, that is. And remember, Lilo is such a round character that the challenge here is to draw it faithfully with the DNA of round shapes and still avoid the sausage effect. Here's the other side of her body. I don't like seeing the gesture lines that dark, so let me just ghost it out a little bit. If the gesture is kept in too dark, it starts looking like it's actually contributing to the shape design when it's clearly not meant to do that. Let's get that leg in there that I've already talked about. You get this nice tapered shape at the top, and then a beautiful S curvy rhythm coming down. We'll keep this S curve as flowy as possible, accordion effect because that foot is in front of the leg. And that heel is just soft. It's round. My foot is a bit too in fact, my whole leg is just a bit too long. You can do that on paper as well. Just slice it up and move it and tape it back to your page. Animators who animate on paper do that all the time. Okay. Anyway, struggling with this foot here, so I've sped up the footage to fix it. Anyway, what I don't want to lose focus on is the DNA shape, the roundness of the shapes, a certain roundness to it. Some forms more round than others. For example, this arm here is extremely round. Now, again, in my head, I know that there is a cylinder here that comes to an end at the wrist here. That cylinder doesn't have any interesting shape decisions to it. It's just a straight ahead cylinder. My shape, however, fits over the cylinder and adds that stylistic expression to it. On a design level. Notice how this curve is a nice sweeping C curve, and this curve is a smaller almost question mark shaped S curve. They both have a sense of roundness, so it satisfies the Lilo and stitch production design aesthetic. That DNA thing. They have the differences in both contours that satisfy the general design principle aesthetic of non repetition and our hand is here. I'm not going to dwell on hands in this class. Hands is one of those areas where you can really dive down a rabbit hole and get really intricate with them. I have Tube blecturs on hands anyway. But in general, I don't really consider hands a part of a beginner's drawing class. But the thing to note when I'm drawing these hands right now is look how round the shapes are. Every little finger is its own little curve, and the mistake I just made on this hand as I made them to repetitive. Let's fix that. Maybe this finger is like this and then this finger comes down more like that. That's way better. It looks more natural. Again, that's how nature does it. If you just pose your own hand or notice how someone's moving their hands when next time you watch a movie. There is always some level of non conformity to the fingers. Usually, it's the index finger doing something different than the rest or sometimes it's the pinky finger doing something different than the rest. But you can look out for that non repetition happening. Drawing the camera now and even this camera is a inflated camera from the straw. In fact, I think a camera is what they used in the style guide to show the inflation effect. Here we go. The lens of the camera is just a cylinder. But an inflated cylinder. Let's make it round two. There we go. That is a il and stitch camera. And before you know it, our drawing is almost done. I'm going to draw this bottom bit of her hair. When I do, I want to make sure I don't just mirror the top of her hair. This part of her hair is longer. This part is shorter. It's also two different types of curves. I've got a more graceful s curve here and more of a pointy one here, still round, but more pointy. I've actually changed that from the drawing. The actual drawing is probably better. They both work, but I can do a more angled s curve here and then a more graceful one here. This is maybe a bit closer to the drawing. Okay. Let's just shade this in dark because it's the underside of the hair, similar to what we did with the underside of the sleeves at the end of Chapter two with that Pixar drawing. Even these little striations in the hair, I'm trying to keep these lines and shapes offset and not repetitive. And I'm realizing up here, you can see the underside of the hair. Just like an ellipse, that's above the horizon line so we can see underneath the form. You can still be quite rough with your sketches, which this one pretty much is, but still have cohesive design choices, and certainly that is the case with professional work. You can look at their early works in progress and still see design choices being made. It's just those design choices are maybe more refined and hashed out in the final. But in their roughs, because you can't turn off your brain as an artist when you're sketching, you still need to be actively engaged in what you're doing, even a good artists rough sketch is going to show the primordial thinking about design. And grappling with those design principles and ideas specifically in the shape. When it comes to their form, usually, you'll see the form implied by the shape, the shape being like the clothing that the form wears. In fact, one of the major watershed moments in my artistic journey was when I got to the point where I didn't have to draw the under construction first. And it took me about a year to get there, by the way. There we go. There's our finished Lilo drawing. I think it's close enough to the original, but more so than it being faithful to the original drawing. I hope it's an effective communication here of this idea of the DNA shape, everything being round in this case. Just to quickly do a bit of a critique on my own work here, I still think this leg is too sausage like. This curve should probably come down straighter there feeding into the foot that way. There we go. That's a much better avoidance of the sausage effect. And gesture wise, one of the things I failed to capture was her head probably needs to be a little forward like she's arcing her back more to reach this position. Her head just slightly more even with her foot, and then just some general cleanup after I made those shifts. And all right, let's move on to some more shape stuff. 12. Honing in on Good Design: Okay, for the next demonstration, I want to draw Kronk from the Emperor's new groove. And I promise I won't stick with this Disney theme forever. But the reason I'm choosing Kronk now is because on a shape DNA level, he is the exact opposite of Lilo. This is the box for the head. Again, I'm modifying that box to become closer to what the form actually is. The corner of the box would be about here and down. In a way, I'm combining shape and form at the same time. Now, let me introduce you to another shape principle that I haven't talked about yet? I call this one continuous rhythm. You can first see it here and how the neck flows right into the shoulders on this side and on this side. Let me just gesture, the shoulder line is like that. Let me make sure I'm flowing into the shoulders properly, meeting my correct landmarks. But yes, what is continuous rhythm? Okay. Continuous rhythm is when one form or one object, let's say, like a head or a neck flows into other objects. In this case, the neck flowing into the shoulders. You can also think of continuous rhythm as connecting two pieces that have to cross through a different object. For example, we have the shoulder on the left and the shoulder on the right. And in between those two shoulders is the neck and head. Continuous rhythm then is the tool that you use to track the shoulders through the neck and head to ensure that they are rhythmically connected along the same curve. Again, rhythm refers to the curves, C curves, S curve straights. Continuous rhythm is connecting these forms along a simple and often invisible curve. And I will point out in this drawing where I use continuous rhythm. I'm sure there will be other examples of it. Crunks proportions are super weird. I'm not used to drawing characters this exaggerated, to be honest. Let's get a gesture. His chest sticks so far out, it's not even human anymore. He is an ultimate caricature of a human. Now, this is where the rib cage actually comes in real handy. Where would I say the sternum is? It's probably up here. That rib cage is just hilarious, it's like this. My gesture again is acting as my midline for the form. That ribcage wraps around like this, meets the middle of the neck before it turns over for the other side. Because the rib cage is spherical, we can draw a line that goes over the rib cage across contour, an elastic band. Now, the waist is about here. I'll just landmark it and that's too far over to the right. I'm just taking measurements up. It's too far over. That waist needs to come back about here to be in line with the head and therefore create balance in this pose. Then that gesture comes down super narrow and let's just have it go out like this like he's wearing a skirt or something and just temporarily landmark where the feet might be. It looks maybe a little high, they might be down here. He does have a little type of skirt on. Let's put that there and the legs are just somewhere in here. The arm then comes down and I can compare where the bottom of the hand is compared to the little skirt, which is about here. Let's gesture down. The arm has this diagonal feel to it. And then this arm is the same. It goes behind the rib cage and rhythmically S curves its way out, and these two hands are connected in a similar way that the shoulder is similar angles. So this hand ends about there. There's my gesture. All my landmarks are in place? Are they all correct? I guess we'll see. Just ghosting out the gesture now, so I can draw darker over it. Or you can draw on layers. I just forgot to do that. And you notice even though Cronk is just standing there, there's still gesture to the pose. There's movement. There's a whole S curve through his body. All right. So where to start? Well, I think I'll start getting the contour of his chest. My rib cage was too wide, by the way, and I can see that now, but that's okay. It's my underdrawing. I'll correct it. And just for fun, I'll actually get rid of it here. So I don't want to leave anything incorrect on my page. The ribs were too far out to the right. That shape comes in. Now that shape is round and then that s curve reverses and makes a little fish hook type shape. I'm leaving a hard edge right there. Something I would never have done on the il drawing. His pectoralis muscles are defined with this again, graceful C curve. But just like the ribs, there's a sharp hook here. I think that's where that line goes. I might have to correct it later. I'm not sure. Then I'm going to extend his shoulder out further. Again, my rough lay and at the beginning was slightly off. That's okay. Look at this. There's a strong hook. It's like a square, 90 degree corner there and it just comes down straight line. Even this one has a slightly more gentle curve to it, but it comes down like a straight line, giving Cronk his signature angular design. In fact, the whole movie, much like Lilo stitches round, the emperor's new groove is pointy and sharp, and I just love the design sense on that movie too. Not to say that there are no curves at all. When I draw the forearm here, this is quite curved. It's a hooked question mark shape. The Emperor's new group has a way of even making its curved shapes feel sharp somehow. It could be because the opposite side of that arm. Again, what I don't want to do is this, that's the sausage effect. Look at what the designers did. Here's the biceps muscle, then it hooks in, comes out, but there's a sharp edge this time coming way in, and that's still too high. Let me undo that. This has to come down more before going about here. It has to come down to create that off axis offset symmetry. Then he's got the arm thing that he's wearing, which is a very convenient way of showing the cylinder form. You notice even this top cylinder ellipse that I'm drawing is pointed right there. But I don't want to get fixated on any one part. I want to draw from behind the form coming out for that rib cage. Coming in for the waist and now I can evaluate, is that waist thin enough, thick enough. I've got two sides going here. Notice how the rib cage is offset symmetry, if I'm tracing the two widest points, Offset. It's on a diagonal. It's off axis. Here is the little waistband that he has. Lot's pointed right there just like this point. These are examples of shape DNA. Repeated rhythmic themes. A good character design will hone in on repeated sensibilities of shapes. Sensibilities is the key word. It won't repeat shapes literally, but the sensibility behind the shapes, the way the shapes are approached. That's what's repeated. Going to rough in where this pattern is on his tank top. Form wise make sure this is connected. This is another continuous rhythm thing. I'm using these rhythmic lines going over the form to make sure that the pattern on his tank top feels continuous. Then it wraps around here. Describing that rib cage form as it does. There that works. Let's continue drawing down the torso. Here's another continuous rhythm thing. If you just follow my cursor here, the ribs go down to the stomach, right through the hips, right into the skirt, connecting multiple things with one continuous rhythm. Over here, I can start with continuous rhythm. Then I can put in just this little offset, this little hook that overlaps. This is just the designers being a little clever and saying, Hey, I did a fully continuous rhythm there, let's not do it there. It's all in the name of change and difference. Here's a nice little handy cylinder for the waist. Handy because it describes the form a nice little handy cylinder for the bottom of the skirt, which I already described. We'll just block in a tiny shape for his hands, which are super tiny in the movie and rhythmically tracking from that forearm thing he has on to the other side. I know where this goes. It's somewhere here. Make sure you get that pointy top. Then out from behind the ribs here comes the muscle, the biceps muscle, comes to a point, just like this point, mirrored. Again, offset, let's keep that rhythm in check, and we go way in here for this hooked C curve, and this one on the outside is more graceful and smooth. We have that nice cylinder at the bottom, helping us describe the form, and this hand is something like this. It's drawn the same way as the other hand. All right. From here, let's just figure out how the legs go. Much like the forearms, there's this really interesting hook inwards coming to a point, which then tapers down in a more graceful S curve to the feet. Look at these simple cut outable shapes. They totally pass my kindergarten test. I love how the knee is drawn. It's a half square, which is a nod to the shape language of the larger design. Because he's got the cylindrical socks on, it's a great way to understand where that ellipse is. Let's go around the back of that ellipse, just to make sure we fully understand the form there. We're beneath the horizon line here so we can see the top of that ellipse. Leg comes in and because of offset symmetry, I know that that shallow point needs to be about here. It's off axis, and then we can come in to meet the ankle. That ankle is just ridiculously thin. That rhythm is continuous into the foot, which I'll just ballpark right in here. Now, my gesture is off on the other foot, so I'll get rid of it. The other foot is more like here. I'm just looking at the negative space between his two feet, something more like that. The leg needs to come out from behind the skirt or from under the skirt right in here. A big hook here. These two points are hooks. Notice they're offset. They're on the diagonal. I'll tell you that diagonal is a secret of drawing, the secret of design anyway. Here's the knee also slightly offset. I know it's the perspective, the three quarter perspective that helps motivate these offsets, but even in a front view, you'll find offsets in the design. Anyway, I'm drawing that more graceful S curve that leads into the ankle. I want to know where that leg is that's invisible behind the form here because there's this little bit of negative space right in there, that's important. And then that goes behind the form again, so it's invisible, but it comes down in this quick fast moving C curve. I say fast moving because C curves, especially, but S curves to remind me of going down a slide. Like a rhythm is going down a water slide or something. Sometimes you can think of evaluating rhythms that way. If this were a slide, would I be going quickly down this slide or is it a clunky slide? The goal is to aim for smooth slides, I guess. I do often try to convert visual stimulus into physical sensations, because I find that if I can physically feel what I'm drawing, gesture wise or form wise, it's just another really helpful way to evaluate my work. Art is about feel after all. All right. He's got this little tie here in the middle of his skirt. The only thing that's important here is to just make sure you're tracking that midline. Midline of the skirt is here. That becomes the midline of this tie. One side is on that side, one side is on that side, and it goes below the skirt, and we just have this little curve that connects the bottom of it like that. Then there's the lines here on the inside, shows a bit of detail. For the last thing, he's got a little C curve hat. A nice little C curve thing at the top. His hair is also C curves, but make sure you don't repeat yourself, don't repeat the same size of C curve. Try not to repeat the same curvature, either. Even these lines here for the hair, try not to repeat them. I can just draw this little hook shape for the cheekbone and eye socket, and that helps me find the other side of the hair, which is over here. There's a bit of a two straights and a C curve. There we go. Just for fun, I'll shade this in. Always nice to graphically separate hair like that. A little hook shape for the nose, and that is Cronk from the Emperor's new groove. I guess the thing I want to point out before we go to the next demo is that this is how you study from reference as opposed to just copying reference. What we've done here is understand the drawing from the inside out. We've used all our fundamentals, which is, I think the first time we've done that so far. We started with gesture, we added in forms. We combined form and gesture, which is something I often do. They do naturally fit together, and then we wrapped up the whole thing with shape. But we're not done with shapes yet. Let's keep going. 13. Working with Dynamic Poses: Okay. In this section, I'd like to contrast doing a simpler design with doing a more complex design and ultimately show you how they're the same thing. And I promise in the next drawing, I'll get away from the Disney stuff. But Mickey Mouse is actually such a great example of simple effective design. He's easy to deconstruct. He's basically just made of curves, which also speaks to a shape DNA thing. Mickey Mouse and the whole Mickey gang are really only made of curves. And if any parents out there are watching this, you might have identified that, yes, that photo is taken off of a diaper box. All right. So I do want to focus on building up to shapes, not just going straight in with shapes. I'll demonstrate more of that approach a little later in the class, but this will be Mickey's face. Here's the nose line going around the head and the eye line is somewhere up here. His nose is an oval. Then it's a good thing we have this mid line for the nose because I can use that to find his little, I guess, I'll call it a hair line. Now, I just want to block this in. I don't want to get too mired in detail already. But I do just want to block this in to make sure I have my circular shape down accurately for the head. I'm also using the eye line here to make sure that let's call them side burns, even though they're not that, just to make sure I'm tracking the side burn shape around the ball. This is an underdrawing. I'm using gesture and form. What I just did there was more to do with form, Chapter two stuff. Now here we go back to gesture. Watch this. Big C curve for the body. Let's immediately landmark where the hip line is. It's probably even a bit higher than that. If we're looking at head lengths, that hip line is probably up here more. I'll get rid of that one, so it doesn't distract me. Now, Mickey's arms has a beautiful continuous rhythm to it. It's this flowy S curve thing that goes like this. The rhythm helps track the arms through the head. The thing that continuous rhythm does, which I believe I've mentioned already, but it's worth saying again because it's so important to drawing is it makes these forms so easy to track for the viewer who is just seeing the drawing for the first time. Continuous rhythm like this makes it possible for the viewer to read something essentially instantaneously. Even use a thicker gesture line here for his arms because after all, they are just tubular forms anyway. Mickey Mouse, especially is a character so simple that it has to read instantly for your drawing to be a success, which is itself a very challenging thing, especially if you're a beginner. The arm is there. Let's now landmark where the knee is, which I'm going to say is about there, and it has a C curve like that, and a straight coming down this whole thing like this is a C curve. It's like that. It doesn't feel straight or edgy, it's curvy. Then even this, the legs are hidden between the pants, but I'm going to draw a continuous rhythm down to find the other leg like this. Let's come down for the shoe, which I'm landmarking the bottom of where the shoe hits the floor. Now this other shoe is of course in the air. I'll landmark where I think the bottom of that shoe is somewhere here. That shoe actually has some difficult form on it. It's a folded and bent box in space. We'll deal with that when we get there. But right now, we're still mostly operating in gesture land. Let's ballpark in the ears, which are ovals, and they should be roughly the same size. Let's make sure we get that in there. Now the eyes are ellipses which lie on either side of the center line, of course, There's not a whole lot of perspective to those eyes, or I should say they're drawn in the same perspective because we're seeing this head almost straight on. In the next drawing, the more difficult one, we'll deal with eyes that are more offset in perspective. Then let's ballpark where those smile lines are in comparison to the nose. They're about halfway up the nose horizontally like this. I'll put the other one about here. I'm noticing that these align with that side turn line. So let's block that in. The underdrawing, the gesture and the form, the more accurate you can be with that with your placement of things, you don't have to be accurate at all with the final shapes. In fact, you're not supposed to draw final shapes. That's the whole point. Gesture and form are different compartments of drawing. You're not tied to the finished shapes. But the closer you can get placement wise, the better. Mouth is interesting. Notice the mouth is not just like that down the middle. It has an offset to it. There's a diagonal where the widest points are. It's offset symmetry. It's kind of more like this. I'll just ballpark it in, drawing lightly. And then when we get to the final shapes, we'll be able to fully put Mickey on model because his head is not a perfect circle. There's a chin, the cheeks kind of squish, but those are shape considerations. So far, this is a Chapter one and two block in. Okay. Let's look at Mickey's right hand. Gesturally it is a continuation of the arm. It's like this. It's probably useful to ballpark where the fingers would shoot out from, probably about there. I'll just make this a whole circular form because it's accurate to the hand. Just block that in. Then on the other side, it's the same type of thing. It's an offshoot of the arm. Then let's block in this curve where the fingers would shoot out from. The base of the fingers and the tips of the fingers form curves. If you've seen my YouTube video in hands, you know I call this the WiFi principle. So we can actually block out or landmark as part of our gesture where those WiFi curves might be. You can even gesture out individual fingers if you wanted to, like this. Maybe on this side, it's like that. Again, even the fingers are curving with Mickey. The thumb would be somewhere there and this thumb somewhere out there. Okay. Probably useful to flip back into form mode and identify that there's an ellipse here or the tip of a cylinder for the shorts and that cylinder flows in, and that cylinder attaches itself to the bigger form of the shorts. What I might do here is start finding those shorts. Now, the shorts themselves are like a bigger cylinder, go like this, this cylinder has a continuous rhythm in with the shorts. And then there's that other pant leg, which is its own cylinder that comes out from the shores like that. This cylinder is interesting. Finally, it breaks the continuous rhythm. Rhythmically, if we're tracking down from the body, this is all unbroken here and then boom it breaks. Think of it like a water slide. A sharp jut out like that would never be approved. Engineering wise. The other side is pretty continuous, especially if you look at the leg, and I'll emphasize this with the final shapes, but the body comes down, meets the leg and continues up. That is one unbroken curve. Now, the cylinder for the pants interrupts that. This part right here, interrupts the rhythm, but the rhythm underneath is still evident. Again, I'll make sure I highlight those things for you when I draw the finished shapes, which is going to start happening right now. For this occasion, it might be worth using a layer. All this was drawn on one layer. What I'm going to do here, I'll just bring my layers window in to show you, I'll make a new layer and I'll fill that with white. Of course, everything goes away, but I can just reduce the opacity. It puts a piece of tracing paper over it. That's the effect. Then I'll make another layer over that to draw with. I'll draw on this top layer. This is my tracing paper layer, which I'll lock off so I don't accidentally draw on that. Then here's my underdrawing below. I'll draw on the top layer now. Now what I'm drawing are the actual final shapes. The top of his head in the lay in was pretty accurate, I think, so I'm more or less just tracing right now, but that will end soon. The eyes are a bit longer than what I had and that nose is a bit further down and a bit wider. But underdrawing wise, they are in the right place already, so that really helps. And then the eyes are broken actually with this little piece of cylinder that defines the muzzle. After all, he is a mouse and he has a little muzzle there. I'll just quickly shade the eyes and nose dark, which is an obvious thing to do for this character. Then a lot of our underdrawing was pretty accurate here, so we can trace where we were for the mouth, going around here. Let just make sure these curves now because these are the final shapes. Let's just make sure they are nice and smooth like that water slide is definitely not going to jostle anybody. Now, I think from here, I'll draw the top of his head, which I had pretty accurate in my rough in. I'll repeat that. But then the cheeks have more squish to them. I'll push this up. This shows the flesh of the cheek raising, which real humans do when they smile. If you think of a circle like this, well, what we're doing is we're transferring the volume of that circle to be at the top. The most part of that sphere is going to now be at the top, and then it tapers thinner at the bottom, which means that it's squished up top, so the bottom stretches a little bit more as it comes in. Then that will have a continuous rhythm on the other side of the head. We find the other side of the cheek here, same thing, it's got to squish up. Well, it's almost like a question mark shape. It's like I'm drawing a sideways question mark. Whatever helps you imagine the shape you're drawing? It looks like a question mark or it looks like a bird's beak or something. Whatever you can identify simple things like that for your shapes, something that can actually help. It looks like I've squished Mickey's head vertically. I'm just going to take this whole area, just resize it up a little bit. Now let's get in the mouth, which again is more or less a traceback of what I've already drawn. Okay. Although I think the mouth actually does come down a bit more. The mouth is open wider, which allows me to draw the chin breaking the continuous rhythm shape of the cheeks. Now that cheek shape can go intersect with the chin like that. Okay. For the next 30 seconds or so, I've sped up the video to eight times its speed, which will help you see all the little changes I make. When you watch in real time, it's hard to keep stock of all the little changes because they're happening so slowly. But when you see it sped up like this, look at all these tiny little tweaks that are influencing how the drawing looks. It's not really proportions I'm editing, it's the cleanliness of the shape. In other words, how well do these shapes pass my kindergarten rule? In this case, if you look at the dark shapes versus the light shapes. Notice how I've smoothed everything out. That theoretical water slide is very kid friendly. Okay, great. What I like to do is progress from one connected piece of the drawing to the other. The head is connected to the arms or it's connected to the body. I can start with whatever one suits my fancy at the moment. I think the body is the most critical juncture here. I will get going here. This is the final shape and already I'll undo that because I think I want to start a little further up the head like this. I know through my gesture that this has a continuous rhythm right down to the shorts, so I'll draw this curve. Trying to get it as smooth as I can, right up to get go here, because after all, I've prepared my drawing for this curve. Then the other side of the body is also see curved, but this C curve is steeper because it needs to flow with the leg like I've already pointed out. It's a steeper curve. It's a faster water slide. Now, in all the editing I did of Mickey's head, my arm gesture is now too low. It needs to be up higher up here. Let's put that in because this is also connected with the head. You notice how that arm has a taper, meaning it's a bit thinner right here where I'm drawing now, and then it's a bit thicker here where the shape ends, and my wrist was way too far out on the gesture, an embarrassing amount. But hey, that's okay. The whole point is to fix it. I guess the bigger point is what appears very simple can be actually quite complex. It is common for gestures to be a little over zealous proportionally because you're not working with finished contours that can impose a bit of a limit on how well you're able to gauge things. I actually have drawn McKimo professionally for Disney, but it's been several years with different characters, you have to get into their proportions. I'm much more familiar with regular human proportions. I think the arms just subconsciously went too far in that direction. Now, to draw the arm on the other side, you notice how I'm rehearsing the stroke, getting that continuous rhythm through the head, so I know where that arm comes out. Comes out right there. The continuous rhythm is like an S curve like that, shooting through the head. And same with the bottom contour, it needs to be continuous with the other arm. Then that rhythm is like a C curve that goes up like this. I misjudged my initial gesture. I gave it an S curve. But if I'm looking at the actual drawing here, it's more of a C curve. But again, this arm tapers from narrow near the head to wide near the wrist. Let's taper that shape. Tapering shapes is one easy way, probably the easiest way to make a shape interesting. For example, if you have a shape in your drawing, that's just like this. Well, there's nothing inherently interesting about that. It is clean and that's good. But consider instead just tapering it out a bit. You have a bit of difference as that shape moves from one end of it to the next. And then make sure it's equally clean. I'll just clean up my lines a little bit. Now, there are no hard and fast rules to shape, but in general, a tapered shape applied at scale across the entire drawing will be more appealing than a bunch of shapes that do not change that are static like the shape here on the left. So while I'm not saying never draw a shape that doesn't have a taper, I am saying keep in mind that too many shapes that are in the same on all sides and from top to bottom and side to side are prone to causing problems with monotony and boredom in your work. Okay, so the arms are obviously met with cylinders at the end, and I'm just blocking in the cylinder that leads us into the hand on either side. And I think I'll leave that alone for now. I don't want to get miired in hands at the moment. I will go back to the body though and block in the cylinder for the belt line. It's a nice cylinder. The ellipse looks like this. If I were to ghost it in at the back, it's always helpful to think how these forms wrap around and therefore describe the larger form that you're drawing. Let's shoot a center line down his torso. It's like this. It's subtly sophisticated. The form is twisting. Up here at the top, the mid line would meet his neck, which is not visible, but the neck would be about there. And then that midline goes like this, veers to the right as it tracks down the middle of a shorts like that. A quick diagram would look like this. The torso box turned in a different orientation than the hip box. As a result, you get a midline shown in red there that has to veer from the left to the right as it navigates both boxes. That midline has also helped me draw the two buttons on the shorts, one on either side. Then now maybe we can find the bottom of the shorts, which were a bit too low in my gesture. I think they are more about here. Tweaking proportions a bit. Here is a great opportunity for an accordion effect as that cylinder comes out from behind the shorts to form the pant leg. You notice how that cylinder I'm drawing is a bit tapered. It's got a bell bottom flare to it, slightly asymmetrical. I do like to draw things in pairs. Let's now tackle the opposing cylinder for the pant leg. It is more circular, it's like this, and then it comes into the shorts with another great opportunity for the accordion effect to show how this cylinder is popping out in front of the shorts. The shorts come out from behind it. Form in front is what gets the accordion line, by the way. Then we can make sure we nail this continuous rhythm from the bottom of that cylinder right into the main body of the shorts. Going to shade the inside of the shorts a bit darker for clarity and then start drawing the leg coming out from inside it. This leg like the arms will also taper wider at the bottom, so the ankle is wider than the knee, like what we saw on Lilo. It's the inverse of what a human is. A human is wider at the hips and the knee than at the ankles. It is a common cartoony thing to reverse that. Again, it's done to expert effect in the characters in Lilo and stitch. Then let's get this leg coming out from the shorts here. Bends with a pretty sharp C curve on both legs. But again, let's make sure that we are wider at the bottom, just a little bit. In the original drawing, I'd actually say it's widest at the knee, but I'll edit that here just for fun. While we're here, let's make sure that this rhythm tracks like it's a clean curve to connect the two legs. I'll undo that because it messes up our drawing, but subliminally, I want to make sure that that rhythm is there. In other words, it's embedded in the drawing. And Mickey Mouse has a tail, of course. The tail is just an extension of the midline of the body, and it is a nice graceful S curve that sweeps around like that. Let's just rough it in like this. It's pretty clear to see that shape wise the feet are way wider at the bottom than they are at the top. Let's get this general shape working. It's like a squished bean shape, which is so common with animated characters. We saw the squished bean in Lilos torso, We can see it here in Mickey's feet. It's a simplified shape that just works so well because it's a squished bean, so it's offset. We're using offset symmetry here. It's narrower here, wider there. It's got all the basic ingredients for interest. Anyway, here is a little sub form for the instep of the shoe with its own little cylinder here, but a cylinder that is wider at the bottom than it is at the ankle. Then from here, we'll just make sure we maximize the design of the shape, making sure it's nice and smooth all the way around, making sure that the continuous rhythm tracks from the top of the shoe through the leg to the bottom of the shoe. What we could do here to make the shoe feel like it's holding some weight is make the bottom straight. Now that's not in the reference. The reference is just a curve all the way around. But if you add a straight there and recall the gesture chapter, a straight helps make things look like they're carrying some weight. If Mickey's foot is contacting the ground, let's give it a bit of a straight there to show that it's gravitationally meeting some force with the ground there. Then there's just this little design flare, little line right here. The point of that line is to show the shoe bending like that. If I were to draw a cross contour, it would look like that around the shoe. And it looks like I've made this whole leg slash shoe too big, so let's just resize it. Now, this side has the more complex shoe that I alluded to earlier. Let's try and figure this out. We ballpark the top of the shoe as being here, and I think that's accurate, and the bottom of the shoe is right there. The first thing I'll do is make sure that we have a nice smooth line here at the back or the bottom. Something like that. Then I'll try and immediately figure out how this box is twisted. Let me just get rid of this line here because it's distracting now. Here's the incorrect way to box this off. If we drew the front plane like that and the bottom plane like that and the side plane like that, that's not what's happening here. That is more of a untwisted box. If I were to draw a mid line on this box is pretty straightforward. But Mickey Shoe is not doing that in the reference. It's more bent. On a Chapter two form level, the box actually goes more like this. It comes down like this. This side coming fully down and the back of the box comes up like that. That is what the shoe is doing. It's deceptively complex. If I were to draw a midline on this plane here, the mid line would be about there. I could find that using my x rule, but visually, I just know it's there. I've done this a lot. I know it's there, but you can use the x rule if it helps, and then that shoots down the form like that. Then it disappears under the shoe. We can put in this little bottom line, which also wraps around the form. And his shoe is not a box, it's more rounded. I'm going to erase that line to redraw it. Obviously, the sole of his shoe is nice and curved in keeping with Mickey Mouse design. It's more like that, and I'll just edit this shape. It's like a tear drop almost and get rid of these boxes to show it's more bubbly like form coming out the other side. You could put a accordion effect right there if you wanted. It's not in the reference, but you could put one there to show the overlap. Then all we need is this little cylinder thing, the top of the shoe, which Mickey's leg fits into. Then we'll just edit the shape. It moves out a little bit like this. Need a little more volume at the bottom. The shoe was just looking a little too thin there, there wasn't enough room for the heel to sit there. I save the hands for last on purpose because they are the most intricate part of the drawing. The first thing I'll do is just get this overall circular base shape, the shape of the palm. It's simplified into a circle, again, characteristic of any Mickey Mouse thing, but it's an offset circle. It's thinner here and thicker here. Then coming off the same rhythm, we can just find our little palm muscle right there. So I'm tracing the same rhythm of the hand. You can see my mouse moving, my stylus. Mickey Mouse hands are all about continuous rhythm. I can come down the side here and find the thumb. Making sure it's as bulbous and round as possible. Then I can come up the side and find that rhythm continuing off the side of the palm for the first finger, stopping it at my nice rhythmic circular line here, and then finding the rhythm for the second finger. Splaying them out, stopping at the curve of the palm, and then find the pinky here. Again, using the idea of continuous rhythm to build this hand. I'm not sure why there's a.in the middle of the hand. Pretty sure Mickey Mouse does not have a.in the middle of his hand. What I can do is be accountable to the midline. Here's a midline down the form of the palm. Notice that that midline lines up nicely with the middle finger, which of course it should. Mid lines are a great way to check alignment. I'm speeding up the footage once more, starting with this little tweak of the body. It was a little too thin in my drawing, just making that repair. Then from here, we'll go straight into the drawing of his right hand. Using all the same principles we did on the left hand, it's the same hand twice, just mirror image of itself. I guess while we're at the tail end of this drawing, no pun intended, I just want to remind you that the shapes become much easier when you have that underdrawing, those Chapter one and two fundamentals in place. B they physically drawn like I did here or just existing in your imagination because they dictate where the shapes go. And if you know where the shapes more or less go, you can then focus on the design of your shapes, making interesting shapes, which is what this chapter has been about. If you don't know where the shapes go, then having the double task of figuring out the location of things and coming up with a design, that is possible, but it's an advanced task. You'll get there. It took me about two years to get there, but it's one of those stages of development that really should not be rushed because that will likely cause a plummet in quality. So I highly recommend, no matter what you're drawing, even if it's something simpler than Mickey Mouse, get the structure in first, including gesture and then building up to volumes and three D forms and then lay the shapes on top of that. So here's our finished Mickey Mouse drawing. Let's now go through this same process on what appears to be a more complex subject. This certainly doesn't appear as friendly at first, especially the pose. But let's go through it to see how similar it is to the Mickey drawing. Obviously, the fundamentals never change. That's even taking into account that this is a CGI rendering, not a drawing. But because this was done by an animator, an animator being someone who specializes in clear posing, the tools and principles used to create this pose is really no different than anything we've looked at. Let's get a quick gesture going here. We are looking way up at that head. In fact, this entire character is above the horizon line. I'm going to be very generous with my ellipse up there, the nose line being somewhere over here. So we immediately get the sense that he is looking this way. You notice I threw in that little hook here for the jaw line, which I like to do. Anytime a head is in three quarter view or side view. It just helps communicate that perspective, just a bit more. If you want to indicate where the nose is, just do a little dashed line like this, and I'll give you an even further perspective hint there. Okay. So because we're getting a little more advanced with our application, I'm going to continue to plug in gesture here just like I did with the drawing of Cronk in the last section. But this drawing is harder, I would say, mostly because we're dealing with a pose that's in motion. So to find the shoulders, I'm looking at where the nose is in relation to where the shoulder is. It's about here. I'm going to get that in and that raised shoulder really creates a lot of tension in the body, and then I'll use that shoulder, which I'm pretty certain about its placement to draw a continuous rhythm line down here, the shoulders being connected here by a C curve rhythm and find where it might come out of the head on the other side. Already, you should be feeling this pose, even though it's just a head and shoulders that I've drawn. Sitting here, drawing it physically myself, I can feel this pose in my own shoulders, the trapezius muscle required to raise the shoulders in this position. I'll do something I haven't done yet and use a different color for the gesture. Now, I could gesture down the back like this. What is the spine doing? The spine is doing something like this, or I could gesture down the front. The front is doing a C curve going the other way and then a straight going that way. I think for this one, I'll favor the front. Remember back in the gesture chapter, I talked about looking at the rhythms on either side of the body. In this case, I can evaluate the gesture of the chest area and stomach leading down to the pelvis region, or I can explore the backs gesture, which really is the spine, the spine being a very dexterous part of our body, and you don't have to just choose one side to gesture. Feel free to do both. Chances are you'll increase the amount of rhythms you'll find coming off of either side that you may not have found by just doing one side of the gesture. All right, so I'm going to find and landmark the sternum here, and that allows me to start building a rib cage. The ribs coming down from the sternum a little bit. I actually don't really know exactly how much, but it's something in this range to make this rib cage egg shape. Now, that rib cage is not necessarily gesture. That's part of the form. But because gesture and form are part of the underdrawing, I'm using the same red color because to me, they represent the same type of preliminary planning. Shape is a fundamental too. But again, the shape is the clothing that the drawing wears, right? So the shape is the thing the audience actually sees. I'll draw that in black when I get there. Okay, so we got this shoulder line going like this, and the hips do oppose it by going like this. This opposition is not only a classic Spider Man thing, but also just a regular human thing. Our shoulders and hips oppose each other all the time. It's part of what allows us to move the way we do. Even when we're standing still, you can see an opposition a lot of the time. It truly is one of the secrets of realistic posing. Continuous rhythm, I'm going to gesture down the right side of the body here and just find this curve that takes me all the way from the shoulder, down through the torso, down through the hips, all the way out to the leg. It's this beautiful graceful S curve, and then that S curve even bends back inwards to the foot, which is somewhere in line here with the head. Somewhere over here. My proportions are already looking a little too long. I might want to just move it up a bit. If this were drawn on paper, I would simply erase it and redraw it. Of course, digital is a bit more forgiving than that. Then compared to the sternum, I want to know where that top knee is. It's just above the sternum. If I draw a plumb line from the sternum out here, which I can just do with my own mind's eye, I don't actually have to draw it. I'm imagining it now. The knee is somewhere up here. Now, one side of the leg is relatively straight, but look at this side. It's a beautiful C curve sweeping rhythm which continuously moves right into the foot. This is what helps give Spider Man his dynamic nature to his poses. Everything is sweeping and swooping and water sliding along the water slide thing being a reference to a previous demo where I equated rhythm to the feeling of going down a water slide. If I were to draw a gesture for his arm, it's kind of like a C curve and his hand is somewhere over here, then to find the other hand, I'll just kind of plumb line. It's a slight diagonal, looking at the reference, a slight diagonal to find the other hand, which is over here somewhere. That may or may not be a bit too far away from the body, but we'll see when we get there. Right now, this is a good starting point for where that hand is. Things are pretty much figured out on a gesture level. But one thing I still have yet to figure out is the relationship between the rib cage and the torso. I've got this line here for the torso, but I want to draw it as a form as well, getting this bean shape here. Now, I'll ghost out some of my gesture line because this will allow me to progress into cross contouring over the form. Then now that I have this form for the hips, I can go over that form. And maybe find the bottom of it like this. Notice that that bottom line opposes the top line. This is both a form consideration and now a newly found rhythmic consideration. Now I can start constructing cylinders which go right over the gesture, this being the base of the leg, and I'm very conscious of the curvature of the ellipse. I'm just relying on the fundamentals that I talked about in Chapter two to determine which way this ellipse bends behind this ellipse would look like that. Now, the knee is somewhere out here. I was a little too far with my gesture, but I can correct that now and just get rid of the gesture where I know it's wrong Now, the knee is kind of to the right of my eyes, so it's ellipse bends out the other way, but it's pretty close to my eye line, so it's kind of straight. It's not bent as much as the other ellipse. Now, that cylinder is tapered because the knee is narrower than the connection at the hips, so that cylinder kind goes like this. And then later on, I'll build the shape on top of that. The lower leg has a cylinder up here. And a very thin cylinder down here and we have that cylinder doing something like this. Same thing for the lower leg on the left or his right. I can see that the ankle ends just below the hips. It's about there and that cylinder really tapers. Notice how when I draw the cylinder, I'm observing the gesture. I'm allowing that cylinder to bend with the gesture. Then that foot goes wider into a form like this. The other foot, of course, being blocked by that foreground foot. From here, I can more truly find the middle of the arm. It's about there. We'll gesture this in. This wrist has to come back a little bit. I'll mark it about there and then gesture my way up to it, the hand is somewhere up here now. Last thing on gestural rhythms. I just want to make sure that the back finds a continuous rhythm here with the leg. You see that, how it goes behind the whole form and then can be swept out at the bottom of the leg there. Just to be clear, that rhythm is not always there in every pose. It's there in this pose, helping this particular arrangement of forms with this particular perspective, be aligned and make sense and flow. That's true of any rhythm, really. None of them are universal. They are just things you train your eye to look out for. Okay. So with that, we can now move on to laying in some shapes. I want to bring in the reference here to talk about yet another important shape principle. And if you've studied art for any amount of time, I bet you've heard the term negative space. And just very quickly, positive space is the area inside the silhouette. So this is all positive space, and then the opposite of that is negative space. So in this case, the areas where we can see through to the sky. This area I'm coloring here, this is all negative space. But the key thing to note about negative space is it needs to be as simple as the positive space, passing my kindergarten rule here. Here I'm drawing the negative space or negative shape, same thing. And I'm coloring it in just to be clear about it. That little shape that looks like that. You can see a beautiful little simple arrow shape here where the head dips in and the shoulder comes out. If we extended that negative shape, there's the arrow here, then it curves down in a C curve and then comes out as a straight for the arm. We have this beautiful simply designed bit of negative space here. There's a really nice bit of negative space down here under the torso, I would actually get into the practice of coloring in the negative space. Doing this helped me appreciate how the negative space was equally as designed as the positive space. And feel free to draw it separately too as a little study. What shape would you say this is? It's triangular, but this side of the triangle is wider and it goes like that. Now, if I were just editing out the foot, I'll color it in for you. If I were just editing out the foot, you can see how it's like a triangle, but it's a bit rounded. Yeah, the right side of the triangle here is wider and longer, and the top of the triangle is angled like this. It's straight but not a straight horizontal. Diagonals, by the way, seem to carry more motion than straights. If you want something to look like it's moving, just deviate from the straight line in favor of the diagonal. This little simple shape is something that you have to keep in mind to help you place the positive shapes for the body. We'll get back to drawing here now. The first thing I like to do is start to find where some of those negative shapes might be. Here's that hook shape, that arrow shape for the head. Notice, I'm adjusting the head as I do that. I'm adjusting the head to make it work for that negative space. Just because we did the gesture stage and this head was laid in as part of the gesture, you can't just be content to leave it alone. Everything is always subject to revision and revisiting. I like to work my shapes down from what I think is correct. If I've got that little V shape here, this negative space I've just been talking about, I can continue that line down following the ribcage form, of course. And maybe find where that arm comes out. Somewhere around here, which I'll just gesture in for now. I'll complete that hand later. But right now I'm more interested in getting that body in just because it forms the bulk of the drawing. It's the biggest shape. Let's go for that first. Instead of carrying that contour all the way down to here, that would involve too much guesswork. This is often a unconscious 14. Silhouette Shapes and Negative Shapes: Okay. This next section of shape is a pretty big one. No shape chapter would be complete without it. We need to discuss the power of the silhouette. What you see on screen right now is a silhuette. A silhouette is basically the exact delineation of the positive versus negative space. Usually you see silhouettes as colored black. In this case, the positive space, that is the character is black, and the negative space or anything that's not the character is white. Silhouette is really an incredible design tool. It's a way for you to evaluate the success or failure of your drawing and your design. The common goal here being that your drawing should absolutely read in silhouette. That is, without any interior detail needed. If your drawing does not quite read in silhouette, that's a good indicator that the audience may have some trouble reading it, or it may take the audience some time to read your drawing. When I say reading a drawing, I simply mean understanding what they're looking at. When it comes to reading a drawing, this should happen instantly. Readability is one of the main metrics we use to determine if someone is a good artist. These beautiful examples here by Lois, your brain doesn't have to say, Oh, what's he doing? Oh, he's posing like a boxer. Oh, I get it. No, no, no. That doesn't happen. It's just boom, instant read. The guy on the upper right is sitting and leaning down, reaching for something. The girl on the bottom is sitting down, but with tension in her body as she retracts like that. Obviously, the interior rendering, that is the stuff going on inside the silhouette, inside the positive space. That stuff is equally impressive here, but it's really the silhouette that determines how quick the read is. The character you're looking at here is a futuristic racer guy. This is actually one of my earlier professional projects. I co created these characters with artist Nick alislian. The initial character concept was his, and then I took it to completion. I'm using this project specifically for this example because I remember this being really my first time where I felt like I successfully used silhouettes in a professional way. That is, I had very clear silhouettes in my final piece. This is the first time I really felt I had achieved that. Part of that was certainly working off the back of Nick's drawings. Nick oislian being an artist I learned a lot from. Let's look at the character's left arm. That is the arm that's holding the helmet. If I go back into silhouette, notice that there is a very obvious negative space placed right there. It looks like a triangle. Well, it is a triangle. That's a simple shape that passes my kindergarten rule, and it's extremely important because it helps show that this is an arm. You see if that negative space was not there, well, suddenly, this entire part of the drawing is vague. It can be anything. Maybe it's a cape behind the figure. Maybe it's some odd protruding body armor. Maybe he's carrying a baby, but with the inclusion of that bit of negative space. Suddenly, it's an arm. Now, it's not important to know what the thing physically is. It's not important in silhouette to know that this is a helmet. You can't expect the audience to know the detail of something in silhouette. Obviously, that's where the rendering comes in. The rendering is where you can help sell the story of the character, let's say. When I say character, that could be easily replaced with anything, building, lemonade stand, mailbox, whatever it is you happen to be drawing. The silhouette should give the viewer a very direct and clear impression of what it is they're looking at. For example, this is a character standing in a confident way, not a shy way, and they're holding something in one of their arms. To some degree, there are certain implications you can make about your drawing in silhouette. For example, the presence of these little spikes here and the large boots here, and even these little spiky parts up here indicates something of the futuristic variety. But again, that is the story of the character, and that's really not what a silhouette is for, but a good silhouette can hint at those things too. Silhouettes are such a great way of telling if your shapes past the kindergarten rule, you should be able to go over your silhouette and say out loud, C curve, straight, C curve, straight straight, C curve. Straight, straight, C curve. I'll stop there, so I'm not annoying. But because your silhouette reads on such a basic level, there is absolutely no room here for ambiguity, which is what makes them so useful. Can even look at little intricacies like this negative space I just described. It's a triangle. It's more or less an equilateral triangle, meaning it's equal on all sides. But beyond that, the rhythms of this triangle is also equal on all sides. That is, it's a subtle C curve on every side. That's something that should not escape you as you progress with your skills. I would not expect a peer beginner to analyze things on that level, but as you become more professional, you're going to be more and more interested in the exact design of something. That's where silhouette becomes more and more useful. You know, in your aims to produce clear and professional work. Silhouettes are also a great way to gauge the overall shape design of your piece. Remember in the last section, I was talking about designing a shape that goes from thin to thick and having that being a way to make a shape interesting. Well, notice that this character is designed from thin to thick. It's thin up here at the shoulders and thick down here at the bottom of the shorts. This kind of meta shape design is something I personally call a designing principle. The designing principle dictates the use of shapes on a grand level. It permeates the entire drawing and it is a more advanced concept. Now, that is something that is firmly in the realm of design, and design aims to answer slightly different questions than drawing does. You don't necessarily need to be able to design well in order to draw, but you absolutely do need to be able to draw well in order to design. Because this class is aimed at experienced beginners, I do think it's helpful to show some tips of design that you can implement along the way if you choose. One of the main things you want to consider with silhouette is how often you're keeping things dead simple? That is a single flowing line, be it a C curve, a straight or an S curve. How often you're keeping things singular and flowing versus how often you interrupt the shape or contour with something? Back of this character is essentially an S curve. That's its continuous rhythm. Is a pretty clear flow to that side of the shape. But here in the upper third of that S curve, it's broken up. If we were to draw a little chart indicating where the break up part happens, you can see that our chart clearly favors the red portions, the red portions being the smooth flow part, and the blue portion being the broken up part. What would you say this is? Maybe an eighth of the shape is broken up like this, and then therefore, seven eighths of the shape is not. I don't want to get into math here, but there's a clear favorite in the direction of keeping it simple. The shorts on this character are pretty much simple all the way throughout. There is nothing complex or broken up about this shape design. It's an instant read completely passes the kindergarten rule, and because it takes up such a big amount of real estate in the silhouette, what that allows is areas like this that we already talked about, and it also allows areas like this to be quite broken up and more complex. I say more complex, but it's still simple. A areas like that still do pass my kindergarten rule. These rhythms, these C curves, S curves, and straights are still very organized and kept simple. There are just more of them in a more condensed space. That's how you make shapes more complex while keeping them simple. Again, to indicate this with a quick graph, there's a lot more activity here, and then here there's less activity. You can think of design, specifically silhouette design, but this principle holds true for many types of design as this constant game of more complex versus less complex. In general, this is certainly a principle I abide by most of the time. Anywhere between a 70 30 split in favor of simplicity or even going up to 80 20 or 90 ten in favor of simple, that's the golden zone. That's where you want to be. You can combine offset symmetry with this principle as well. If you look at the complexity here and the complexity here and you take the midpoints of the complexity, they are on a diagonal. This design would be much less interesting if the silhouette were like this, where the complex interruptions like this, are equal on either side. Let's say his arm was like down here. Now, this still works, for sure. It's readable and fine. It's just this, the area of complexity being totally symmetrical. It's probably not the most professional solution. That is certainly not a rule. You should absolutely experiment with breaking that, although I suppose you can't break it if it's not a rule. What I should say there is you should test its limits, and you should experiment because there are no definitive solutions to this stuff. Guidelines and principles. The finished character rendering here, by the way, looks like this. You can now see there's all kinds of complexity in this area. You have folded arms, lightened shadow, clothing detail. You've got a futuristic belt buckle here. The nice thing about having a clear silhouette is it affords you the ability to go more complex inside the silhouette. I suppose that's because on a cognitive level, the brain already feels like it understands what it's looking at. In a way that buys you some time as the artist to now indulge a little bit. But just a little bit. Here's another character from the project. It should be very obvious that this character is some form of mechanic. Here's the finished rendering. He's basically a futuristic pit crew member, essentially. This project never got green lit, by the way, so you wouldn't recognize it, which is a shame. But anyway, back to the silhouette it was very important to us on a design level to include all of this stuff in the silhouette. And this kind of goes back to what I said earlier, a silhouette can hint at the story of the character. All of these protruding elements are clearly tools. On a design level, they're poetically arranged in a curve. The designing principle would connect these in a curve, which mirrors the curve of his backpack here. That's how we kept all this complexity organized. Because you're able to read all of these little shapes, your brain expects what this character is all about right away. That's not always possible, but where it is possible, I highly recommend latching onto that and taking it as far as it can go. One last principle before I get into some drawing here. I'm really a big fan of breaking things up. I already talked about breaking things up rhythmically, but I'm also allergic to having an overly dominant silhouette. This character is largely in silhouette. But I had to put this little guy right in there, that little bit of negative space, which I think tells you where the body is. You can imagine his rib cages like this and his hips are here, and then that leads into his leg. That's why I put that negative space right there is to just indicate where his body might be. This silhouette is like what, 95% dark, maybe even more. And I wanted the remainder here. Let's just call it 5% for now, even though it's probably les than that, I wanted this to be there, just to break it up a little bit. I operate under the suspicion that the brain gets bored easily and break ups help with that. However, because there is such a dominant dark shape here, that does afford you the ability to break up the contour a little more than you might otherwise would. This one has breakups on a more consistent level, let's say. There's really not one big area where it's just dreadfully simple. For example, here, the shorts could have gone like this. That's what we saw on the previous character, but it's not. It's more complex. It's this thing. Again, I think this largely works because it's playing off of a large, dark shape already. It buys you some leeway here. The other thing I want to say about these breakups is as you should expect by now, they are very simple, but they're also not really repetitive. If we look at the length of this one versus the length of that one, this one is longer, this one is shorter. Now they are generally the same C curve type of thing, but then look at this. It goes into a wavy pattern. If this wavy pattern were not there, and instead we had another C curve, Well, if you do something three times, you've heard that expression. Twice as coincidence, three times as a pattern or twice as accidental, three times as intentional. If you do something three times, that's when the brain starts saying, Hey, that's repetitive. You do it twice? Okay. But even twice, you got to be careful and that's why I think it was a wise choice here. I can't remember if it was Nick who did this or me, probably Nick, to just break up the type of breakup that's happening. All right. Just one more to close out this lecture part before I start drawing. Here's yet another character from that project, and her silhouette looks like this. Now, this one in its design is actually quite close to this one that we saw previously in the sense that it's simple. The breakup area happens around here, and then a large bit of simplicity really all the way down to the bottom. I guess this is probably a good place to point out that this is clearly not a formula because you can draw 1 million different things using this pattern, 1 million different things in 1 million different styles. A formula yields similar results every time. This is something you can apply anywhere and still make unique looking work, which is true of design principles. The other thing I find really interesting about Nick's design here is that there is a shape DNA to the breakup part, the breakup part being up here. Notice it's very spiky. Even though this right here is an arm, that's her elbow right there, it's a spiky arm. Even these little offshoots of hair, these little sprigs of hair are spiky. There's a spike right there, I missed, little sprig of hair here that has a little spike shape. It's a softened spike for sure, but it's got that quality. This helps perhaps communicate some of the aspects of this person's character to you before you even get into the actual rendering of her. Just while we're here before we close out, I just want to remind you of things we've looked at already. Look at the beautiful continuous rhythm through the hair right there. That is just fantastic. I didn't do that. That's a Nick alislian thing. He put that in the design. I just made sure to capitalize on it when I cleaned it up and painted it. What Nick gave me here were rough sketches. It was partially my job to let's say finalize the silhouette and then carry through to the finished rendering. When I say something looks good here, it's mostly credit to Nick. Anyway, I just love this continuous rhythm. Straight from the top of the head all the way down to what? A good almost half of the body on this side is curated by this continuous rhythm. Remember that continuous rhythm has breakups in it. All these little red sections are breakups. But this blue line I'm drawing now is the continuous rhythm that we can still sense through all those breakups. And while we're here on continuous rhythm, there's a beautiful one right down this side of the body. It covers the entire body. Well, until the knees anyway. If you take that continuous rhythm and then graph out the areas that are broken up, chart them out like that. You can start to gauge what's simple versus what is broken up. Almost always you will notice that it's in favor of the simplicity, that is the simplicity takes up more of the real estate. You can even spot other shape design things we've already talked about. Look at how her head is thick up here and then it tapers thinner here. The human head doesn't have to do that. That's a design choice that Nick made. It's a very interesting shape. You can look at things like offset symmetry. I think there's a diagonal through the head like that where the widest points are, or even here in the shorts. It's wide here and wide there. Look at the diagonal. These are just things you can pepper throughout your designs and throughout your drawings that just help raise the interest of things. I absolutely love how delicate this shape is. First of all, it's a simple S curve. I think that's the first thing we could notice about it, but also this very gentle taper. It's a bit wider here, a bit thinner there, just barely noticeable, but it is noticeable and then tapers back out wider at the end. Here, I'll take away those red marks and you can see what I mean. Even the end of this shape, I absolutely love it. You notice it's not symmetrical. It's not this. It's that. That is a small difference for sure, but applied on a larger level on a bigger scale. That kind of stuff will turn you from a k draftsman to someone who is actually quite good. That's because if you gain the ability to carry these kind of aesthetics through an overall drawing, people will notice it, even if subconsciously. Let's put this into practice now and I'll show you how I think about this stuff as I draw something from scratch. 15. Designing using Silhouettes: A great way to practice this concept of the silhouette is to have it at the forefront of mind when you draw from life. I do really recommend drawing from life because you're going to be able to capture people's movement. The whole idea is when people are moving, you have to draw quickly, and that pressure to draw quickly forces you to think about silhouette because it's the most direct way to a drawing. Yes, you could do this from photos as well, but the whole problem is that photographs don't actually stimulate you or challenge you to draw quickly. Even if you're trying to draw quickly, inside your head, you know it's a photograph, it's not going to move. An pressure you feel is artificial. If you are actually outside or in a coffee shop drawing people in motion from life, there is a certain feeling that presides over the drawing experience. It's like the difference between competition and practice. In my experience, it forces you to use these tools a little more directly. What you're looking at here is a drawing from life from one of my own sketchbooks. It was drawn with an ink brush that looks something like this. As you can see, with this drawing, it looks like my warm up chapter, does it not where the strokes are made in this very bold and direct and continuous way. You can almost see me trying to will the drawing into existence, going for the shapes right away rather than plotting and building with gesture first, then construction and then finally shape. Here's what a drawing like this looks like in action. I usually start with the head and I certainly did in this one. By the way, she is operating a boom pole on a film set. She was staying relatively still, at least for the duration of the take that they were doing. I remember thinking about the continuous rhythm of the silhouette coming down off the hair and flowing into the arm, which ends about here. So I put that in. Then mentally, I mapped the shoulder line, but obviously, I didn't draw it because this is drawn with a brush pen. I can't erase this. I put in the shoulder where I mentally map that line. Then I mentally mapped this line. As you notice, these lines are all on diagonals, which is so common in real life, and I drew in where I think this arm is. The drawing probably started like this. Then in my head, I was imagining a gesture down the body like this. I'll leave this mark on the page just so you can see it, although I'll ghost it out as I always do. Of course, in the actual drawing, I did not even draw that, but that's what I was thinking about. That allowed me to find this line here, which leads down to the hips, which of course is inside the silhouette, but it was important for me to draw it to figure out where the hips are to then know where this line comes out for the coat she was wearing. Then this line for the bottom of the coat is really a gestural landmark, no different than what I would draw if this were a gesture drawing. Then that allowed me to find the other side of the contour somewhere over here. Now, this arm, I've drawn too far in, but in the spirit of not using the undo button as if this were a real marker drawing, I'll just extend the arm out where I think it should go. You'll see in a second, how you can actually just color in the silhouette to gauge the success of the drawing. Then from here, I could find the legs. Now here's an important tip that I have not mentioned yet. It's something I like to call the t principle. Actually, this is not my invention. This was taught to me by Glen Vilpu. The t principle says that whenever you have something colliding or intersecting with something else, here, there's a leg coming out of this jacket and there's another leg over here. The t principle says it's best to do the intersection at a t, there's a t between the coat bottom here and the pants. Essentially, it would be less wise to put the pants coming out right there because now you have something called a tangent, which can be hard to read. Because the pants are a separate thing from the jacket, I will use the t principle to make them come out here. Of course, another t principle to make this one come out there. To quickly show you the ts I'm talking about, here they are in red. You can also think of the arm as being a t principle. This is a t that's been rotated 90 degrees and the t here as the elbows collide with the torso. Now, you'll notice that there is not such a t principle going on here where the hair connects with the arm. This is either something I will consciously allow to occur or knowing that doing so will blend the hair in with the shoulder because one thing is just sliding right into another thing. I might incorporate a small t principle here, which can enhance readability, let's say, I might just simply bring the hair out a little bit here. In a moment, I will convert all of this to a silhouette and we can evaluate it even more closely that way. Anyway, to continue finishing the legs, I would just think about making a shape that is designed with either a scurve S curve straight. See how I broke this shape up in the middle. Well, my original drawing is better. Let me just erase this just to show you, I said I wouldn't erase, but here we go. The leg is better drawn with the break there and then this part is a bit longer. So it's basically two slight C curves, but one is longer than the other. The midpoint being right there. This one is that long and this one is that long. Then we go in for where the foot is, there's this beautiful negative space right in here. I say beautiful, not that what I've drawn is beautiful. It's nature gives you these really simple negative shapes that help delineate forms, and then her other leg goes down. She was wearing bell bottoms, as I recall, the leg in widens out at the bottom. I really like bell bottoms for that reason. They are easier to design into your drawing. Now, her shoes were hidden by the bell bottom. I think there was a bit of a heel coming out there and maybe the tip of the shoe, which I didn't even draw in my sketchbook, the tip of the other shoe might be about there. She was holding a boom pole, so there's the boom pole here. What you might want to do now is just on the same layer, describe a larger brush, I'll describe a marker brush here and just convert this into silhouette by coloring it in. Okay, great. Now, what this allows you to do is evaluate your shapes on a more holistic level, let's say, I can see the larger impact of the silhouette. It's easier to see it when it's colored in like this. Now you can do things like start cleaning up little shapes and determining exactly where you'd like to put things. So how does this curve exactly go? How does the t principle of the leg cross into the coat down here at this negative space. Can we design it in a way that is the most interesting shape possible. It's like a diamond shape. Do I want to close off this diamond at the top, like this? By the way, I'm accidentally sampling a few different levels of dark. I don't mean to do that. Sometimes it's good just to put a swatch here so I can just quickly sample it. This diamond shape. Should it be an equal diamond like it is now, or should maybe this side close a little sooner and this side a little longer? Maybe not, maybe it should actually go more like something like this, how do these shapes go. I do this in my illustrations all the time. This kind of thing. I don't literally put things in silhouette like this anymore just because I've been doing it long enough that I don't have to. But I think this way. I'm always tweaking shapes on this. I call it a non literal level. Like for example, I'm not even thinking of these as a pair of pants or legs. I'm just simply thinking of the shape language and keeping those shapes as interesting as I can. Then maybe I'll mentally zoom out and say, Oh, yes, it is a female figure that I'm painting or I'm drawing here. Let's make sure that it continues to read that way. Here, let's edit my scribble lines out and commit to a cleaned up silhouette. Does the shoulder go in like that? That's nice. It makes the hair have a bit more of a statement to it, like a bit more of a visual identity as hair. Or do I go fully continuous with it literally continuous. That's nice too. The only thing I don't like about that is it You can't really tell where the hair ends and the shoulder begins. You can tell it somewhere there, but I prefer this. I should clarify something about continuous rhythm here. Continuous rhythm is still present. The brain still can connect this as a rhythm. You don't need to be literal about it. I don't need to have it exactly be a continuous rhythm. Continuous rhythm is an illusion that we can detect. Even here, I can now dive into a little negative spaces for the hair if I want. This is strange, though, hair wouldn't rest like that. I'll get rid of that. But you can see where the possibilities are endless here. Hair maybe would break up along the sides. I've just made two negative spaces equal one, two, let's not do that. Let's break them up. Difference is key. If you have a shape like this, and then you make another shape exactly like it. Try not to do that. I'll cross this out with red. Instead, make the shape like that. You have a little rectangular shape and then a triangular shape. Or if you want the shape to be still rectangular to have a DNA connection, just make it a different type of rectangle, a smaller one, then maybe you have a little offshoots of that rectangle around it. That's what I'm trying to do here. For example, I have two curves, one, two, I want to offset them with offset symmetry. Ofset symmetry is a great way to accomplish differences in shapes. You connect them with symmetry, but then you offset them diagonally. Then I can do little things like carve into the waist here, make it maybe a little narrower, maybe the jacket comes out more or less or maybe the jacket is more straight. At this point, by the way, I'm not even looking at my original drawing, which is why it's off screen right now, I don't want to reference that. The point of this demonstration is to show you the power of silhouettes and how you can sculpt your design and how quickly you can make little iterations to perfect something. You can even draw this way. I could maybe play with her arm coming out like this. Now, I'm not trying to draw a well constructed arm or hand right now. I'm simply trying to see what the silhouette would look like shape wise roughly if the arm were posed like this. And does that make sense for the pose? If it makes sense for the pose, I would continue to go in and refine this and actually draw a sleeve in a hand or something like that. But does this make sense? It looks like it does. It looks like she's holding something. I reinforces the idea that she is definitely holding something. I like that. Maybe the sleeve would come down because if it's a jacket, then there's going to be a cuff there that comes down a bit. Okay. And you can see you can make all types of visual refinements this way. For example, do you want to throw in a little negative space maybe right in here? See what that did. I opened up the pose. What do I mean by opening up the pose? What I mean there is I've given you just a hair more information of what's going on there. That little negative space tells you that the back goes like this and the hips go like that. Even though it was not in my initial drawing, but this is where the exploratory nature of drawing is just so fun and silhouette is one of your primary tools to get you in this sandbox so you can play around with it. Okay. You know, does the elbow come to more of a point? This would indicate maybe a tighter jacket. That's interesting. You can even play with little folds in the clothing here if you wanted to. This is all just the outer shape, the silhouette. You don't have to actually draw this stuff on the inside. Of course, if this were a finished illustration you were working on, you would eventually have to draw the stuff on the inside. But on the topic of design, which is what this section is about, this is what you should be thinking of as a designer, and Design is really preoccupied with the final shapes. The whole thing about gesture and construction, that's drawing fundamentals, or I should say draftsmanship fundamentals. Design is what I'm doing now. It's what you do with those fundamentals. That is to say, I'm fully confident that there is an infrastructure here. I could go into this figure and find this ellipse, find the ellipse here, find the top of the shoulder box here. I know I can do that, which is what frees me now to play with the design stuff. Honestly, the design is done when you think it looks good. I can't really give you any more criteria than that. It's something that takes context and repetition, really. Let's do another one. One job I had fairly recently was a children's book gig where I had to design this kid who would be the star of the books. He was, I think, a seven year old kid, and the creator, the writer of the books wanted him to have very cute proportions. This is the head shape, not the head shape, sorry, the head dimension. Then I'm very interested in comparing that with the shoulder dimension. Then we designed it based on this wedge shape that would go from thin at the top to thick at the bottom. And he would have these very baggy pants and the pants would kind of like they'd be so baggy that the crop of the pants would come down like this. So the first thing I did when I designed it and I'm kind recreating that process for you here was I was thinking about the silhouette mostly and then proportion. And I'm using gestural strokes and landmarking and all the stuff we talked about in the gesture chapter and even basic ellipses, which I can't turn off. I can't turn my brain off from thinking about ellipses like this. But that stuff is not at the top of mind here. It's buried in the background, and his arm would come down like this. This is a great way to just play with overall proportions. Now, let's immediately transfer into coloring this in as a silhouette. Because I'm not trying to draw the inner information right now. I'm simply trying to work out proportion and dimension, how wide is he, how tall is he? What are the shapes doing on a meta design level? Does the head connect in with the shoulders is his neck so short that it connects right in with the shoulders or is there more of a neck? Basically, would the would it be more like this? Now, the character we ended up deciding the character would have very large hair. This would be like if the character had no hair, then what I did was I put well, first let me indicate the ears, and ear is a great silhouette tool, and it actually can show dimension as well, or I should say perspective. Right now, because we can see this ear and not the other ear, we're looking at it was a male character. We're looking at him in a three quarter pose. What you can do is also maybe get rid of this arm a little bit and maybe get rid of this shoulder a little bit to turn it into a three quarter perspective. It's amazing how much information the silhouette can store. This is really only available to you as a drawing tool. If you know in the back of your mind the gesture and form building tools that we already looked at. Maybe this arm would come out here and this leg would be like this. It's reading now as a kid dressed in baggy clothes, which this kid was. This arm comes out here. I love drawing this way because you don't have to be preoccupied with any detail right off the bat. I can ask myself, where would his hands land? This is where you can look up photo reference. What's the real proportions of a seven year old? Where do their hands go? Probably somewhere around the hips. I'm just inventing this, but the whole point of with silhouette is it's easy enough to quickly iterate and invent things and destroy them and recreate them. Now, his hair, like I said, was a big Chunk of hair like that. And that looks immediately like it's given him some character. It's kind of this sort of exaggerated Elvis Presley swoop at the top. And we even really play that up. We ended up playing that up with some negative space as the swoop became really, really apparent. We had some fun with the negative spaces there. And I'll make sure this one is maybe long, this one is more wide, so I'm not repeating myself and maybe a straight there for the hair and a straight there for the back of the head. His hair is kind of crazy there but well cut there. You know, so it's kind of like nice fresh from the barber kind back of his head. Then does the ear connect with the jaw? That looks a little strange. Let's maybe give him a little bit more of a jaw. Now it's a child, so the jaw is more rounded. This is where reference can come in. What does the jaw of a child look like compared to the jaw of an adult? The answer to that is it's rounder. An adult has more chiseled features. A little boy like this would have a more rounded face, and that's when I can think of these shapes now. I'm tossing and turning between round. Tossing and turning is not the right image because that implies unrest. I am ping ponging from round, round round, straight, round, round. So it's mostly round to give the boyish impression of roundness, which I think is suitable for a little boy design, a seven year old boy design, but offsets or just punctuated with straights. Now, is that a rule? No, absolutely not. This section of the back of the head could absolutely be round or rounder. And it would look just fine, but I like the design choice, let's say, it's a very clear choice I'm making to go straight there, to really carve it out with straights I suppose that speaks to something I enjoy seeing in people's designs, my own designs and other artists as well. I like seeing when things are very intentional like that. It's interesting to me. Not to get off on a tangent here. That's the kind of thing that AI doesn't do very well. It doesn't really make it kind of makes the safe shape choices all the time. And this is really where you can set yourself apart from that world of image making. Okay. So does he have sleeves? And if he does, do they come out like that, and then maybe his arm is narrower? You know, I'm kind of tracking a diagonal relationship for maybe this sleeve. And then is this arm straight? Or does this arm go, maybe we don't even see that arm. Maybe the silhouette is best communicated if we just see the chest and that arm maybe just comes out at the end. Maybe there's a hand here with some that looks like nonsatu. Maybe the hand is just curled here or maybe there's just no hand visible at all. The point is, look how quickly I'm able to decide on these things, how low are the shoulders? What level of height do the shoulders need to be at to communicate relaxed. If the shoulders up here, suddenly that looks a bit less relaxed. It looks like he's raising his shoulders to me. But if they're down here, it looks more relaxed. Now, how far down can I go? Maybe I can push it like that. Maybe this arm needs to come in a little bit. If he has a long sleeve shirt on, then the sleeve would be down there and the hand would be here, and maybe there's a little bit of negative space there. I like that to communicate how his hand is resting. On the body and maybe there's just a little bit of a hand coming out of this side. In a three quarter view, you usually can see the other arm. I just know this from experience from having drawn a lot, and that's what I ultimately want any student watching this to do is don't draw from your head all the time. Splice it in with drawing from reference. I think the best reference is directly from life. Photos are great. If you can draw from life, though, please get out there and do it. You will be doing yourself the biggest artistic favor that way. It can simply be going to a coffee shop or I don't know, maybe if you live on a busy street, just sit outside and draw people as they pass by. And try and capture people in their day to day poses. He had shoes, and now his shoes were their own interesting silhouettes. The kind of came out like that, and this shoe was sort of like this, but how long would the shoes be? Where would the heel go? Would the heel blend in with the pants in a perfectly continuous way? I don't like this decision right now because I don't like how the pants they don't have enough separation from the heel. That little dip right there is not enough to be a t principle. If I want the t principle, it would be like this. There we go. Now we can play with taper, maybe the pants taper even more. Here's where you can get into all kinds of digital tricks. How about if I took this? And just moved it in a little bit and maybe even took a selection and distorted it out. So this comes in to reinforce my meta shape I talked about. And then now that I've done that, his head appears too far forward. So just quickly grab it. Let's bring it back. And then I I don't like seeing that selection. So in photoshop here, I can hide it with Control H and just move this around freely. And where does his head sit? I'm just moving with the arrow keys. You can hear me pressing them. Phonetically. Where does his head sit? Maybe somewhere about there. That looks like a resting pose to me. Just evaluating it visually, I don't have any tricks up my sleeve for determining what looks good, other than experience. That's the main trick. You can only earn that by doing it over and over again. That's something no one can teach, can't teach experience. But what I can teach and what I hopefully I'm teaching here is the way to maximize every ounce of useful experience that you can get out of your practice. Maybe his cuff of his pants should have its own T intersection like this. That's way better. I say that's way better because now I like that the shape is fully continuous here and then it just breaks up at the end. You can almost imagine the continuous rhythm here, break up at the end. I like that. Now, this is a symmetrical bit of breakup. Again, like I said, there's no rules. I think it looks okay here. If maybe you wanted to give them some cargo pants, maybe you could add a little cargo pocket here and have a little bit of extra break up there and not a lot of break up there and offset them on a diagonal. Sure, let's go with that. The whole thing about design is you should give yourself iterations various versions of the design. Now here, I want to make sure that the cuff of the pants, if I'm doing this cargo pocket, The cuff of the pants should be smaller, the cargo pocket is this big. I want the cuff of the pants to be much smaller and obviously smaller. Before this, it was the same size. Let's just tweak this. I think it should be a curve here inside the crotch area of the pants. You can even play with a little negative space there for the cuff or not. Maybe that makes that negative space too complex. Let's just keep it fully continuous. This looks like an effective design. This once again is a recreation of how I designed this character. These books are not actually out yet as of the time of this recording. Unfortunately, you won't be able to find them in stores or anything, but I'll announce it when they do come out. I spent years working on these books. It is a series of three books. I illustrated two of them. Maybe the hair is a bit wider here and narrower at the tip. Maybe there's another sprig of hair that's even smaller. Maybe something like that, or that looks a little strange. Maybe that's too continuous, maybe this. Maybe that. Again, as I'm saying, maybe, maybe it's a blast to be able to iterate so quickly. Maybe the neck should be even thinner. I make a joke with my own children all the time. I squeeze their neck and I call them chicken neck because children's necks are just so skinny, so maybe I can really push that. That's just a bit of life experience in forming the art. I happen to know that children's necks are skinny. That's something I would not have thought of if I weren't a parent, but all kinds of life experience will factor into your design decisions on a micro level, like how thin the neck is, you know. Okay. Okay. There we go. How long have I been recording? I'm looking at my timer. I've been recording for 13 minutes. Some of that was probably spent ming and awing and I'll edit those out. So let's say 10 minutes, if I weren't talking, in 10 minutes, I've got a little design here for a boy character. And then if you wanted to, you could start thinking about, okay, where's the eye line or this would be the nose line, I suppose. Here's the eye line. Then I will get into this in a future chapter of the class, but you could get into drawing the character now. We are his eyes? Maybe his eyebrows are up here. Maybe his eyes are then sitting in his head in the eye sockets right there. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. This is the next step, which I will cover later in the class. You can challenge yourself though. Where would the midline be? Well, the midline wouldn't be in the middle because this is in a three quarter perspective. If we drew an egg shape for the rib cage like we looked at in the form section, well, that midline would go over the form like this and down the middle of the form there wrapping underneath the crotch area. The hip bean shape would be here. The leg cylinder would come down like this, the other leg cylinder, like that. But all of that is buried in the silhouette. The silhouette should be a stand in for all of that information. If you can get a good hold on the basics of gesture and form, You could start with the siloette stuff first because it's really fun. Start by having a lot of fun and then dig into the more technical aspects of drawing, which were covered in the previous chapter on Form, really, and building building up your figures that way. Even in the first part of the shape chapter, I talked about combining all the draftsmanship fundamentals to building up a drawing. You could use this silhouette as your initial spring of reference for that. Okay. 16. Big/Medium/Small Shape Theory: All right. This is the final installment in the shape chapter, and we are looking at a beautiful illustration by Sergei Kolsov. The topic of this section is big medium, small shapes. If you've gone on the Internet for any amount of time to look up art instruction, I'm sure you've heard of this concept of using big shapes, medium shapes, and small shapes in your designs to make them look as appealing as possible. So I want to explain that, but I also want to explain a good handy way of studying and practicing it. Just to continue to preface this. I see time and time again when people do studies, their study is trying to replicate the reference, and that is certainly great. I've done that 1 million times in my own study. You pull up a painting by Sergeant and try and copy it. Make it as good as he did, which never happens, by the way. You might be tempted to look at a beautiful illustration like this and try and copy it yourself, which again, would be totally great. However, you don't actually have to do that to gain a fuller understanding of concepts. And when it comes to big medium small, this is especially true. The first thing I did just off camera was I cut out the silhouettes of this character. I might as well go ahead and throw a white background behind him so we don't get distracted. This silhouette follows all the principles I talked about a couple sections ago in the shape chapter. You should be able to identify areas of simplicity versus areas of breakup. On a DNA level, I would say most of these lines are straights. This is great because this is actually a different design language like the shape choices are different than the illustrations and silhouettes I showed you a couple sections ago. Okay. But what I have also prepared off screen is this. This is just a tracing of the silhouette. This will be the base position for how to study big medium small. Just as an overall philosophy of learning, I am totally cool with tracing someone else's work in the name of study. I would never show this to someone as my own work, of course. But before we even do anything with that, I want to quickly show you an overall philosophy for thinking about big medium, small shapes. The idea is we have our canvas here or a piece of paper, or whatever it is you're drawing on, and we only have certain dimensions to draw within the bounds of the canvas. Within this, we need to fill it with shapes. Because we only have certain boundaries and limits and borders, we only have a finite amount of shapes we can put in there. Now, your big shapes, I'll say B for big M for medium S for small, You only have room for a few big shapes because the canvas is only so big. Here's our big shape. You might have I'll just draw two big shapes in here just for fun. Here's two big shapes. I'll make them maybe different values so that you can see them. To big shapes, and I am already out of room here in this column for big shapes. This is representative of the same thing in painting or a drawing. You only have so much room for big shapes. You can only put a few of them in there. Now, medium shapes, you have a lot more room for those. I'm just going to draw a few shapes here. The shape can be anything. I'm just making this up, trying to keep them simple, of course. And I'll quickly shade them in. All right. Now we move on to our small shapes, and you're already ahead of me. We have much more room for small shapes. I will populate this with as many little small shapes as I can fit into this little column here. As simple as this is, this is my overall internal system of distribution of shapes. Now, don't do any math here. I'm not trying to say for every one, two big shapes you get one, two, three, four, five, six, medium shapes, and so on. That's not what I'm trying to say. It's just the idea that you have fewer big shapes, more medium shapes, and the most small shapes, simply due to the size of the physical canvas space that you're working on. Okay, but now we have to see how these things can be combined. Let's pretend that this is an actual drawing that we're doing. Of course, we will apply this to the Serge olsav drawing right after this. This is a big shape. Actually, I've made two big shapes. One is the positive shape I'm drawing here, and one is the negative shape of the white of the canvas behind it. These are two big shapes. The white of the canvas is commonly a big shape of the sky in a landscape or something. To big shapes. Okay. Now, that's pretty much all the room I have. Maybe I could put another big shape like here. This is a pretty big shape here. Let's do that. Now there's three big shapes, and let's not have a tangent there. The two dark shapes are on their own islands disconnected and then the white shape is continuous through them. But now we can subdivide this and add medium sized shapes. When I do this, I want to play with overlapping these shapes as much as I can, but not always. For example, Let's put in a few medium size shapes that do not overlap that are also their own islands or they go behind this one here, we'll go behind. Maybe there's a shape over here. How about a shape that traverses all of these that goes behind them? This is almost a large shape. But I should also mention that within the categories of big medium small, your shapes can be of various sizes. So long as they visually still belong to that category, a slightly larger medium shape and a slightly smaller medium shape. But your small shapes should still be smaller than the smallest medium shape and your big shapes should still be bigger than the largest medium shape. Here come the small shapes. There will be more small shapes than the medium shapes, and there are more medium shapes than there are big shapes. Just like that, there we have it. This is what you are aiming for as an illustrator or concept artist or whatever profession you want to be in, even if it's just making art as a hobby. If you want your stuff to look pretty, this is what you're aiming for. I don't know about you, but I look at this little abstract piece I just did, and while it certainly doesn't look like anything, it feels interesting. It engages my eye. I'm not bored looking at it. The first theory I want to talk about is what I call the X ray vision theory. The first big shape that I put down on this canvas was this guy here, if you remember. Notice how that big shape is still there, the identity of it, even though it's been overlapped by this medium shape, overlapped here by the small shapes, also overlapped here by medium shapes and small shapes. Not to mention all these small shapes that are cluttering up. The shape is still very much intact. It's like we have X ray vision and can fill in the gap there and the gap right there and the gap right there and all these little gaps in here. Our brains are incredibly good at shape detection. That's what they're designed to do a lot of the time. In practice, I see a lot of art students being shy about overlapping and introducing shapes that are even close to other shapes. A very common thing an art student will do is let's say they draw a shape. This could represent a head or something or a figure. Instead of putting another shape behind it and concealing that shape or instead of putting that shape overlapping like this, what they'll do instead is they'll put the shape just beside it. I think this speaks to a habitual thought that if we are creating this art and putting so much effort into creating this art, we want to show off, look at this thing I drew and look at this thing I drew and you don't want to overlap them. But this is poison if you do this enough, if you separate things too much, then everything looks like it's on its own island or demanding the same type of attention. The pattern becomes boring and repetitive, like a checkerboard or something. Really what you want is your big medium and small shapes interacting with each other. Via overlays or things going behind, and that becomes exponentially true when you get into values, you know, a lighter shape, overlapping, a darker shape, et cetera. The thing you do have to look out for though, back to the X ray vision thing is you want to make sure you don't overlap, say this big shape too many times because if you start doing this, Let's destroy this. If I start putting too many shapes here, well, now all of a sudden, I've lost that big shape. I can still see the dark shape behind there, but my brain doesn't have enough continuous rhythm information to I don't know what's happening here. Our shape should go like that. It went out like this. But I've lost too much of that rhythm. I can't read it anymore. If I undo, there it is, this is better. But even here, this is still too disguised. That shape is too buried now. Something like this is a bit better. I'm evaluating it visually. There are no rules to govern this. It's just, can you still see the identity of that shape, and also to compound on that question, is that shape design simple in the first place so that your brain can have a fighting chance at identifying it. If that shape were too complex and didn't pass my kindergarten rule, then you'd be shooting yourself in the foot from the beginning. This is the next layer of principles you lay over your simple shapes. That is when you overlap them or underlay them with other shapes. Therefore, asking the viewer's brain to take in more information. Are your shapes simple enough that they can be read in an instant. Okay, so we're back here. Our goal now is to do what I just did with that theoretical diagram, but inside this silhouette. And this is only something I recommend you do after you have a good, clear silhouette. And that's why in this case, we're starting with a tracing of something that's already certifiably good. At least I am personally certifying it as good for whatever that's worth. All right. My first line of thought is, the silhouette is not just black like that. It's not filled in with one color. It's broken up. The guard is wearing a white shirt and dark pants and he has a different skin tone and a light hat, and he's got little patches and pockets, different colored boots. All of those different values or different shades equal different shapes. I don't want to cross over into painting here at all, but one thing that is true in painting, whenever you change your value, you are also changing your shape. A light shirt versus dark pants, that's two shapes. All right. Let's start working in our silhouette and I'm trying to find the shape of the shirt. I don't need to draw it perfectly. I know there's an arm here, but I don't really care exactly how the arm goes. No, I'm just like, the shirt sleeve is there roughly. Then it comes down and it comes down about here and up and then down and something maybe fix it a bit more like that, and it goes up and then the other shirt sleeve, it's something like this. I don't care if that's not 100% accurate. It's not supposed to be. Remember, this is not a copying exercise. We are trying to understand how Sergei Kolsov in this case, has broken up his shapes inside the silhouette. Let's find the top of the shirt. It's something like this. Again, the goal is not to copy the reference. It's just to get the size of the shape roughly in place. And then if you want, you can just use the paint bucket tool to fill in something. The reason I'm doing that is so now I can fill in this shape, which is the pants. I've made that shape by default by making the shirt shape, and I'll just clean this up here. But those are my big shapes, two of them here. That's how I'm seeing it anyway. Now let's move on to the medium shapes. Well, he has arms. As if we were drawing schematically and roughly, not trying to draw a perfect arm here. Let's try to figure out where the arm is and the hand comes down. It's about here. I'm just trying to design this with as simple shapes as possible, and it comes back up here. The shade of that arm is somewhere between the shirt and pants. I'll just quickly block this in. Now let's get this other arm in here, which is also a medium shape. Remember, that's what we're determining here. Where are the medium shapes. I only really had two big shapes, one, two, shirt pants, and now it's the medium shapes. I'll just sample the shirt value there, and the boots are definitely medium shapes, and I'll just put this in, grab my paint bucket filler and do that. What you should be seeing even at this early stage, when you start putting in the few medium shapes is the interest, the visual interest starts to build. In the case of a character like this, you start understanding a little bit more of who he is. We can start to see clothing coming through. But remember, that's on the literal level. As artists, yes, we need to be aware of the literal level because that's what we're ultimately trying to communicate. But we also have to be able to look under the proverbial hood of the car and understand what we're doing with all those little nuts and bolts that make everything up. Which is why in this method of study, it's totally okay that this is just a proxy for an arm. It's not a perfect arm drawing. Drawing this arm perfectly or drawing it the way Kolsov did wouldn't really help us any on a shape level. We just need to know in this study what the size of the shape is, and I guess roughly where it goes too. Now, more medium shapes. Well, he's got this big strap with a buckle that goes like this. Let's just end it there and that strap is continuous, or it connects to this strap, which connects to this little pocket thing here. Again, does not matter what any of this stuff is on a literal level. Let's just get the basic shape in there and in your head, categorize which camp it's in. That is, in this case, it's the medium shapes. We are working on exclusively medium shapes now. The whole point is this will help you be conscious of what you're creating shape wise when you make up your own characters. It's just a coincidence, by the way, that I'm determining two big shapes here and I showed you two big shapes in my diagram. Two is not a magic number. Sometimes there's three, sometimes there's four, sometimes there's one, it depends on the piece you're looking at. What other medium shapes can we discern here? Well, there's this little pocket on the sleeve. That is a pretty clear medium shape to me. Although we're getting a bit smaller with that medium shape, but let's just call that medium. While I'm here, let me just color in the head, as well as fill in the helmet as medium shapes. There we go. We are getting close to being finished with the medium shapes. A few more though. He is holding a button, and I am going to term this baton as a medium shape. It is definitely on the smaller side of medium. Like if I am also calling this arm a medium shape, then that is a much larger medium shape than this. We are bordering on the small shapes here, but let's call that a medium. I'm also thinking about the face here, the head as a medium shape, and the hat as a medium shape. I think that's it. Those are the medium shapes that I see in this picture. What I absolutely love about this type of exercise is to me, anyway, it removes the mystery of detail and rendering. Like, you look at the Colsov painting and you can get enamored by how he rendered the clothing folds and the little shiny belt buckles versus the leather straps. That's all cool, but rendering is different, or maybe I should say rendering comes far after the shape decisions. An experienced artists will be able to combine rendering in with shape decisions. That's what it means to get more advanced as an artist, graduating from beginner or experienced beginner to professional, maybe. To me, what all that implies is you're able to crunch more decisions all at once. In this class, though, I'm really interested in splitting all this up. Then as you practice, you will be able to start combining them probably pretty quickly. But without further ado, small shapes. This is the fun part because small shapes are like little buzzing little bees, little noisy things that are really, really needed for that visual interest. These belt buckles are essentially squares. I'm just making squares. And whoops, I forgot a medium shape in here. Apologies. Let me just rewind and put this in. Again, this is a medium shape that I just happened to miss before. This little strap here, I would say is a small shape. Then within that, there's these little small little buckles there or straps or whatever they are. You can even find see this little tiny bit of shadow right there. I think that's strong enough of a shape to be a small shape. Again, we are not thinking on a literal level. A shadow is just as much of a shape as a shoulder pad is, assuming this is a shoulder pad that I'm drawing, there's a little sleeve pocket here. Again, I don't care that it's a sleeve pocket. I care that it is a small shape. Look at this. If I wanted to get really interesting about it, there's a tiny little dark shape right there, which in reality is obviously a little shadow. But again, in the language of shapes, we're not concerned with discerning things on a literal level. There's an eye somewhere around here. It's a small shape. You can think of the nostril as a small shape. You can think of the mouth as a small shape. There's a little shadow under his jaw. This is a small shape. This little strap from the helmet. Let's call that a small shape, and the shadow behind the ear, this part here under the helmet. That's a small shape. I hope you're noticing that there are a lot of small shapes up here. And we're not done. There's little small shape here at the front of the helmet. The strap along the helmet is also a small shape. You could look at the highlight on his cheek right there as a small shape. To me, it's identifiable enough to be its own little shape. Now, unlike this part of the figure where there's a lot of breakups via small shapes all condensed together. In this area of the figure, there are still small shapes, but they're more spaced out. There's a small shape via the shadow under the shirt and probably another one right there. Block that in. There's probably another one here that's triangular. The arm has a triangular little shadow shape there that I think identifies as a small shape. There's one there too. I'm just my eyes are darting back and forth between the reference and my study, so I don't have enough time to recognize and synthesize any detail. Oh, look at this. I missed a medium shape right here in the pants. This shadow here that I'm drawing. This is big enough to be a medium shape, I think. Let's put that in. Yeah. This is definitely a medium size shape. I mean, it's bigger than the baton and we call that a medium shape. But then back to the pants, there are little shapes in here like little folds that are prominent enough to announce themselves as shapes that are integral to the overall design of this thing. Some of those folds are kept so subtle that I don't think they contribute to the overall shape. I mean, they're nice on a rendering level. But as far as big medium small shapes is concerned, I'm only including what I see as being prominent enough to contribute to that fundamental binary information. Is there a shape there or is there not? That is upon a quick visual inspection. Do you see a shape there or not? What I am ultimately telling you here is like, for example, this arm, this part of the arm that I'm coloring in red, on a visual impact level, it's one shape. Rendering that Colsov has put into that arm is so close in value that it all merges and melts down together into one shape. But on the other hand, I am saying to you that this shape here in the pants separates itself from the larger shape of the pants in order to become its own shape. This is what designers do, and a good designer doesn't matter if it's Kolsov or anyone. Insert your favorite artist's name here. Without even knowing who it is, I guarantee they do this because you can't really achieve good design unless you're intentional about this. The boots have a little rectangular shape there and a little triangular shape there. These are all small shapes again. The bottom of the boot has a nice little horizontal shape there and it goes up. There is this little shape like this and a shape like this. What's pretty cool about this type of study is even though I've been drawing just the most basic shapes and approximated even, I haven't even really been trying to copy at all, it's starting to actually look like a decent piece of work. Now again, part of that is because I traced the silhouette to begin with. Just coming up with that silhouette would be its own day's work. Well, probably not for Kolsv, but I've definitely struggled for a day over a silhouette. That's not uncommon. But once you have that, doing this stuff is really fun because I feel like you're composing, you are making a composition with the language of big medium small. This boots I just worked on here. Let me just outline some of the, let's call them negative spaces here. There's one. Here's another one, and here's another one. Notice the sizes are different. For example, he's not putting his shapes in a checkerboard pattern like this that I'm doing now. This looks like a checkerboard or a leopard or something. Good shape design is almost never equally distributed like that. There are interesting varieties, or maybe what I should say there is the variety between spacings and sizings is what makes the shapes look interesting on a compositional level. And you don't fool yourself. This is a composition. A character design like this or a character within an illustration is very much its own subcosition. If you are only populating the page with a character like I'm doing here in this study, this whole statement is no different than any other pictorial composition. It's a composition just as much as it is a character. If there is a secret in art, a one sentence secret, I swear, I swear it's this, that the abstract level is just as important, if not more important than the literal level. I swear that is an art secret and in my years of teaching students, I can pretty confidently say that most students don't know that. I mean, I didn't know it when I was a first student. It took me years to discover that. Hopefully, I'm imparting it effectively to you here. I think there's another medium shape in this arm that breaks it up a little bit. The shape seems to be enough to warrant its own thing. Then, maybe if you want, you can say, okay, this is a medium, a small shape on the arm here. And it merges with another one here. There's maybe another small shape down there. Let's go with something like that. You notice as I do this, and I'm almost done here, but notice how many more small shapes there are than big or medium. Most of your study will be concerned with placing these small shapes. I'm just trying to get enough of them in here that I can feel like it satisfies the distribution model that I showed you a bit earlier, where you have exponentially more almost small shapes than you do big shapes. Even the small shapes have to appear much more populated than the medium shapes, which I feel like finally now I've satisfied that condition. All this without taking any real pains to draw exact shapes except for the tracing of the silhouette, that was exact. In the context of this type of study, I do recommend tracing the silhouette. So at least you know you're working within the correct framework, If you wanted to increase the level of difficulty of the study, then draw the silhouette yourself before moving into the inside shape stuff that we're doing here. Just because I'm a sticker for this stuff. One thing Sergey Kolsov definitely did not do is make this shape so equal. So I'll just do a quick tweak on that. You can take this stuff as deep as you want and be as attentive to this kind of detail as you want. Honestly, the more I do art, the more attention I pay to this kind of thing. This is what has become the most important thing to me, lighting, rendering, whatever. All that stuff can only happen or is only useful if all this big medium small shape stuff is in place. Let's stop here. I think this is a successful study, and we'll look at one more related thing before signing off for Chapter three. Here's a piece by John Neverz. You can see his Instagram handle up there. I highly recommend giving him a follow. He is just a fantastic artist with just immense confidence in his sketches. The thing I love about this one and really all his stuff is he really gets this idea of shape breakups. I want to draw this in a way that I would actually draw my own stuff in a way that I believe John Neverz draws his stuff, which is just playing with shapes, trying to commit them to more of an intuition. Noticing things like, here's a big shape for the belly here. Here's the hips, which are off kilter from the shoulders, shoulders, hips, gestural stuff. But in the shape category, which we're in now, this is a big shape, big belly shape. John Navarre says, Hey, there's pectoralis muscles up here. This could be a good natural way for a shape break. He gives you this little tiny little shape break up in here. Just thanks to nature, the pectoralis occurs in the upper third of the torso. We have a one third, two thirds deal here. Nature is actually quite good at avoiding some kind of symmetry. Of course, it has other kinds of symmetry that it does employ. We have an arm here that goes from thin to thick back to thin. And even the way he does this little crude shading, notice how even that has variety to it. It's like a tighter spring there and a looser spring there. I'm willing to bet that's something that John Nevers has trained over the years. He could probably put it into words like I am, but some artists just commit it to muscle memory. They find out what they like and they go with it. Of how even the eyes on his head are uneven. But back to shape breakups, big medium small. His hips have some nice little uneven lines, which are a lot of small shapes in there. Then that parlays down into a medium size shape for the crotch area. Then the leg that comes out is what is that a medium shape maybe? It's a tapered cylinder as well, which is interesting, thick to thin, which then breaks out into a big old C curve for the calf muscle. And some nice offset symmetry right there for the other side of the calf. That's also thanks to nature. Nature is designed that way. Here's some simple shading and he's got this sock or boot thing that adds all kind of small little shapes in there. To be clear, these are very sketchy little shapes I'm making. They're not as refined as the olsav study I just did, and that's not a knock on Nevers work here. It's a sketch. It's the nature of a sketch. It should be this way as you're exploring. But the thing I want to impart here is that this is ingrained in an experienced artist's thinking. I just threw in a cylinder there. Do you guys see that? The more you use these fundamentals, the more you can always have them be the glue of your drawing process. Here's the other foot here. Even the way that foot is designed, is like this wedge like this and with the little gap between the big toe and the rest of the toes, doing a little break up there. Even that breakup is similar to the breakup up here in the sense that it's one third versus two thirds. These principles are discoverable everywhere. I overlap the sword with the leg in my sketch, but that's okay. I've learned long ago that it's really not important to copy something exactly. If I wanted to copy this exactly, I could. But to be honest, I don't see the point in doing that anymore. Even someone like John Neverz if you asked him to draw this exact thing again, he probably would overlap the sword too or do something different. I love how he's breaking up the shapes here of the clavicle. It's like this is making a shape like that. But on this side, it's a different shape. There's all kinds of little small shapes being made here with the sternal mastoid muscle here and here, the roundness of the deltoid causing some small shapes where it overlaps there, overlaps the triceps muscle. So shading on that triceps muscle, giving all kinds of little small shapes. Here's a nice medium shape, that forearm coming down to hand over here. But with some nice little breakups of smaller shapes, or maybe these are smaller medium shapes. I'm not quite sure in here, just to offset that. Okay. And then we go into the hand, which is kept nicely in silhouette. We'll just shade that in. Okay. Always a nice idea to shade in your shapes. It's always been a helpful tool for me just to gauge how strong they are. You can feel it, how easy is it to shade in these shapes. A well designed shape will also be easy to shade in. I'm not sure if that's a universal rule or anything, but it's something I've noticed. I love the cross contour here tracking down the rib cage into the naval area, and even that naval is on an angle, and then that cross contour picks back up for the belly area. Then look at this little detail here. What is that a scar? I'm not quite sure. But what it is is a nice breakup of shapes. It's added this rounded triangle shape in here. That doesn't exist on the other side. Notice how John Nevers did not put an equal shape on that side. Whenever you can try and avoid obvious symmetry. The symmetry you can't avoid the two arms should probably be the same size. That should be symmetrical, but they appear offset due to the pose. The shoulder being at an angle like this affects how the arms look. They're not just pose the same way on both sides. That's where gesture comes in. Gesture can be a tool that helps you find interesting shapes. If you have an interesting gesture, chances are your your shapes will stand a better chance of being interesting. Let's put it that way. Okay. There we go. This is how you can condense these lessons of shape, but even how gesture and form play into it and just start sketching. I do recommend studying other artists, let's call it sketch language, like the visual language they use when they sketch, and I absolutely love John Nevs's visual language. His strokes are so free and they look like he's having fun. That's what I want my stuff to look like. You saw me study from Glen Ken's strokes in the warm up chapter. I find the same kind of appeal in John's work. It's in the same category, but it does look different than Glen Keynes. Anytime you are making any kind of mark on your drawing, try and always think of what kind of shape is it imparting? Is it a big shape, medium shape or small shape? Then within that, is it breaking up an otherwise boring area? When I say boring, I mean just one shape left blank. Like if this torso area were just blank like this, if it were just blank. Well, you'd want to put something there, obviously, like anyone would know you have to put something there. But let's just say you did it like this. Put his pectorals like that and his belly button there. I could see many beginning artists making a choice like that. But can you see how it's not as interesting as what Never has did and what I've copied is this. There's just more activity going on, more specific attention paid to the big medium small, and I always enjoy how the big shape like the belly and torso area I showed you before. It looks like a slice of bread when I outline it like that. But can you see how that shape is untouched in the drawing? It's still there. I've overlaid it with this medium shape. And this medium shape and the navel would be a small shape. And some of these shapes up here would be small shapes. But the overall big shape is still intact. And that's something I use all the time to evaluate my work, as I ask myself, are my initial lay in shapes. Those, strong pillar shapes. I call them sometimes, they're the pillars of the work. They hold it up. Are those shapes still intact or have I ruined them in the time it took me to put in all the rest of the shapes. That is a very common thing, by the way, to lay something in and it's looking strong and then half hour later, somehow along the way, you've ruined it. When you do that, it's probably that you've lost the identity of your bigger shapes. All right. I think this is a good place to close out Chapter three. Chapter four, we will dive a little more into perspective. 17. Chapter 4 - Perspective: Welcome to Chapter four perspective. As far as my relationship with the fundamentals goes, Perspective was the hardest one for me to wrap my head around. There's just a few hoops you have to jump through to convert this three D world around us onto that proverbial two D piece of paper. But after this chapter, you'll understand the most common types of perspective, 1.2 0.3 point perspective, and we'll expand on concepts like the horizon line and how vanishing points affect the scene. We'll start off with a series of lectures and then move right on into two full drawing demonstrations. Let's get started. 18. 1-Point Perspective: All right. We know that when drawing in linear perspective, you first need a horizon line, and on that horizon line, we can place a vanishing point. You can place multiple vanishing points on a horizon line, but this is one point perspective. So there's only one vanishing point. And from that vanishing point comes radiating lines both below the horizon line and above the horizon line. Now, one point perspective assumes that lines going in this direction are all straight and parallel. They do not converge at a vanishing point. Likewise, all lines going in this direction, vertically are also straight and parallel. They don't converge at a vanishing point either. This is the easiest perspective grid to draw in. I'll draw a few cubes here quickly. I'll go straight vertically up until I hit one of my grid lines. Then I'll follow that grid line back, go straight horizontally on both the front and back sides, then connect the front and back following the grid line, vertically down and connect these two front and back points following the grid line. All right, great. Now I'll draw a second cube, but using the top of my first cube to help align it. I want these two boxes to be side by side in space at the same depth. But I also want this cube to be less deep than the first one. I'll shoot a line here, and now I can construct my cube in just the same way I did the first one, following the grid lines, and then anything that's horizontal or vertical, I just draw it straight horizontally or vertically. There we go. That second cube is the same height as the first cube and the same distance away from us and its depth is roughly half of the first cube. Let's make another cube that aligns with the back of this cube. This time, I'll extend the object above the horizon line. As we know from previous chapters, that means we're not going to see the top face because it's above our eye line. One point perspective is great for when you're looking down the barrel of something like looking directly down a street. The first thing to ask yourself, as always, is where is the horizon line? Well, it's obviously not there because whoever took this photo is not 20 feet tall. If the horizon line is the eye line of the viewer, that means the horizon line is somewhere down here. All right. But somewhere is not good enough. We want to nail this. Let's move the horizon line away and bring in an average person to gauge height. The height of a person can help us find the eye line. Now, in this visual thought exercise here, we need to find the height of an average person that's accurate relative to this photo. Now, it's hard to gauge height when he's just in the middle of the street like that. Let's put them near a wall because I feel like I know how tall a person is in relation to this wall. I think that person would be about tall in this scene. At least that looks right to me. Now I can just bring that horizon line down to cross his eyes, giving us our eye line. Now, let's put our little vanishing point in the middle there, and let's shoot a few grid lines up. Hey, those look pretty good. They look like they're in alignment with the windows. Let's do another batch of those grid lines, still looking pretty good. Another couple here for the top of the roofs, yep, still works. How about for the sidewalks and where the buildings meet the ground? Here it doesn't quite align. It's just a bit off. Now, sometimes that's just going to happen. One thing you need to keep in mind about linear perspective is that it assumes that everything is rectilinear, that is elements in alignment with each other on a grid. Now, I actually do think that this photo does meet that criteria. Modern cities often are built on grids. I think the culprit here is I got my eye line just a little bit wrong. It's too high. Watch this. I'll gently lower it adjusting the perspective lines as I do. There we go. Everything perfectly lines up now. But hang on a second. Now that person I place near that wall is too tall for the eye line. So do I have to shrink him down like this? Because now he definitely looks way too short. I mean, who's to say? Maybe that is right, but I still think the guy is actually this tall. It's just that the camera person who took this photo was crouching down a little bit to get closer to the street. Therefore, the viewer's eye line or the eye line of the lens was just a bit lower than average human height. Again, because the photographer was crouching Okay. So here's another photo. This exercise becomes a pretty fun thing to do to familiarize yourself with this kind of perspective. This to me looks like just a general snapshot. Someone pulled out their phone and took a photo. Chances are, if I just struck a horizontal line, right where these people's eyes are, see those people in the distance, I'm trying to shoot right through their eyes. In this case, I'm reasonably sure that is indeed my horizon line. Now it's time to find the vanishing point. Well, I'm just eyeballing the angles created by all of these perspective lines here. I'll undo all those. They're sloppy, but they probably merge somewhere about there. Then what I like to do in photoshop is just grab the line tool. I can just draw lines like that, and I'll just start at my vanishing point and draw a line out there, aligning with the undersides of these patio support things. Let's do one at the top of these garage doors. Let's do one on the sidewalk and already, it's off. Let's see. Let me undo that. I'll start from the edge of the sidewalk and trace it back to the horizon line, and it looks like the point wants to go just a bit to the right of my current vanishing point. So I'll undo what I did. Instead of drawing my dot as a vanishing point, I'll just start my cursor here, grab the sidewalk. There's this little faint line right there on the sidewalk. I wonder if that lines up. That's looking pretty good. Then from here, I will just grab that part again. Let's get the top sides of these buildings just to make sure that the tops are generally lined up. And this bodes well. Because we've covered so much space in the picture and the lines generally line up, they're like 99% there. I can be reasonably certain now that that is indeed a working vanishing point for this shot. But if you want more convincing, you can grab more lines here. Maybe the top of these posts. Now, one thing that's interesting, this awning here does not line up with the vanishing point. It goes to the right of it, and this is one of those times where you can't expect everything to be perfect. That awning device is added to the building and resting on a complex mounting device. Chances are in real life, that awning is just not perfectly aligned with the buildings. It's probably just rotated a little bit. Just due to age and weather conditions, whatever. Therefore, it's a bit off. I mean, it's pretty close, though. That relationship right there, I would consider quite close. If I were drawing this, which I will soon, I'll do a drawing very soon, I would just line it up, so it perfectly does match the vanishing point. You know, I would correct for those errors a little bit. But anyway, let's shoot a few more lines. There's the window of the shop there in the foreground. There's the ground of the shop. Those are perfect. One thing I just want to point out here, you see this seated figure right there? Well, because that person is sitting, that means that their eye line, which is here, is below our eye line. The photographer of this image, I would assume is standing up. I've kind of proven that by aligning the horizon line with the standing people in the background. That means we know if we wanted to draw a seated figure in this perspective, we know that that person's head should be below the horizon line. Because they're sitting, they're lower than we are. At least their head is lower than our head, so it goes below the horizon line. There's one other really important lesson I want you to glean from this. I'm actually surprised at this. This is something that people when they gain skills in art, a lot of people still trip up on this. Here we go. If I were to ask you, what is the physical distance between this line and maybe this line here. You know, what is that distance? Obviously, it's all the same across this line. What is that distance in meters or feet or whatever? Let's just pretend because I don't know what the distance is, but let's just pretend it's 1 meter. That seems like it could be about? But let's just say it is. Let's just say that is 1 meter. But now, I'll duplicate those same lines and drag them up this way, so they're further back in space. What is the distance between those two lines? You got reaction might be to say, oh, it's the same. But no, it's not even close to the same. These two lines here are way further away from each other than these two lines up here. This is due to the fact that depth compresses two dimensional height. That was quite a mouthful. What I mean by that is simply to preserve the same distance between these two blue lines. At this depth, this top line needs to be brought down significantly. Okay. I just tapping the down key on my keyboard here, it's probably something about there. Now, I'm just eyeballing this, but I'm going to say that is about the same 1 meter distance or whatever that measurement is. But essentially now this and this are about the same distance apart. Obviously, this relationship keeps progressing the further back in depth you go. If I were to draw a line way back here and I wanted a 1 meter distance back there, Well, I am just barely going to even move my line, it's not even visible really. The lines are so close together at this point in depth that you almost can't perceive the difference in height between them. This is just something that happens when we convert a three D space onto a two D page like this, and it comes up literally all the time when you draw in linear perspective. But before all that, there's yet another really important lesson I want you to learn about perspective in general, this scene is as good as any to show it. Let's go ahead and bring back in our old friend here. Hello, sir. If I were positioning this guy on the ground. How do I know where his feet go and where his head goes. Just imagine you wanted to draw someone. How would you know how high to make them? This is actually quite easy, but it's again, something that often goes overlooked, even with more advanced students. The first thing I like to do and I did this with the cubes a minute ago, I like to landmark where they touch the ground. That orange line there is going to be where this guy's feet touch the ground. I'll just lower him down. He's standing right on that line. Okay, that's great. His feet are fine, but how do I know where his head goes? Is he this tall, is he that tall? How do I know? Well, it's easy. Assuming average height here, all I have to do is make sure his eyes align with the horizon line. The horizon line crosses his eyes. That means that he is the correct scale for this part of the scene. Actually, what it means is I've made him the same height as us, the photographer, the viewer. If this person needs to be a little taller than the photographer, I would just simply make him a little bit above our eye line. His eyes are just a few inches above our eyes. This is actually the secret of placing anything that you know the size of in perspective. Let me just move this guy over here along with the orange line. Let's duplicate that orange line and put it over here. I want that same guy to now show up where this orange line is over here. I'll duplicate our guy. Obviously, now he's a giant note how dramatic this is. This shows how easy it is to make mistakes in perspective. Just from this point here to this point here, which is not a lot of distance in two dimensional space. It's only like an inch and a half higher on my page here, and yet look at the compounding effect of perspective. This guy is a giant. Like comically giant. He's three stories tall. It's really, really mind blowing how quickly the scale changes as you increase height on the page. But anyway, back to the question at hand, how do I know how tall to make them? Well, simple, his eyes just need to be in the same relationship to the horizon line that the first guy was. That's it. Where was the first guy there? Remember, I said he's a bit taller than our photographer, so it's about there. There we go. I just realized I put him below the orange line. Let me just fix that. Your relationship to the horizon line does not change with distance. This is now how high two dimensionally, this guy would be back there. We can put this guy anywhere in the scene. Let's put him just standing on the street here. Well, all you got to do is find where his eyes are, which is again, just above the horizon line is what we're saying. There we go. Now that guy is standing at that exact point on the street right there. A quick little tip and trick I like to do is just add shadows. If we just make a horizontal shadow, We're going to a shadowed scene here anyway. The shadows actually would be just like this in real life. Shoot a horizontal soft shadow underneath the figure and it plants them in space. There we go. I do recommend playing with photos like I'm doing here when you're first learning this stuff. Don't even worry about drawing it yet. You just want to wrap your head around how the device of linear perspective works. These are principles and lessons that are actually much harder to learn if you're just drawing it. Because if you're drawing it, you're probably going to make shape mistakes and stuff like that, which will just confuse your diagnosis of your problems. We just want to get at the heart of how the perspective works, and tracing horizon lines and vanishing points and perspective grids and placing people and objects from photos into another photo is a really great way to fast forward and accelerate your perspective learning. Go ahead and give this a shot even right now. It shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes or so. 19. 2-Point Perspective and Placing Characters: All right. Let's now go over two point perspective. If we're using the looking down the street analogy, which is honestly how I remembered this in my early days. So we're still looking down the street, but we've turned our head a little bit. So now we're observing the street at more of an angle. The angle is no longer perpendicular to the street. So let's first place our horizon line as we always do, and this is the exact same calculation. Now, this is too low, but watch what I'm going to do here. This time, I'm not going to use another person in the frame as my reference. I'm simply going to ask myself, where are the perspective grid lines straight horizontal and that street car there gives me a good reference for that. Right on top of the red line, right about here. I think that's in line with my eyes. In other words, the eye line, in other words, the horizon line. And again, what you can do is just look around the scene and look at any point that intersects the horizon line and say, does that point roughly intersect with my eyes if I were standing there? I think, yes, that horizon line makes sense. Okay, now we need to put a vanishing point on the horizon line. It clearly doesn't go there. Just a cursory glance should tell you that it goes somewhere over here, and that's because you can easily determine that these angles intersect somewhere over here. When I just did that, I can see my vanishing point has to move just a little over to the right there. Perfect. We extrapolate some grid lines from that point, and sure enough, they line up great. Again, in this scene, we can be reasonably sure that things are rectilinear. That is, the streets are parallel. The benches are parallel with the street. The buildings are parallel with the sidewalks, which are parallel with the streets. The edges on all those things are square to each other. You get the idea. That's a condition that must be met for linear perspective to work. Okay, but back to the gridlines, now, we have some other grid lines to contend with. I'm lining up bench corners, the bottom of the streetcar, the top of the streetcar window, the distant building back there. And these lines appear to be converging somewhere at a vanishing point as well. And of course, they do because this is two point perspective. But to find that second point, we have to zoom way out. I mentioned this in a previous chapter, but the second point in a two point perspective drawing or picture is often way off the page. So let's extend that horizon line and then we'll extend our grid lines to the horizon, and we can now see that our second vanishing point goes right here. And just for fun, let's fully extend these grid lines and add a few more as well. So let's take stock of both vanishing points here. And look at the relationship, this distance between vanishing points in a two point perspective is very common. More examples of two point perspective. We take this beautiful background piece by Armand Serrano for Lilo and stitch. Once again, where is the horizon line? Well, to find that, I'm going to look for a straight horizontal line in the picture. I think I found it right here, the tabletop. That looks like a straight line to me. I'm going to put the horizon line there. Just going to zoom out to make room for our vanishing points. As per our last exercise, I'm going to eyeball one right here, and I did that by visually tracing the lines back to where I think that point is. Now let's actually trace the lines back. I'll just pick three obvious lines to start with. And yeah, I'm pretty close. I think the point could be moved just a little bit, and then I can trace more lines out to test that. Yep, it's looking good. I was able to gauge that vanishing point pretty well because it's right on the page. Oftentimes, one of the vanishing points in a two point perspective is on the page, although that's not a rule. But the other vanishing point being so far off the page, I'm not even going to bother guessing. I'm going to just trace it back and find it that way. Picking two or three obvious lines in the drawing, and now I can place the second vanishing point where they converge on the horizon line. As well as shoot more grid lines out to confirm it. This looks good. Believe it or not. If you can get here, you're already halfway to drawing good perspective scenes. Again, I do recommend you sit down and do this exercise, be it with photos or with other arts or both ideally, just to get your head wrapped around these concepts. Let's zoom back in a little bit and bring Lilo in there. Now, she's way too tall if her feet are planted there. You should be ahead of me already. We need to find her relationship with the horizon line. We could bring her down here, having the horizon line cross her eyes. But what does that assume? That assumes that the viewer or the camera taking this picture, if it were a photo is exactly the same height as Lilo. I think the viewer is a little taller than Lilo. That means we have to scale her down a bit so her eyes are below the horizon line. This makes Lilo about half a heads dimension shorter than the viewer. I think that looks about right. Now, another really useful and overlooked tip about placing figures in perspective scenes like this. Let's just make Lilo giant here for a second. Now I will correct her relationship to the horizon line. There we go. Now, what I just did is actually quite powerful. I've just extended the floor beyond the frame but accurately. What I'm essentially telling the viewer here, and here I'll draw it for you is that the perspective extends like this, Lilo's feet, if that space were in the frame, would be accurately placed, and I'm just proving that here by drawing out the scene. This is something I see students and even professionals get wrong all the time. When a figure is placed in the foreground and their feet are cut off. Honestly, the figure is more often than not incorrectly placed, and that's because the artist often neglects the relationship to the horizon line. For some reason, the thinking seems to be that if a figure is just in the foreground, you can place it wherever you want, but you can't. That horizon line will tell you where to put it. Assuming, of course, it's standing on the same ground plane. So we go back here again, cropping Lilo's lower half out of the frame, and hopefully you can detect the accuracy now. She is a few steps closer to that foreground door. I consider this a composition slash perspective essential. 20. 3-Point Perspective: All right. Let's go over three point perspective now, and we'll take a look at this photo. The two point perspective grid lines are pretty obvious here. We'll shoot a few this way. Then we'll shoot a few the other way, following some street markings and the building windows there. Now, we still don't have a horizon line. We have to extend these blue lines up to find where they intersect. Just like before, there's our horizon line with our vanishing point, right where those lines are intersecting. The second vanishing point, again, way off the page this way. I'm not going to bother to find it because we just did that in the last section. Now, let's pause right here and talk about the nature of this horizon line. It's very high up on the page. Of course, it makes sense to be that high here because after all, we're sitting way up above the ground, and our eye line does indeed intersect with the fifth story there, if I'm counting correctly. When you place the horizon line that high and I'll do a quick sketch here. I'll just use a one point grid because it doesn't actually matter. Placing the horizon line up high like that makes it look like we're high above the scene. Just think of these boxes here as cars. We're clearly observing those cars from high above as they pass beneath us. And the same perspective is true here in the photograph. But let's remove these perspective lines. We have another set of perspective lines here, the ones traveling vertically. This is unique because in one point and two point perspective, we just made these lines straight and parallel. Now in three point perspective, they're not parallel. They also converge at a point. I'm going to state something now and then circle back later to reinforce it. This third point convergence only happens when you start tilting your head down. But for now, where is that point? Well, unfortunately, it's also way off the page. Depending on the angle at which you're looking down, this point can be way further off the page than we saw with two point perspective, and there it is way down there. This point dramatically changes position depending on the angle or the tilt of your head. In this photo, we're really only barely looking down. Our view is still mostly looking out toward the horizon line. I'll demonstrate this with this little three D mock up scene here. I've just got a bunch of cubes sitting there. Let's now roughly match the angle that we just saw in that photograph. So we climb up like this. Important to stop and note here that this is not three point perspective yet. Notice how the vertical lines are still mostly parallel and straight. That's because we're still looking directly out into the horizon line. We haven't tilted our head down yet. Let's now tilt our head down like this. There we go. That's roughly what we saw in the photo. I'll zoom way out here just to reiterate that this third vanishing point is way down here. All right. Let's bring this back. Now I'll tilt our head or tilt the camera in this case, so that we're looking more dramatically down at the scene. What does this do to that third vanishing point? Well, let's zoom out and trace some perspective lines here and look at that. That third vanishing point is way closer to the frame now. And in exchange for that, the horizon line is the thing way off page now. Let me show you how this looks. I'm going to guess the horizon line is there. Let's see how close I am. We'll trace out two perspective lines, and I'm close. The horizon line has to come down just a bit to here. All right. But back to where we were, let's take the next logical step from this view and look even more dramatically down. This time like we're looking directly down at the scene. This time, I don't even need to zoom out to find that third vanishing point. I'll trace some perspective lines, and that point is right in frame now. In fact, with such a dramatic down angle like this, our horizon line may as well just be infinitely far away, and we can completely disregard it, and just think of this as one point perspective all over again. The horizon line would go right here. We may as well edit out the slight angles in these lines and just make them straight like they would be in a one point perspective. The horizontal and vertical lines would be once again square and parallel to each other. Remember what one point perspective simulates. To recall a line earlier in this chapter, we're looking directly down the barrel at something like directly down the street. In this case, we've just rotated the camera so dramatically that we're looking directly down at our scene. So here's a photo where we're more or less looking directly down. We know that the vanishing point will be on the page here and there it is. Now, your other grid lines can still be parallel, but on an angle, it doesn't have to be horizontal and vertical. Now, this photo almost does that, but you can see it's not perfect. These grid lines do actually converge at two distinct vanishing points, more like this. But if you just can't be bothered with dealing with that tiny bit of convergence there, you're absolutely free to discard those vanishing points and just make things parallel. It really won't hurt the image. The benefit is it makes things faster to draw because you're not constantly checking those two vanishing points. You're just only dealing with the one vanishing point. The reason I'm telling you all this is mostly because in my early days, I erroneously thought that just because you're looking down or up means you have to use three point perspective. But that is just not the case. All right. Let's do a quick dissection of this beautiful piece from Black sad drawn by Juan ju Gundo because this is a dramatic downshot just like before. The vanishing point responsible for that will be inside the frame. And just quick note, that vanishing point can be anywhere in the frame, like here it's on the lower left. It doesn't have to be in the middle or anything. But I'm more interested now in the other two vanishing points. I'm going to strike just one line this way. Now I'll move it to different spots in the illustration. Let's check the baseboard here first. That's a nice clear line, and you can see that it lines up. Okay, without changing the angle of that line. In other words, keeping it parallel, let's check the bottom of the bookshelf at the other side of the frame. And you can see that a slight margin of error notwithstanding, we're in line here too. All right? That means this part of the rug should be fine and it is. We'll check the front of the couch cushions here, and yep, they're fine as well. It's only when I go up to the top of the picture frame that we start seeing a bit of a disparity. Let's try the other extreme edge of the frame. And yeah, there's a bit of a disparity here too. That means that there is a horizon line somewhere way above the picture, and these perspective lines are converging to a vanishing point on that horizon line. But it's just not affecting the picture very much because both the horizon line and the vanishing point are so far away from the picture. These lines could have just been parallel and nobody would notice the difference. There is a bit more perspective convergence happening with this side of the grid, though. That line lines up with the rug. But then if we bring it over here to this side of the rug, you can see it's starting to be off already. We can check with the baseboard here and yep that's pretty off, and we'll check with the bottom of the window sills. This is obviously off now. But even this is really not that much perspective information. These lines still could be parallel, and I bet nobody would notice. I mean, watch this. These red lines here are parallel, and I use them to skew the illustration, so it's lines line up with the red lines and are now parallel. I'll let you decide if that substantively changed the drawing. I did find something extremely interesting with this piece though, and I actually debated on whether or not to even include it in this class because I do think this breaks out of the beginner mold. In fact, what I'm about to show you, I've never even used in my own art. But check this out. I zoomed way out of the picture in order to find the horizon line and vanishing point. Part of the surprise is that the horizon line is below the picture. This is extremely uncommon, as normally the horizon line is above the picture when you're looking down. And actually, this is only half of the surprise I want to show you. But to quickly go on aside here. I remember reading an interview with Guarndo about the illustrations in this book, and he said specifically on this one, he initially drew it with the horizon line above the picture, which is how it traditionally works. Then one day he just came into the studio to do some work, and this picture was upside down on his table. And when he looked at it, he just liked the feeling of it better. I think he said it gave him a bit of vertigo, which totally fits the mood of the story in this part of the book. So we just left it upside down. I thought it was an interesting bit of artistic license there because when you're looking down at a scene like this, almost always what you'll see is the horizon line above the picture. This lower horizon line simulates something interesting. Let's pretend this is a scene I'm shooting and I'm shooting down at the scene like this. The horizon line here would be this way above the frame. But if I did this awkward tilt of the camera like this, well, suddenly, now I'm projecting the horizon line below the frame, and that's what's happening in the black SAD piece. It's an interesting and unique bit of cinematography. All right. But now for the main surprise, what you're about to see is something that does not follow the rules. In fact, it's something you can do to break the rules as you advance in your art. As we just talked about, the horizon line is below the picture for these lines. Well, it's above the picture for these lines. Not only that, but these lines don't even really converge at a specific point. They're just ballparked out there. Anyway, this dual horizon line thing, you almost never see that. For that reason, I almost didn't put it in this class. Because I don't want to confuse anybody, but I think the overriding lesson that I want to impress upon you is, it's very important to remember that these are not rules. They're merely principles. But as a palette cleanser, let's go back to how you're going to see three point perspective, 99% of the time. Here's a beautiful piece by Alex Ross. We're looking down at the city. Now, we're not looking too aggressively down. That means the third vanishing point is going to be below the frame, but not by too much, and here it is here. Then the other two vanishing points will share a horizon line above the frame, and there they are right there. You can flesh out a grid from those points, of course. If you can set this up, which you should be able to now, you're halfway to a good accurate perspective drawing. There are, of course, some tips and tricks and things to keep in mind when you actually draw the stuff, and I'll be sure to highlight those in the demo. But really, knowing how to set up the shot is half the battle. I really find it helpful to analyze and actually plot out other photographs and drawings like I've been doing so far in Chapter four to help you wrap your brain around these concepts. By doing so, you'll also undoubtedly catch where artists are cheating and maybe not converging to an actual vanishing point, but just ballparking it. Then you can evaluate how acceptable it is to do that thing. Before we close out this section, you might be wondering, well, what do you do when you're looking up at the scene? I've been looking forward to this upcoming little image here. All you got to do to look up is rotate this whole arrangement 180 degrees and look at that. We're looking up. The exact same principles are true. Just reverse the location of the horizon line and that third vanishing point. Just following these grid lines, look how quickly you can start drawing structures from a low angle point of view. All right. So go ahead and practice 1.2 point and three point, both looking down and looking up, deconstructing the perspective from photographs and other drawings. And when you're ready, we can try and draw something ourselves, which I'll do in the next section. Okay. 21. 1-Point Perspective Drawing Demo: I know I said in this section, I would draw something, but there is one more really important thing I want to show you. We need to know how different types of lenses translate in perspective drawing. One of the main characteristics of a lens is its focal length. There are three basic categories you see here. The focal length, which is measured in millimeters, essentially translates to how wide or how zoomed in the photograph will be. Now, the actual thing those millimeters are measuring gets technical and doesn't even matter for our purposes. What matters is how it changes the picture. Perhaps on a more relatable level, if you have a smartphone, you probably have different types of lenses built into it. My iPhone 11 has three lenses, the three you just saw in the previous slide. I went out to my back deck and took some photos. Man, I got to restain that deck. This one was taken with the normal lens, which is probably your default lens on your smartphone. Now, I was just standing up when I took this photo, it's no surprise that the horizon line will fall exactly at the height of my eyes, which I've just confirmed here with two perspective grid lines. Pop Quiz, is this one point perspective or two point perspective? Well, we're not really looking down the barrel here. Notice that the photo is taken at a bit of an angle, like I'm standing here, but looking slightly to the left. Anyway, that means we have a second vanishing point on our horizon line, and you should know from previous sections that it's probably somewhere way out here. Yeah we'll trace some grid lines and there it is. Way off the page. So far, this is nothing new. But now let's look at the shot I took with the wide angle lens. I did not move my feet. I just switched lenses and took a shot. Yes, that's my finger in the frame. I am not a very good photographer. Okay, but watch this. I used the same cropping here and this is where the horizon line and vanishing point were on the previous shot with the normal lens. Those were its perspective grid lines too. But notice on this wide angle photo, we've got to make some serious adjustments for everything to fit again. While we're here, let's just shoot out a few more perspective lines just to remind you how it all works. Notice here in the wide angle shot, we're seeing a lot more of the scene. This is what we saw in the normal lens shot versus the wide angle lens shot. So, let's zoom out now and find that second vanishing point. This is how far I zoomed out the first time with the normal lens. But now with the wide lens, I don't have to zoom out that far. The second vanishing point has come a lot closer to frame, and this is how wider lenses affect how we draw perspective. This also means that a perspective grid line on the ground plane close to camera and up here above the horizon line, they are going to be quite angled. That's another characteristic of a wide angle lens shot. Okay, so now we look at the telephoto lens shot. And right away, I'm sure you noticed we see less of the scene, which makes sense. Telephoto is the opposite of wide angle. Here, I'm comparing the telephoto shot with the normal lens shot. I want to show you something interesting. We'll strike a grid line here. That's in the telephoto shot, and we'll now carry that over to the normal lens shot, putting it in the same spot, going across the coffee table there, and notice it still lines up. Let's try it again across the top of the fireplace. Bring that line over, and yeah, it lines up. This shows that a telephoto shot is essentially just a cropping of a normal lens shot, a cropping that is then enlarged to the size of a regular photo. A telephoto lens is essentially just a high powered zoom. That's how I think of it. The one pretty major drawing implication here, and to show this, I'll just show you a perspective grid. Let's pretend this is a normal lens shot. Well, if we're now cropping into this and enlarging this to full screen, our perspective grid has gotten let's say flatter because we're using fewer of the prospective lines, or at least our drawing travels less distance along those perspective lines. In fact, in live action filmmaking, directors choose telephoto lenses to do just that, make a shot look flatter, less perspective, less depth. Telephotoshots have their place, but generally don't make for the most interesting drawings. The good news is, if you buy longer and longer lenses, you could probably start taking covert pictures of celebrities in their underwear. 22. Drawing Demo Continued: All right. Without further ado, let's put all the stuff into practice and draw something. What I'm going to do here is convert my two point perspective photograph into a one point perspective drawing. I will be using this deck photo as reference here. This is something that is very much in line with what I did when I was first starting out, I would always draw from reference because then the answers are in front of you if you can deconstruct them properly. I think in the context of being a beginner or an experienced beginner, yes, you should also draw from imagination. But that should take up less amount of space than drawing and studying really from reference, seeing if you understand that reference by being able to pull off a successful drawing of it. Obviously, I'm creating my one point perspective grid here, and I'm just using photoshops line tools to do this. You could alternatively make a series of parallel lines and then distort or skew them into a vanishing point. That's probably a faster way to do it. I'm doing it this way here, just to make sure we're all fully on board with exactly what I'm doing. You can see my layers over on the right there. I've put the perspective grid in its own group and just put that group to multiply, so it shows through the background and decrease the transparency. The perspective grid will always be sitting on top of my drawing. Now I'm just looking at the photo and just with a very soft pencil brush or my calligraphy brush as I usually draw with, I am just plotting out just basic landmarks. I'm starting with pick an area and start with it really. I'm starting with the stairway at the end of the deck, which leads into those two flanking recesses at the end of the deck that have those boxes. Those are all solid enough forms. Anything boxy is very good to start with. This photo is good because it's mostly boxy forms like that fireplace, for example, is basically a series of boxes. Even the couches and chairs, while they're not literal boxes, you can almost picture them as being contained in boxes. They're very easy to simplify into a box and then break it down from there. What you're seeing here is video sped up two times the speed, which is actually not that fast. When you see my YouTube videos, those are often sped up 2000 times speed. This is still, I think, a more honest look at how the process goes. Now, speaking of process, this is just one possible process. This is the way I did it when I was learning. That is, I had a perspective grid, and I tried to be as faithful to it as possible. As you gain experience, you don't necessarily need to have the perspective grid that fleshed out, and you don't necessarily need to always be referencing it. There's a certain amount of eyeballing you can become comfortable with. It just really depends on how technical you want your drawing to be, you know, how technically correct it should be versus the feeling you may want to inject in it. In fact, the piece that I end up with in this recording doesn't really look like one of my pieces because I actually don't draw this way anymore. I have become comfortable with a certain level of eyeballing, which introduces a certain amount of error for sure, but there is a certain amount of error in art that can be aesthetic. And I feel like I've spent years finding that. However, I do consider that kind of thing beyond the realm of what a beginner should be focusing on. A beginner should be focusing on getting a technically accurate drawing, something that feels like it has space, three dimensionality to it, some depth, that it lines up with a perspective grid, and that you're able to use the tools we've been talking about to achieve it. That is the mystery should be gone. Every step should be clear in your head, and if it's clear, that means it's repeatable, and that's where you want to be. All right. So I'm doing one of those things now. I'm finding the middle of that fireplace box with that x trick. Remember, you draw an x between the four corners of the face and where the x crosses is the middle of that face in perspective. And you can see, I kept that x very light. I think I even put that x on its own layer and I'll use that layer for little tricks like that later. Although really the only tricks I use is I use the X thing a few times. Everything else is done by, but also based on the grid. Here comes the coffee table. Just to talk about what I'm doing like the nuts and bolts of it here, obviously, the coffee table follows the grid. But how big the coffee table is is something you have to determine by eye. Right now, that coffee table is way too big. So you see I'm erasing it. Just bring it down, bring it in, and even this is too big. Remember a few sections ago in this chapter, I showed you how big that man got when I moved him just an inch up on the screen, but I didn't change his two dimensional size, how giant he got. Well, that's what's happening to this coffee table. The lower that front line gets, that coffee table is increasing by a matter of several feet. Even if I just for a few millimeters of two dimensional space, the coffee table appears many feet larger or many meters larger, however, when you want to measure it. So, you got to just trial an error, really. And you'll get a sense for where these lines go with experience. But even I messed this up all the time. I'll draw what I think is a coffee table, and I'm like, Whoops, I just drew like a six foot dining table. That happens to me all the time. One of the things I've learned about becoming more experienced with art. It's not that you make fewer mistakes, although you do, you do make fewer mistakes because you know how to avoid them. But it's not that you eliminate mistakes. It's just that you catch them immediately because you can anticipate them. Every artist has their own predilections. I know where I'm more likely to make mistakes, and honestly, it's with this type of drawing, perspective drawing, layout drawing. I'm not really used to doing strict line drawings like this. It's honestly been quite a while since I've dedicated a drawing to practicing perspective fundamentals like this. About 20 years ago, I would fill sketchbook pages with drawings exactly like this. I would find I would usually favor one point perspective at first because it's the easiest grid to work with in. And I would just position myself from life, like on a street or just looking down a deck, just like this, and I would just practice converting the two D page into the illusion of a three dimensional space. One of the things I always had a hard time with was knowing where to put the ground plane. When you're drawing in perspective and you start your first perspective grid, you might want to put the ground plane starting at the horizon line. But remember that the horizon line is infinitely far away. It's like looking straight out into the ocean and seeing where it meets the sky or something. You can't put the ground plane there. The ground plane has to start a certain amount of distance down from the horizon line. Just like with the coffee table placement that we just talked about, where you start the deck in this case, that's got to be dialed in pretty accurately or else I could easily increase this deck by 20 meters or decrease it by 20 meters. All right. Another thing you could do here is just draw this with the line tool. Before this, I've been using just a regular pencil. But there's really no reason with linear perspective, especially if forms are boxy like they are here, that you can't at least do a block in with a straight line tool. It'll ensure accuracy. Now, it will definitely sacrifice aesthetic quality, but the idea is not that you'll finish a drawing with the line tool, although you absolutely could. But this could just be a way of blocking things in quickly, getting a sense of depth on the page. Because with perspective, you do need to get a few elements in the picture, just like any art really. You have to get a few elements in the picture in order to start judging it. I need to get the fireplace in, the couches, the table, the end of the deck, and these boxes in the background that I'm just blocking in now. The more elements I can get in, the more spatial awareness I can have in the picture. I'm at the point now though where I feel like I can walk around in this space, and that's a good place to be. That's your first hurdle. I find that once I clear that hurdle, I'm able to be a little bit more creative with my placement of things and I can explore the space. Although, right now, I'm just working from reference, the creativity factor is limited. Again, that's a good thing when you're practicing. Here's another X trick, but this one is a bit different because the top of the house is out of frame. Notice my X also travels off frame there at the top, and I've just estimated where the top of the house there will end up in order to place the top two corners of the X. The bottom of the x is, that's easy because I can see the bottom corners in my drawing, but the top corners are off frame, so I had to guess there. There will absolutely be a margin of error that's acceptable and I feel like it looks accurate enough. Ultimately, you're judging all of this by at the end of the day. It's been my experience that a drawing that is 100% faithful to a perspective grid actually looks a bit unnatural because nature really doesn't do that. Even if you're in a city that's a modernly built city, you're always going to have some margin of error because things move and shift and manmade things are not perfect anyway. There's also things like lens distortion, which is, no matter which lens you use in your photos, along the edges of frame, the lens will start distorting parallel lines. It's less pronounced with telephoto lenses and way more pronounced with wide angle lenses. That's how we have fish eye lenses with super wide angle lenses. It's that the lens is so wide that it's distorting the parallel lines to be literal curves. But even the telephoto lens will have that effect just very minimally. Anyway, in this drawing, I'm not distorting any lines. My vertical lines are always perfectly vertical and perfectly parallel. That alone is very unnatural. It's actually the case that one point and two point perspective really doesn't exist. At least we don't see that way. These things are art constructs. Vertical lines for us will always be converging at least a little bit. In drawing, though, we simplify that and we do things like one point and two point perspectives to make it easier for us, and it generally works. But right now, I'm doing a new thing. Notice I'm putting new grid lines in. Well, what's this? The first thing I want to say is those grid lines are still going to the same horizon line, as you can clearly see on the left set of lines there. But this is how you draw items that are rotated and therefore not rectilinear with the rest of the scene. So I'm drawing this chair in the background there, and it's rotated 30 or 40 degrees off axis. It gets its own little vanishing point just for that chair, and same with the other chair, that's also rotated off axis. Remember, if you rotate enough things off axis, then suddenly our one point perspective grid is useless. Even 1.2 point or three point, all these things assume a rectilinear relationship, that is things parallel and 90 degrees with each other. That's when linear perspective works best. At least that's when you can follow the grid the most faithfully. Sometimes if you're drawing a really organic environment, think of an old European medieval town or something, things that generally won't line up with perfect linear perspective. You can still put a grid on your page just to get a sense for the space. But you'll have to develop a feel for drawing organic curves within that grid. That's just something that comes with practice. In this drawing here though, I am also doing some of that. If you see the foreground double chair there. Notice how the bottom is arced and even the back has an arc to it. Those arcs are just eyeball. Now, there is a way to use the grid tire advantage here as well. Because those arcs on either side of the chair are the same, you can make sure that the widest point of the arc lines up with the same perspective line on both sides. In that way, you can plot out landmarks for two arcs that are the same in perspective. But when you go to draw the actual curvature going through those points, that's something that should be done by. At this point, I've got the drawing blocked in. Things are looking correct. I'll now flatten all those layers down to one layer and decrease their opacity and on a new layer, draw over everything with my final lines. This is where you can be as aesthetic as you want. I'm just going to quickly go over things with one brush. I'm not worried about making a portfolio piece here. I would just like to get the study done and presentable as a drawing that I did, not a block in. So, of course, this is where you finalize the actual forms and construction things in this case, that are on this deck, like the deck posts and the rails. Those were blocked in before, but I may not have actually drawn all planes of the posts. I may have just put a few lines in there to indicate their presence. Now in this part, I'm actually drawing them out. And again, you can be as tight or loose as you want here depending on your own aesthetics. I'm shooting for somewhere in the middle, I guess. One thing I haven't mentioned in this drawing, although I have mentioned in previous sections of this chapter, I do like to shoot horizontal lines across the frame. You can see how those horizontal lines are relating the two boxes at either side of the deck. Those horizontal lines just help me reference height. The height of one thing that needs to be the same as the height of another thing. Well, connect it with a horizontal plum line, like we were doing in the gesture drawing section of this course. It's just with perspective, it's probably going to be much more rigid of a line. I'll also begin thinking about very basic shading, right there. I'm just picking a side of the box or in this case, that tapered upper fireplace box thing. Just pick a side, like we did with the Spider Man drawing. Remember from the last section from the last chapter, pick a side of the box and shade it in. Right there, I just shade it in the inside of the fireplace. That makes sense. It's inside the structure, it's going to be dark. Here's that side of the fireplace box being shaded. I mean, I say basic shading because you're just picking one side of the box and filling it in with a dark value. That's how real lighting works too. It's just the difference here is I don't really care about specific value control. As long as I shade something darker than what's light. When you study actual lighting like some of my other courses do, that's where you get into specific value grouping and value control within those groups. We're not dealing with that here. So right here, I'm just roughing in the trees. Now, obviously, the trees don't follow linear perspective at all, but I can see just from the photograph that they are generally of a darker value than the rest of the deck. Mainly my approach here is to make sure that the background that's full of trees is essentially just darker values than the deck. And I'll try my best to simplify that too, just like maybe two values for the trees. And the wall has all these little trim pieces on it that I was blocking in using the x trick earlier. Now I'm just flushing them out a little bit with more specific forms. Now I'm just blocking in two planters, and that foreground one is not actually in the photograph, I'm inventing that. These are interesting because they force you to draw ellipses. Those planters are circular structures and a circle in perspective is an ellipse as we talked about in a previous chapter. Placing ellipses within a perspective grid is an essential skill you'll need with any environment because you're almost always going to encounter this kind of thing. Not everything is a box. The double chair here is probably the most challenging thing to draw in this study because it's got those arced arms and back like I talked about. I'm just trying to be careful that the arcs are drawn faithful to the perspective grid. So what I'm doing is the widest part of the arc will be placed on a certain line of the perspective grid, and then it's neighboring arc, like the arc on the other arm of the chair. It's widest point should also cross that same perspective line. Notice here, even though this is technically a clean up phase, my lines are still pretty scribbly as I figure this out. If I were very interested in final line quality, I would probably do a third pass on this drawing where I would have yet another blank new layer on top and this would become my new underdrawing, and I would go over everything once again. Or this being digital, I would maybe just pick the parts that needed the cleanup and just focus on those parts, leaving other parts as is. Again, because I'm a painter, I almost never just do a line drawing and call it done. All of this stuff would be just an underdrawing for my eventual painting. And that's why self admittedly, I don't really do linework. I was going to say my linework is not very good. I don't even do linework. It just hasn't been an area of interest or focus for me. I mean, perspective as an area of interest as a fundamental. I'm interested in all the fundamentals. In terms of aesthetics, though, finishing my own art with lines is not where I've gone. It's all been painting. From here, if you're interested in studying the aesthetic qualities of line, you will have to look elsewhere. I am not the teacher for that. Okay, but watch this. I have created a new layer on multiply mode and just looking at the photo there. I am blocking in this big shadow that's cast by the house onto the deck. I really recommend keeping big shadows like this, just one value. In fact, if you draw traditionally, you would just be using a single gray marker for that shadow. What I'm doing now is with an air brush. I'm just getting darker right in the crevices of where those couches are touching the floor and compressing themselves up against the wall. I am getting a little off topic though with this shading. I'm doing something there called ambient occlusion. I have a whole YouTube video about that, if you want to check it out. It's basically the darkest part of a shadow. I did do a little bit of that before I reminded myself what class this is, and that is off topic for this class. But, you can easily see it in the photograph. Look directly behind the foreground two seater chair. See how dark it is near the wall. It's within shadow and also a darker version of the shadow. Yeah, that's called ambient occlusion. The ambient light, which would otherwise be filling in the shadow, like light from the sky, for example, is blocked in that area. So it's darker. All right. I'm working on this background chair here, and I'm just making sure that the whole thing feels boxy, like you could encapulate it in a cardboard box. That's the mental image I'm invoking when I draw it. I'm at the stage now in the drawing in real time, this is about 45 minutes in, let's say, and that's about a good amount of time to get a full perspective drawing done, about 45 minutes. I think you could do your block in in about 10 minutes or maybe a bit more and then go over the drawing once more in at least that same amount of time to refine things. Here on that side wall where I'm putting all those little trim pieces. This is where the lens distortion would go in a real photograph and even how real person would observe the scene with their eyes, you would probably start getting a bit of three point perspective there as those lines, again, way at the edge of the frame start converging. We saw this actually in the Black SAD piece from earlier. Remember the lines just at the edge of that picture, we're starting to converge a little bit. I was on record there saying you didn't have to do that, and you don't. But it speaks to Guarndo's experience there that he chose to get just a bit closer to how a camera would capture that scene. All right. So right here at the end, I've just sped up the footage a bit more just to block in this background, just trying to find a little abstract pattern just with two values, maybe three values for those trees in the back there. And it's always helpful to flip the image horizontally to just get a set of fresh eyes on it as you work. I'm noticing now that I made the deck a little wider than it is in real life. I think what's doing it is just one thing. It's the wall on the left now that should just be brought in closer to the chair, and perhaps that chair itself should be brought in closer to the coffee table. It's an error, but that's okay. It's an error within the tolerance for this study. The perspective space is still unaffected. It still looks like a logical consistent space. It just happens to be a bit wider than the reference. Once again, that is, in my opinion, one of the hardest parts of perspective is getting those little measurements. How wide something is, how deep something is because as we've seen, when you're drawing the illusion of three D on a two D page, that stuff can get out of whack real easily. This is one of those things where as you gain experience in arts and you can draw this stuff, you may just want to offload this to a three D program. That's what I do today. If I have to do a drawing in perspective. To me, it's now foolish not to block it in in an actual three D program. Let the three D program figure out the perspective grid for you. You can then just be creative with placing things and shot layout, camera angle changes on the fly. This is something that would be real expensive to do in drawing. Using three D programs as daily routine for industry professionals. Of course, you then export that and do your final actual arts on that base. However, do not do that until you can actually draw this yourself. You should develop a consistent internal awareness of where your horizon line is, where your vanishing points roughly are, whether it's 1.2 point or three point, and how changing any of those factors ultimately affects the scene. This is where I ended up. I think this is a good little watermark for how a study should look. 23. 2-Point Perspective Demo: Okay, for this next drawing, let's do a two point perspective, and let's do an interior as well, just to show how these principles apply to exteriors and interiors. It's really the exact same thing. First thing I'll do is work out a perspective grid, and I'm narrating this one live, by the way. So you're not going to see it sped up. You'll see it in real time. I'm thinking this will be a kids play room. So let's put the horizon line somewhere that might kind of correspond to kid height somewhere maybe there. And actually, I should do that on a new layer. So let's do that again. I just made a new layer. And I do like to color code my perspective grid if I'm going to do one. I'm not going to adhere to the grid quite as rigidly as I did the first time. I don't have to do quite as many fanning lines here, but I do have to determine where my vanishing points are. For this one, I'll show you a wider shot, and if you remember from previous lesson, that means that the two vanishing points have to be somewhat closer together. Let's put the first one here, just inside frame, and I'll do a few lines here just radiating out. From this spot roughly. You already notice I'm being a little more sparse with these lines, not cluttering up the frame quite as much. Then I'll switch colors to something adjacent like this red next to the yellowy perspective lines. For this one, I'll put the vanishing point. Let's see. Let me just resize the canvas a little bit or resize my window. Maybe I can go from here. I'm just imagining a point right about there. And let's block in these points. Now, these two vanishing points are pretty close together as far as two point perspective goes. Remember from previous lessons, you've seen the vanishing point for two point perspective be way off the page. This one is not that. This one is pretty close to the frame. As you can see, that means that the ground plane here at the bottom is going to be quite an angled line. Okay, perfect. I'll call this layer grid. And here in photoshop, I like to push this paint pressure icon, which means I can't paint on it or draw on it, but I can adjust other things like the opacity. So if it were on lock mode, I couldn't adjust the opacity. I like to put it on this one, which prevents me from drawing on it, and then I can adjust the opacity down. Then I'll set that mode to multiply so I can draw now on my background or I can make a new layer here and just grab a black pencil. Or maybe be something not quite as black, maybe something like this, a darker gray. One thing I like to do is I like to just put a swatch of that up here. If I ever accidentally sample some other color, I can quickly just go sample this and not have to deal with going into any color picker here. That can be used in any app. Of course, all these tools can be done in any app. This is a kids room and I'm imagining my own kids room, where do I want to put the corner of the room? Well, this is dead center, so let's just put it somewhere off center somewhere over here. And then I can define this wall following my grid line. I can define this ceiling line following this grid line. Just there. I'm following this red grid line, but I'm translating it up a little bit. That means that it has to fan out a little bit more than this red line. I'm fanning it out a little bit more. Of course, if I really wanted to figure it out technically, I could drag a line and figure that out. You can see how it's pretty accurate, but that's because it's pretty easy to gauge off this line. I really don't want to draw using the line tool this time because I really felt stifled by that in the last one. I'm glad I showed it to you last time, but in this one, I want to show you how more or less how I approach a perspective drawing today, which is still fundamentally based. But it's a little bit more free hand than what I did last time. Here I'm just defining the room. We're looking into the corner of the room. Then you might have some trim up here. This would be like crown molding trim, and we do this. You can see we're already getting a bit of character in the lines. Let's populate the room with its basic layout. I'm just imagining if this were a blank room that I were moving into in my house, how would I want to use it as a kids play room? Well, let's put a mat, like a carpet here. Let's see. I'm just tracing out, not a horizon line, tracing out a perspective line. The carpet will go say here and that carpet is going to be the centerpiece of the play area, it's going to It's going to be this big. I'm just this is my interior decorator hat that I have on here. This is the rug, and the rug is going to have little tassels, if that's what they're called coming out of it. I love these little things. They add instant detail and fun and they're indicative of a play rug. Now these ones are going to be much shorter. I can't draw these lines as long because now those lines way longer these lines here would be like this long here. Let's foreshorten them like this and they'll get almost into dots by the time they're way back there. Remember, this is a pretty wide angle shot, the depth is even more compressed, meaning the length here will be much longer than the length there of these little tassels. That's just how wide angle works. It'll enhance those measurements. I can always for example, if I wanted to just make that rug wider, I could just erase this, sample my line there and just make it a bit longer. Okay. And this is why I'm drawing pretty loose in this stage. You tighten up as you go. Let's see, there's going to be a window here. Let's just figure out it's going to be a double width window. I'm following the red perspective line, holding shift to draw myself a vertical line going down, and then I'll just connect it with this yellow perspective line. This is going to be a nice little window. And of course, windows have a ledge. I'm just going to add a little ledge there and there's a little piece of trim that and that perspective is off, let's fix it. If I wanted to, I can just shade the bottom face. Okay. Let's get the top of the window. There's going to be some blinds here, just like these classic cute little blinds. Now these are curves, but I'm imagining a perspective line shooting through, and that's how I'm determining where to tie these knots here for the blinds. If I wanted to, I always like to switch to my marker tool here, just for some quick shading, just to shade in planes of boxes just to help me orient myself. It's always nice to have little bits of shading in there. Again, just pick the side of the box, you want to shade darker and go ahead and shade it darker. What you could do at this point, just to kill some of the light of the room, sorry, the white of the page, made a new layer, set it to multiply and just a little bit with some color. Just something off white. Then I'll I'll lock this layer so I can't paint on it, and then on this layer below will be my drawing. And what I'll do is I'll draw draw draw. And if I want to erase that, well, I could just use the erase tool. But what I actually like to do is I like to just switch to white and just paint with a paint brush, just paint white over these lines. That's how I like to do it. But you could erase if you want. What else is going to be in this room? Well, there's going to be a table here, a little squarish table that's going to be a nice play surface. This table is very close to the horizon line, which means the eye line. It's just beneath the eye line. You're just barely going to be able to see the top of that table. Let's bring this table down a little bit for the apron of the table. I can shade in one of the sides of the boxes here. Let's just figure out where the legs are going to go. Already, this table is looking a little bit too big. Here, I'll just get the race tool, which I said I wouldn't do, but let's erase this out. Of course, you could put as I erase it. I'm erasing all my drawings. You could put these things on layers if you want to. I'm just not going to bother with that. I like to be able to quickly react and not have to go over here and say, Oh, where's my table layer? I don't like to have to do that. I do want this table to be a bit smaller. It's got to be kid size. I'm just determining where the legs go with some loose perspective lines. I might as well not be lazy and let's just draw a tapered table leg here. Keeping it pretty loose, falling that yellow perspective grid line. There we go. Maybe it should be a bit longer. The legs should be a bit longer. Let's bring them down here. Again, I'm just eyeballing. To see what works in this perspective. You know how high does this table need to be before it looks right. Yeah, that looks about right. Let's shade this part of the box too. That can be a bit darker. All right. So let's put a chair here. Now this chair is going to be angled. But it's easy. I'm just following this red perspective line or a little bit beneath it. So the chair is angled, but it's not rotated. So it doesn't need its own vanishing points. And now what I'll do is I'll erase out the table that's behind the chair. So I do like to do that. I'll draw something I'll draw a table or a rug and then I'll put something in front of it, and then I'll erase what's behind it. So I drew the chair, erase what's behind it, and then that chair will have its little seat following the red perspective lines these legs are going to go back a bit like this and I draw these little ghosted perspective lines. This leg needs to come out, I think. That's the way these chairs are built. It doesn't buckle when someone leans over. Maybe this chair could be made more fun if it had an open back like this. What that would allow us to do is draw the seats of the chair through it. Then let's just pick a side of the chair like this back face and just shade it in. Just for fun. I forgot that back leg there. Whenever you have the underneath part of something like we can see underneath this table here. Just grab an air brush and just throw in a little bit of a shadow. I'm not trying to render light and shadow here. I'm just showing the viewer that this is the ground plane, and this shadow does roughly follow a perspective grid. I'm trying to draw a rectangle in perspective with the soft edges of an air brush that just show us that, that's the perspective of the shadow. Little case shadows on the ground, really really help, especially if you can draw those cash shadows in rough perspective like I just did. Really really helps. The table extends past the aprons a little bit. Let's just clean up this edge here. We are making headway. You can see we already have a space that we're working in. Let's block in some other major elements. Let's put a big shelving unit here. It's going to go like this and let's just have a little fun extended a bit higher maybe go up following this red perspective line just beneath this. Let's go down. Again, holding shift in photoshop, will give me a vertical line. I need to know where the wall, the bottom of the wall is. Let's put the bottom of the wall here, following this red perspective line. That means that my shelving unit can be this tracing this back, can be like this. There we go. There's the side of my shelving unit. And let's give it a bit of thickness that cheap Ikea particle board they give you. It's like a half of an inch thick. That's probably more than half an inch, but whatever. Let's go down. Okay let's follow, there's a wall here for the shelving unit. It's going to go down again, holding shift, two point perspective. I'm keeping my verticals nice and straight. Maybe later, I'll show you how easy this is to skew into three point perspective, but I'll do that once I'm more into the drawing. Now, this is way above the horizon line up here, we can see the bottom face of this plane, and I'll just grab my marker and just shade in my stuff there. Let's see the drawing has more character when you just free hand your lines. Now let's add some shelves. Let's put one up here. Let's just lay out the shelves. There's going to be one there. There's going to be one here. Following perspective lines. I'm looking at my red perspective lines in this case, following them. Then here, let's put one in the middle of those two. Obviously, the shelves are above the horizon line, so we can see their bottom faces connecting them to the back of the shelf here. Notice that my perspective line here intersects the back of my shelf. I'm just connecting lines here in perspective. Zoom back out to full size. Maybe this area here, maybe this is going to be a bit of a kitchen. Like a kid's toy kitchen right here. We're we're going to have a tap for water with little hot and cold water faucets, and we're going to have pots and pans hanging on a dowel that goes across. Maybe maybe the dowel is up here. So the pots and pans can hang from it. To pots and pans. Of course, the kitchen needs an oven, just a toy oven, of course. Maybe with a cupboard next to it. Now, we want to we're putting this in front of the shelving unit, so we're erasing the back, following the red perspective line. This is our oven. I probably should have made the horizon line a different color. I mean, I can just do that now. Go back to my grid, unlock it. Describe a blue line. Because I'm getting confused as to which line is my horizon line. Let's redo that. There we go. Now it's a blue line. Perfect. Lock it again. Perfect. The oven needs a little window to see through and that window is going to be like this. Loosely adhering to these perspective lines. That's going to be dark because we're seeing inside the oven. Then here, we're going to have a drawer or cupboard and this cover. Let's just give it a bit of depth. It goes back a little bit. And on the shelves or any manner of items, dolls, toys, what have you, kids stuff up there. We cars. Again, they are above way above the horizon line though, so we can't if that is a car, we can't see the cars wheels because the wheels are sitting on the top of that shelf, which is hidden in perspective. We cannot see the top plane. It's hidden in perspective because we're above the horizon line, right? I'll zoom in a bit. If this were a car, you know, we're seeing a car in perspective, just a toy car, right? Like a blocky car. If the wheels are here on the car, we're only seeing like the top of the hub caps and the actual wheel is down here. Hitting the top of the shelf in perspective. I'm going to erase this out though, because this is the bottom of this shelf. If anything, I'll just grab my marker tool and my gray color sample something in here and just shade the underside of this shelf. Again, just to help us know that this is a box form. Whenever you have box forms, just pick a side of the box, usually an underside or a side plane that's obvious and just shade it to give you an indication of the perspective that you're dealing with. What you could even do here is just get a bit more fancy. Let's just shade this entire back face of the shelving unit. I'll do the same thing here. Then what we can do is grab a white color and get back some of the faces here that face forward. You could even just draw with this white color. If I want to put another shelf here, instead of drawing two black lines, I'll just draw one white line with enough thickness to it and there, that's the front of my new shelf. I do this all the time, draw with a lighter value and pull a form out, just go in here. There we go. Basically what I've just done with that white line is it's as if I drew two black lines, right? But now I don't even need to draw the black lines. I can just have the white one, and then I can just quickly shade underneath it. Let's see. Maybe this one is split in half. Well, just split in half. Let's draw the x.'s the point and I'm just going to race that x. I don't need to actually see it. I know where it is just visually. Maybe this is just going to erase this out. Switch my layer order there. It's going to be some sliding door system or there's a little hole that you can see through it. This door slides along a track, maybe. This is the inside of the cupboard and there's a bunch of stuff. I'm not going to draw what's back there. I'm just going to indicate it. Of course, that stuff is the detail you might add later at the end of the drawing. There we go. Now we have a little sliding door. Everything lines up at the perspective lines. We haven't done anything to break the mold of perspective, basic linear perspective. This is all just putting boxes in front of and behind other boxes and getting depth that way. What else do we have to do here? Let's figure out exactly where this ends. It's going to end. Let's make sure this is in line. There we go. I feel like my table is a bit off. Yeah, that perspective line is way. You can see my table is pretty off there, and that's because I just free handed it too much. It needs to be much more angle that line does. You really got to be careful as you approach that horizon line. Things get horizontal there. Anyway, now just putting in what is this lantern? I don't know. Just a kids toy, which is going to be rounded. Kids toys are usually rounded. So they don't cut themselves. Let's I have no idea what these are, but they're just things. Let's overlap. This one is behind the lantern. Little shading at the bottom of each little toy here. You can see I'm way zoomed in. I'm zoomed into 250%. My canvas is not that big. I think my canvas in this case is about 1,300 pixels wide. That doesn't matter. You can make it as wide as you want. I just made a canvas that would cover my screen, for the most part. There's a ball on the table, and there's going to be a round thing on here and another ball behind this Here we go. Very quickly, we've populated our table. That looks good. What do we need? Well, we need to fill all this space. I want to come up with some kind of composition here. One thing that you do to fill walls, well, what do you do to fill walls? You put little pictures on them or something. This is going to be a I have a sign like this in my kids room. It's on a string and it's made of crafty planks of wood like that, and it's got some writing on it, whatever, but the point is it's filling up the wall space. I'm just noticing here that my wall is too far back from the cabinet. Let's bring that wall right up against the base of the cabinet and my previous line is now just a piece of trim there. All right. I'm going to make a new layer because I'm going to try and dress up this room a little bit. I'm starting to look a little soles. I'm populating it still. It's a bit unfair to call it that right now. But let's put something really fun in here like a tent. The tent is above the horizon line. There's a little ellipse above the horizon line, and here is an ellipse below the horizon line. To mark the base of the tent. What I could do is actually just mark. This is going to be rotated a bit, so I'm imagining another vanishing point. What I'm going to do is actually just use the line tool and I'll make that line really less opaque. Let's see the tent pole is going to go here, it's going to be a cross beam there. That's going to be the opening face of the tent. Let's see, something like that, and that tent is going to be open this way. Again, this whole object is rotated like 15 degrees. I'm not quite following that red perspective line. Let's races. I'm just figuring this out as I go. There's going to be a bunch of rope tying these beams together up here. That rope is going to be thick and all over the place, like a bandanna or something. It's really imperative these lines are straight. Let's see, t use the line tool, go back there, and use the line tool and go back there. I'm just eyeballing this polygonal shape here. Just trying to reference the perspective grid to make this look like it's sitting on the ground. And this looks pretty good. Then now I can maybe get my marker tool with a white color here and just give it a front flap. Of course, this is in front of the unit we just drew behind it. I'm just going to erase out the baseboard, the unit behind it. All of this goes away because this tent is in front of all of this. And this is the stuff inside the tent. This will be shaded in. There we go, that's inside the tent. There we go. Let's flesh this out here. The tent flaps are going to be tied off here. Now I need to rediscover where the back of the tent is somewhere in here, there's going to be a construction beam going around the middle. Let's just figure out the midline of this trapezoid shape, something like this. Let's cross contour our way through a cylinder. This is like a bamboo rod here. It's got some thickness to it. It's not just a line. I blocked it in with the line, but now it's just rounding out some thickness to these tent poles. Okay. And yeah, inside the tent is going to be pillows. It's going to be like a little lounging area. You've got some nice pillows, maybe there's a teddy bear back there behind a pillow. Who knows? Just something in this tent that indicates it's a play thing. Now, it's overlapping my carpet a little bit, which I don't like. Let's just go back and erase the carpet. Just as we fill out this room, that carpet needs to be brought in a little bit. Let's end the carpet here. Follow the perspective line and the carpet there, so that tent is in its own little area here. Maybe what I'll do is I'll just grab this tent and within reason, I'm able to move it a little bit. I couldn't move it over here. Obviously, the perspective is just wrong now. But I I could resize it and just nudge it a little bit back here. Just to sit back in the room a little bit. I do want to overlap, I want to overlap this unit behind it. If I just put it to the side, it's a little bit difficult to tell the relationship and it makes the room look too big, too spacious, overlap it a bit. Overlapping forms like that is a really good way of establishing depth. Just like we overlap the items on the table. When you start getting overlaps like that and even how the chair overlaps the table. When you start getting two dimensional overlaps like that, you start building a convincing sense of depth. I've noticed a lot of students shy away from overlapping things like that. For some reason, it's maybe a scary thing to do, overlapping shapes. Maybe it's just not intuitive. It's not an intuitive thing to do, and people will put one shape as its own little island beside another shape. That always just kills the depth of things, even these pillows, maybe there's a pillow here overlapping the pillow behind it. That gives this tent a little cozy feel. There's a little circular rug here, which is an ellipse with its own little tassels there. Then maybe what you want now is a little table behind all this. This is just a almost like a night stand. It's got very limited perspective because we're right up against that vanishing point there. You can only barely see the side plane. And its legs are going to go like this, I'm imagining a table that I own. Now the leg is behind the tent, but it goes back there, then the front leg goes there and there's a tripod thing going on here. Let's just shade this whole area behind the tent in. On that table, there is going to be a little lamp. We're above the horizon line here, I'm just barely making the front of an ellipse and the lamp is also going to be an ellipse. We're going to see just barely underneath that ellipse, if this is indeed a lamp. Now the arc of this ellipse at the top of the lamp is wider as we're progressing higher and higher above the horizon line. That's great. Now we're populating this court. Let's put a little picture frame or maybe a large picture frame here. Something like this behind the tent. Maybe it doesn't make quite as much sense that a picture is being blocked by the tent, but I'm not too worried about it. The picture frame was there when they decorated the room, these hypothetical parents, and then the tent was placed in front of the picture frame because that's the only place they could fit the tent and the picture therefore covered up. It makes it feel lived in just give this a quick shading. Who knows? Maybe there's another picture frame here. And now I feel like I'm moving a bit quicker because I'm starting to understand what this space is all about. That's what often happens to me. I get to a point where I feel like I'm actually living in the space and I get a little more confident with my drawing. I'm just taking the pen tool and grabbing these walls like this. Then what I can maybe do is grab my marker tool on this top layer that has a color on it. And let's see, I don't even know if this is going to work. Just color the walls just a bit darker. Just so we're not working on the same tone for everything. I'm giving the wall it's got a darker paint color on it or something like that. Then while I'm on that layer, maybe I make the lamp a bit lighter and make the tent a bit lighter. I'm just on my tone layer, you can see the layer I have selected, and I'm just painting white into this layer just to separate elements. This is obviously nothing to do with perspective. I'm switching gears here to basic aesthetics, let's say, and I'm just making things look differentiated by some basic tones. I'm doing the same thing to the cabinet. It picturing that generic white Ikea board they give you. It's always painted just flat white. I'm just putting that in here. These pots and pans likewise have a lighter tone. This thing just helps present your drawings a little bit more aesthetically. Just pick an object and assign a different tone to it. Then once I'm happy with this, I don't like to have 1 million layers. I'm just going to flatten. This is my drawing layer that I'm turning on and off. Then here's my tone layer, which has the white painted into it. It's sloppy without the lines to anchor them down. Okay. So I feel like this room is getting fleshed out now, let's put a let's put a chair right in here and the top face will be above the horizon line and the arms will go out. And I don't know, it's going to be a big comfy couch. So they go out like this. Now we're below the horizon line, referencing the yellow perspective lines going below. So here's the back that you sit on that you rest your back against, I should say. And here's the back of the chair coming down. Although that's too narrow. It's got to be wider. This just visually, and it's going to come down like that in the front face is going to go like something like this. Again, this is a box. I'm essentially drawing a box. I just with rounded corners. Now we're going to need the seat cushion and we're below the horizon line here, we're going to see the top face of the seat cushion just a little bit because we are approaching the horizon line. Here's the rounded face. I'm imagining an ellipse. Imagining this ellipse like this. If it helps you to draw it, go ahead and rough in the ellipse and then of course, it's got some thickness to it that let's just erase out what's behind here. And instead of this line, maybe this whole thing is almost like a big bean bag or something. I don't know. This is where you are conceptually inventing things. Obviously, photo reference, I'm not using reference for this. If you wanted to draw a specific chair and you're having trouble with the design, just look up reference on what a kid's chair might look like. I don't like how the edge of the frame is just blank there. It might be nice to let's put a potted plant, like a fake plant in a pot here, and this plant is going to have to populate the edge of the frame. I'm not even worried about drawing a nice plant. But I do need something here. Just for compositions sake, and we'll just shade this. Just going to put some thing there. I don't like to leave the edges of the frame blank, just a quick composition tip, the simple idea of having an item be cut off by the frame like this little potted plant is cut off by the frame. We don't see the whole thing. That type of thing instantly adds credibility to your picture. Believability, maybe is a better word. It makes it look like things extend beyond the frame. Of course, they would if this were a photograph or an actual representation of a real space. All right, shading this entire chair in, again, differentiate it from the wall. So that's its local tone. Then I'll go a bit darker and shade the front face of this cushion in. If I'm shading that front face, I might as well shade this front face of the back cushion, leaving the top face of the seat cushion lighter. I'll even go a bit lighter with that. There we go. Just to get some basic form and maybe again, just picking faces, shading them in, maybe I'll go in and actually darken this side face because it's facing away from the frame. We're going out of frame here. Let's make this stuff overall darker. Almost like a vignette, I'll even grab the air brush and just vignette this stuff. In the Instagram filter. Just adding a little bit of dark tone. I'll get an even darker tone. Just adding a little bit of this dark tone as if the light is falling off. Though this is not really intended to mimic light as much as it is to help the aesthetics to highlight the focal point a little bit. A vignette is a cheap and effective way to do that. It can help bring focus to the focal area of your picture, which is in here somewhere. Then if I like that couch, my lines are looking a bit light, I can go back in there and figure out exactly what those lines are doing or more precisely anyway. This is not really a detail pass. This is more still an exploratory sketch pass. I feel like the forms are being drawn clearly enough here. And if I'm doing concept art for a client or just exploring my own children's book or something like that or whatever it is I'm doing, my own illustration of any kind. This is the level of sketch that I work in, this level of finish. Okay, great. We still have a lot of blank areas in this wall. I feel like this is a good space to put another shelving unit. Any parents out there know that kids' rooms explode with toys extremely quickly. Let's put a lower shelving unit, and this one is like a cubby unit specifically to house toys. It comes out from the wall, maybe as far as the chair. Something about there. Again, just following these perspective lines. Now, where's the middle of this? Well, let's just block in the X. Actually, before I do that, I should just show you this is the front face like this. And we're above the horizon line there, so the line has to go this way. Let's see, I'll block in the x just loosely to find this point right there. Then I'll delete the x because I don't need to see it. Visually can have a snapshot of where the middle is. There's the middle. Then I can draw another x very faintly here, get the middle. And put another line there. Then I'm just imagining an x there it is, and then another line there. Then I'll find the middle of this line, which I can just visually do. It's right there, I think, and I'll follow the perspective line back to define the middle of the cubbys then there we go. I'll give thickness to each of these cubby lines. Now up here, we're above the horizon line, but just barely. We can just barely see the bottom face of the top and here we're below the horizon line so we can get a sense for the top plane of each cubby. You've got to be careful, right close to the horizon line. These cubes are going to be pretty horizontal. These lines are not going to have too much change in direction between them. In fact, let me zoom in. I'm getting sloppy here. I'm changing the direction too much of these lines and I'm losing perspective. It's so easy to lose perspective, loose a sense of depth and proper perspective when you're close to the horizon line. These lines, even though that's the back and that's the side, that's the back and that's the side. There's not a whole lot of angle change between them because we are close to that horizon line. Then here, there is more of an angle change looking at my red lines because here we are far enough beneath the horizon line that there is enough of an angle change now for these areas. It's going to carry these horizontals down. There's our Cubby unit. Then of course, we want to erase any of these lines that are behind things. Drawing intricate little spaces like this, especially repeated ones like these cubbies, you can really lose your perspective here. It's worth the time to go in there and figure it out. Then from here, let's zoom back out, first of all. Let's go ahead and pick a face. Let's with the inside of these cubes. Actually know what we'll do. We'll do the thing we did with the cabinet on the back wall is we'll just grab this, shade this all in, and then with a lighter color, let's just pull out some of the verticals, the front faces of these shelving units, and also the front face of the shelving unit going that way, the cubby unit, I should say. And maybe the bottom planes and maybe some of these bottom planes can be just lightened up a little bit as well. Same with here. Then maybe because we're inside the cubby we further shade the very backside a bit darker. Just to further enforce that we're looking deep within these cubby units. Picking this back face, shading it in. 24. Drawing Demo Continued: Okay. All right. Let's go ahead and finish this drawing up. What you see here might look a bit different. I just had a power outage. Of course, that means my screen recorder didn't save. There are a few additions. The rug has a square pattern on it, but that's just squares following the perspective grid, and I populated the cub area with stuff. Just abstract shapes, really. You're also seeing the drawing flip horizontally. This is a common operation in any digital painting or drawing software. Anyway, right here, what I'm doing is I'm just adding in a foreground little slanted ceiling, just shading in some ambient occlusion there, which is what I did on the deck behind the chair, if you remember. Now, the only reason this part looks slanted is because it deviates from the perspective grid. Notice that faint red perspective line just underneath the slanted part is at quite a different angle than the line just above it. That's how it looks like a slanted bit of ceiling. I should also mention that I have sped up the footage by two times again because really what I'm doing here is more or less the same operation over and over, following the perspective grids, maybe blocking in ellipses, Here, I'm just adding a bit of details to the carpet, this strip or colored band that goes around the perimeter of it and just by y, adding a little triangular pattern going around that perimeter as well. Again, doing this by eye, and the only reason I'm able to do that by eye is at this stage, I have enough just general correct perspective in there that I can start drawing things totally free hand. And right after I say that, here I am going back to the perspective grid. I'm adding an object that's going to be rotated off axis. I just arbitrarily made up a new vanishing point on the horizon line, of course. This is going to be just a large toy car. This car will follow the blue perspective grid that I just blocked in because once again, this car is rotated a little bit. It's not 90 degrees to the carpet. Notice that my design of this car is very boxy. I'm creating some angled boxes here and there, but mostly this car fits within a bounding box, let's say, and that enables me to reference my perspective grid and really figure it out. Here, I'm treating the entire car as one box and I just shade it in one side, and just blocking in some windows and door detail. The wheels of the car, which are coming in now are probably the hardest part of this car because they are ellipses, but they're very close to circles. It'll be a tough balance to find that. I may go back and edit these shapes later. Of course, the reason they're close to circles is that they're very close to being seen just straight on. They have just a little bit of perspective applied to them, so they're just a little bit elliptical. Anyway, to plant this car on the ground, it always helps to just grab a soft airbrush and block in a shadow underneath it. I'll just finish this off by defining the top planes of the car and adding just a little tire detail there. Notice that the car overlaps the table behind it. I've overtaken that front leg of the table. That's the small thing that will make a lot of difference in your perspective. Though subtle overlaps add a lot of depth. You'll see me continue to overlap things as we now finish this drawing. So what needs to be finished? Well, on an aesthetic slash compositional level, the room just needs to be filled more. I've got a lot of empty foreground space. And in the context of this class, it's not so much about filling the composition, although that is what I'm doing. I want to show you how further overlaps will help add a lot of depth. Then because we have a lot of this foreground space, the foreground tends to be a great area to overlap things because if something's in the foreground, that means that other objects are behind it. I just drew a elliptical foot rest that overlaps the main chair. And then I'm going to continue that theme and draw kind of a bean bag chair here. And this is a special thing. It's ellipses, but then I've deformed them to feel like it's a beanbag chair. I roughed in a proper ellipse and then improvised over that. Then I've been doing, picking a face and then shading it. This is like a cylinder. I'm picking the side faces of the cylinder and shading them in. Then once I'm confident in this shape and form I've drawn, just going over them with a darker line to finalize it. Again, you're seeing this footage at 1.5 times its original speed now. All right. I feel like I need something sizable way up in the foreground. These are based on these cushions that I own that my kids play with. They're just these big flat couch cushions that you can maneuver into many shapes, and they're basically rectangular. Now, I'm deciding to rotate these off axis, so I'm not following my main perspective grid. I am still using the horizon line. What I did to draw those two cushions, they're both rotated in two different ways. I just visually traced lines back to the horizon line, for sure I'm wrong. If I actually trace those lines back, well, first of all, you can't even see both sides of the cushion so you couldn't even do an honest check. But once again, at this point, I've got so much, correct perspective in there that you can really improvise now and no one is really going to know within a certain tolerance. The simple act of rotating something off of the main perspective grid. But again, still referencing the horizon line is a really nice way of breaking up an otherwise overly linear piece. If you look at any room in your house, chances are it's not perfectly rectilinear. There will be some objects that are off axis, even if it's just the fact that you placed something on the counter and didn't line it up perfectly. Those little differences in rotation add up and make a scene feel natural and familiar. Oh, and by the way, I am drawing this new stuff on another layer. It just makes it easier to erase out what's behind it because I'm doing a lot of overlaps. Like this little footstool here is overlapping both the rug and the foot rest. When I say the word overlap, I'm talking about two dimensional overlap. As in the shape of the footstool is in front of the shape of the rug. In three dimensions, that footstool I just drew does not touch the rug, but in two dimensional space, it does. This is just an air filled ball. Fun fact about spheres, they will always be circular, no matter what your perspective, they will not be elliptical. Because it's a spherical form, you're always going to be able to see a perfectly round cross section of that ball, which is a circle. No matter what your angle. Now, I just free handed that ball so it's not perfectly circle, but that's just human error. I think it looks good that way anyway. It feels like it's been played with. Notice the use of cross contours both on the cushions here and the ball here, as well as on the bean bag back there, just using lines that go over the form and in doing so, revealing the form to the viewer. And I'm just racking my brain trying to come up with more items to place on the floor here. I want this to look like a room that is played in, just maybe a little bit cleaned up. This is not nearly as cluttered as my children's rooms, but a little bit of clutter here will help. This is one of those puzzle piece toys. Again, it's rotated. Look at its two side contours and you can roughly trace those back to the blue horizon line. Doing so ensures that it will belong in this perspective, but it's rotated off the main two axes. The other two sides of that puzzle piece toy also converge, except that vanishing point is so far off the page. I didn't even bother. I basically just made the lines parallel. I guess I would say the farther the vanishing point is off the page, the less you have to be 100% faithful to it, but the reverse is true. The closer those vanishing points, the more you should adhere to them as closely as possible because the errors will become noticeable. That's just because our naked eye will be able to trace that. And here's a toppled over fabric toy box. For this one, I didn't rotate it. I'm just following our good old main perspective grid. When it comes to populating this area with actual toys, I'm not going to draw any details there. I'm just going to block in shapes. Long as they sit on the floor, which is determined by the perspective grid, it'll look like detail. If this were a final illustration, I'd have to think about going in there, zooming in and figuring out what those toys actually are. Here, I'm just darkening the side face of the chair, merging it in with that plant. Let's continue the theme of overlapping and put another puzzle piece toy on top of the first one, thereby overlapping it. It may seem like a tedious task to draw something in full and then overlap it only to erase out the thing you just drew. But that is how I keep my perspective honest. I'm sure someone like Garndo could probably just not do that or draw something way rougher and get his overlaps right. But for me, and this is a holdover habit from when I was a beginner, I was taught to draw the whole object and then overlap it with another object. Then you have to go through the task of erasing out what's behind it, which was a lot more tedious in the pencil and paper days. Digitally, you could do this quite easily by putting everything on its own layer that makes erasing layers very simple. But again, I just don't like sifting through layers. But that is totally a personal preference and you should use layers if that's what you're comfortable with. All right. Just a few more items to add. Here, I'm shooting a plumb line to measure where the top of another chair would be. It would be a chair of the same set as the first one. Just seemed odd to me to only have one chair in there. Here's a second one. Now, this one, we're seeing it straight side on. So it's kind of a side profile. So there's minimal perspective here, and I'm just using those horizontal plumb lines to measure where the seat was and where the top of the chair was. Yeah, just cheating and just drawing it mostly in profile to get away with again, minimal perspective there. Let's make sure to put the shadow underneath it. There we go. Okay. And from here, it's just a matter of maybe reinforcing some of the drawing that's there, here, just painting out a line that should have been hidden by the table, Darkening lines that I feel should be a little bit more confidently stated. On a design level now that I see this room, this window is bugging me. It feels like it needs some country house style upper window that's curved. I found the middle of the window by drawing my center line up from the lower window. Remember the centrline stuff from Chapter two, and I'm just making this nice arched window that I feel is a nice architectural accent to the main bottom one. On my tone layer, I'm just painting white in the window glass sections where you could see outside. That just helps make it look like it's outside. Here's a rod for the blinds, following the original perspective grid, of course. Yeah. Then now that I feel like I've got a finished room going, I can just grab an air brush on my tone layer and just set it on color dodge mode and just airbrush in just some shafts of light. Now, I am following the perspective grid here. See the direction my airbrush is moving. I'm following the perspective grid. That's key whenever you are indicating light, shafts of light or shadows cast from the light that you follow your perspective. Remember that a light beam is still a three dimensional line or volume of particles anyway. One thing we can be sure of is that light travels in straight lines, so it is subject to perspective. Then just one last thing before we call this finished. I just felt the need to fill this space at the bottom right. I figured just like we did with the second chair, let's put a second car there. I've got this bit of drawing on another layer just because it's a late entry, I'm not sure if it's going to work. This also allows me to resize it a little bit. Notice the car is heavily being cropped by the frame. That's very intentional. I want there to feel like there's more more space in this room beside us and behind us. One face of the car, the left side in this case, has gotten a shadow tone, which by the way, is a different choice than the first car, and that is totally inconsistent lighting, but that's okay. This is not lighting per se. It's shading to show form. This drawing has the appearance of light, which is nice, but as you've seen, it's done with a much more water down approach. Something that I hope you see is very easy to apply. All you have to do is have a solid three D form in front of you, pick a side or two sides and shade. The other thing that I hope you'll find about perspective scenes is for the first few minutes, in this one, it was the first 10 minutes. It just felt empty and boring. But as you start adding objects in that perspective, the three dimensional space that you're depicting starts filling up. And the act of filling it up makes it feel lifelike. Here's my finished piece. I know in the beginning of this, I said I would try and skew this into three point perspective. I've decided not to. I will, however, tackle a three point perspective drawing in the next and final chapter, which is going to be a narrated practice session. That brings us to the end of Chapter four. 25. How To Study - Drawing From The Model: All right. Welcome to the final chapter of the class. Practice. There will be no new information in this chapter. But what I want to do is prescribe for you a daily practice regimen and demonstrate how I would go about doing it. You're going to see a lot of drawings and you're going to see how I actually draw, not how I demo. This is how I would draw if I were in a life drawing session, for example, or just practicing in my sketchbook. These are exercises I do recommend you do daily, if possible, or as close to that as you can. There's three sections. In this first section, we'll do some quick poses from the model, and you'll see just how quick in a moment. That will mostly drill and develop gesture, but a little volume stuff too. Then we'll do some targeted shape studies from other artists, seeing what other artists do that really works and seeing if their decision making feels right for our hand. Then we'll close with some perspective rough ins. Rough ins meaning something more on the sketchy side rather than the finished stuff. Hroughout this study session, I'll drop a little tidbits as to why I value sketching and quantity, generally speaking, over tight finished stuff when it comes to art improvement. All right. Let's get started now, drawing some quick poses from the model. So when it comes to finding figure drawing reference online. This is, of course, assuming you're not doing it directly from life. You're choosing the next best thing, which is doing it from photos, which is fine. Thankfully, there are tons of models out there who are posting photos for us to use. Some of them even available for commercial use, such as Juke Pub stock here on Deviant Art. I really like her poses and I like her photography. The poses feel like a traditional life drawing class. You can see she's got it sorted into various categories, full body, props. What's nice here is you can find the same pose both in male and female. You get different body types, different shapes. One thing to look for when you're looking at poses to draw is try and find people and models who put expression into what is otherwise a basic pose. Something like this. This is just a seated pose. But if you just follow my cursor here, you notice there's a gesture running through it like a C curve or maybe an S curve if you follow the leg all the way down, and of course, it's echoed in the male model too. Guess this is to say that there's movement and what could have been easily a static pose. This will help keep your interest alive while you study. Like here, there's a nice little turn to the head off the axis of the shoulders. There's a pretty extreme angle on that neck and that angle is then broken by a curve here for the torso or a C curve going around the back if you follow the back this way. Subtle details I look for like the arms being crisscrossed here, adds a real human quality to the pose. It increases difficulty a little bit. But in exchange, you'll get the feel for a real human pose that you can apply to any character that you subsequently create. The next thing you'll want is a timer. Honestly, I just use my phone for this. But if you want to just set it to your web browser, this page is riddled with advertisements. But this is just online stopwatch.com. You can set it for 30 seconds, which is where I'm going to start and then you can hit start. It's got a real annoying bell sound effect when the timer ends, which I will mute to do you a favor. But yeah, that's all you need to get up and running with some practice. These are morning stretches. Let's draw a stretching pose. 30 seconds on the clock. This is how I like to start. I like it because there's no conception that you can capture any sense of detail or final lines in 30 seconds. So it's a great way to shake the cobwebs off both mentally and physically and just warm up. Not only that, though. You'll be training yourself to capture gesture and pose and weight and movement. You can do that in 30 seconds, and I'll try and show you here. So start the clock. I almost always start with the head, which gives me an educated guess as to where the shoulders are and then I can gesture upward to the hands in this case. I'll gesture down to the pit of the neck, and then from that comes the entire torso gesture, which is a C curve here. There's a cross contour for the hips. I use that to landmark the outer corners of the hips and I can build the leg gestures off of that. Notice I gesture to the knee, landmark the knee, and then to the foot. This is about what I can capture in 30 seconds. The pose is there, and that's what matters. Moving straight ahead, this is the same pose, but a different angle. Which illustrates the point, your gesture should also capture perspective, doesn't have to be totally accurate, but it should be present. Even right now, the head is blocking the back shoulder. That's perspective information. Then look at that C curve. See how I've really exaggerated it. I highly recommend doing that in gesture. It's a funny thing that happens in drawing by pushing the gesture like that. You might feel like you're overdoing it, but by the end of the drawing, it usually ends up feeling right, and I didn't leave enough room for the feet, but that's okay. And snuck in a few strokes after the bell there. Cool. There's the pose. I can feel it. All right. What have we got now? Oh, a mermaid pose. Cool. Let's start with the head as always. Gesture down to the pit of the neck. Get this nice C curve for the arm, way too long, but I'll correct it without erasing. Then the other arm is this strong straight rhythm. That arm is carrying a lot of weight, and remember straights help show that. The torso is a C curve. And notice I'm throwing in those cross contours for some quick volume. Then I threw in a shape for the mermaid tail and then try to find the legs after that. And with the dwindling last few seconds here, I can throw in a placeholder for some eyes, maybe a little dot for the nose, too. I find that helps. Good stuff. Next one. This is a tough angle for the head. I'm scribbling aimlessly and in that messy volume, I found an eye somewhere in there. Then from there, I can find a jaw and a neck. The shoulders have been landmarked. This arm is bearing weight, so it's straight. Let's get that. It's easier. Now, this arm, where that hand is is also where the knee is going to be. In this case, I'll start that leg with the knee and work backwards. Notice my stylist rarely leaves the page. I want visual evidence of my feeling around for the pose. Somehow that helps with the drawing. She's propped up on that box, so it was important that I at least draw the surface of it. Poses like this can cause nightmares due to the foreshortening. But before I even tackle that, I'm going to get the head and torso first, and those things by themselves don't have any foreshortening, C curve for the arm here, and then a straight for the back arm, which is holding the weight. Then with those arms blocked in, I could landmark where the knee is. Notice I shot a horizontal line to help me find it. Then I'll find the spatial relationship between the bum and the foot. From there, I can place the other knee and then work my way down to the bottom foot. If I can get those spatial relationships close to right, I'll capture the foreshortening by default, without having to do a perspective grid. All right, for this one here, there's a nice little twist in the head. I really like that. I'll spend probably a little too long trying to get the angle of it before I go and landmark the front shoulder based on that. Again, the pit of the neck really helps landmarking those shoulders. There's the pit of the neck, there's the shoulder. From there, I can mark the other shoulder, which appears lower. Then I can get this beautiful C curve running through the upper torso. That front arm is a tilted straight. The back arm is more C curvy. I guess it is a habit of mine to get the upper torso and head area working before moving to the legs. Now, you don't have to do that, but it is a process that I've just slipped into over the years. And I didn't leave room for the feet again. That's why you see these big pads of newsprint in life drawing rooms, by the way. You don't have to worry about fitting your drawing on your page. You have a huge page to work on. All right. Last time I didn't get the staff she was holding, and this time she's holding a sword. I will make sure I get that. Pit of the neck helps find the shoulders. Notice the angle on those shoulders. Then just quickly gesturing where that sword is. Now, this time for the torso, I'm using more of a center line approach that is starting with the center line, then finding the outer areas of the shape. Then for the legs, I'm trying to find the knees and plumb lining between knees to see if I've got the perspective right. That far leg ends up being way too long. I should have put the arm and hand there to help me find it. Notice the plumb line at the feet to help me find the two D relationship between them. There we go. I think this one works gesturally, but it doesn't work proportionally. But that's okay. It's a 32nd drawing. Remember to be kind to yourself on these things. All right. Let's tackle something with some more extreme action here. Just for fun, I'm going to use a much fatter brush. Switching up the brush like this, I find does help. As a general philosophy, I don't like being married to any one tool. Of course, the process doesn't change. This time, there's no pit of the neck though, because the shoulders are high enough to cover it. Anyway, let's make sure we get this dramatic C curve of the body. Notice here, I've learned from my mistakes and I'm plumb lining vertically to find the knee. Now I know that other knee is a bit lower. Once I have that, I can find the feet, the foot on the left being lower on the page than the foot on the right. Again, that will capture a sense of perspective. There we go. A 32nd drawing that I think captures this pose. All right. Let's switch now to 1 minute on the clock. Trust me, this feels like an eternity after 32nd drawings. Here we go. The process is the same, except I can just take a little more time at each step. Because I could take more time, I tend to go a little further than the rough gesture and get a little bit more shape in there. But here you can see the same techniques being used, plumb lining to find the shoulder versus the chin relationship. There's the gesture for the torso, the gesture for the arm. Here I'll find the far elbow first, then plumb line to find the other elbow. I found the far one first because it was more connected to the body. It was easier for me to gauge where it is. And you can see here, I'm spending a bit more time on the shape of the arm. I have a whole minute. Anyway, because I have that elbow, I know where the bottom of the bum is, and then I know where the knee is, and then I can find where the hand is. It's like a puzzle or a strategy that you have to think up on the fly. I have a basic framework for the order I like to do things, but the pose itself dictates the minutia of it. Do I get an elbow first or a hand first? Anyway, time's up. I'm just throwing in a quick shadow on the ground to help perspective, and there we go. Now, you know, I like the way that turned out, but I feel like the head is a bit small. It would have been nice to get the hair in there. And when that happens, I'll just spend another minute to quickly jot in those details. And here's where I ended up. I'll still label the drawing 1 minute because in spirit, it was captured in a minute with just less than a handful of details added in later. Okay. Here's one of those poses that is deceptively tricky. The illusion is that it's straight up and down, which would negate the purpose of a gesture. But that's actually not true. This pose is not straight up and down. There's movement in the shoulders, the angle there, and there is a subtle C curve in the torso, and the plumb line of the hips is at a different angle, a more extreme angle than the shoulders. These are all very subtle important things, and capturing them will save the drawing from looking stiff or a cardboard cutout. Anyway, once again, I'm trying to get the torso right before moving on to the legs. Just because of those subtle relationships in the torso area. Little ears help the direction of the head, the little tilt there, and then I'll also block in an eye line too. Then from here, I'll just flesh out the knees and lower leg area, in getting a basic sense of volume there, as well as gesture. Although gesturally there's not much to speak of. It's pretty straight horizontal. When that happens, I'll shift my focus to mostly look at shapes, offsetting symmetry, things like that. Then time's up, I'm just going to quickly throw in a little cast shadow. If this were a real life drawing session, the model will need 20 seconds to move to the next pose. In those 20 seconds, I often throw in a little dash of something extra. All right. Let's up the clock to 2 minutes now. And again, it's the same process. I just have yet a little more time now to work out things. Generally speaking, the accuracy gets higher with time. Whereas with a 32nd gesture, the accuracy is in the gesture, not so much the finished shapes. Well, I mean, you just saw that there are no finished shapes in the 32nd gesture. Whereas here, you can see I'm slowly methodically working my way from the head down the figure, and I'm in arriving at shapes as I go. Now, the confidence, though comes from the fact that I still do use gesture. You can see here I'm gesturing down the body to the torso. The gesture is still what informs that critical sense of movement or weight, getting the dynamicism to the pose. I specifically chose this pose, by the way, because it's difficult. It's one of those poses that really looks straight up and down, but it's my goal to capture the subtle sense of movement that does exist in this pose. Notice my gesture is not straight up and down. You can start with the basic difference in angle from the shoulders to the hips. I mean, the angle is close, but it's not the same. Also, the torso line is not straight up and down. It can also really help to find your cross contours, getting the volume of the form. Not only that, but in this case, because I had the arms in there, I could also work out the shape of the torso, getting those little negative spaces right. I'm shading her clothing in darker just to differentiate it from the flesh. I think it'll help give the drawing a bit of a graphic read. The biggest hurdle a beginner will have to conquer is removing the sense of flatness from a drawing, especially a quick drawing. That's why I think dwelling on quick drawings is really helpful. It's really not that beneficial at first to develop final drawings. It's way better to go through volume of drawings, just reams of them, and working out the kinks of capturing things like gesture and quick volumes. Because if you can capture those things quickly, it means that your eyes are tuned well. You're seeing the right things. That is honestly what most beginning artists lack, in my opinion, which is totally natural, by the way. These are skills you can't really be born with. You have to develop them. All right. Just like that, two minute drawing done, and I think it does capture a sense of fleeting movement. All right. A nice, foreshortened one. We're looking dramatically up at her. The whole body is foreshortened from head to toe, but I'm not going to let that scare me. That's just a matter of getting my volumes. With the tools we developed in both Chapter one and two of this class, that shouldn't be as much of a problem anymore. Foreshortening is just a volume that's coming towards you. No big deal. It does change the proportions. Maybe that's a difficult part, but you get used to that kind of thing. With tools like plumb lining and gesture, that's how you deal with that. Here's a nice exaggerated C curve gesture for the body. Once again, it feels exaggerated when I'm drawing it, but it ends up just looking normal. For the hips, I'm really trying to get a sense of that elliptical volume. Because we're looking dramatically up at the hips. Those hips are way above the horizon line. We're going to really see the bottom of that hypothetical ellipse around the hips, and that really helps capture the sense of perspective that we're getting here. This leg is really what's going to help sell the foreshortening. Notice I'm working out its volumes with cross contoured ellipses as I draw it. I use the ellipses as a landmarking tool, and then I'll build my shape from one ellipse to the next. Yet again, I'm running out of paper space, so I'm just going to adjust the canvas. There we go. The sole of that foot has a really interesting shape. A bunch of weaving S curves. I really want to capture that. Just throwing some basic shading on the sole of that foot, like it's the bottom of a box or something. Then here's the other leg which is hidden largely by the front leg. But because I've drawn the front leg first, I can find it via comparing positive and negative spaces, plumb lining if I have to, even if just in my head, although I've abandoned that leg here to capture the hand, which I think adds a bit of interesting look to the pose. And notice my line quality is quite soft. That's because we're working quickly. I can't really commit to things. I work softly in case I need to change something without erasing. I don't like to erase. I think that erasing is focusing on the wrong thing. You should be searching, and erasing implies that you're looking for perfection or something. These quick poses are really not about that. All right, there's a two minute drawing. All right. Let's do one more drawing here to wrap up our sample study session from the figure. This one has a lot of energy, a lot of action. It is quite literally an action pose, and that makes it interesting. But in terms of drawing, I don't feel like this presents any other difficulty than we've already seen. I'm spending a bit of time on the head here, getting that angle right. That'll allow me to gesture down that prominent neck muscle, the sternal mastoid. Knowing the names of the muscles doesn't matter in this stage, though Anyway, it does lead to the pit of the neck, which allows me to find the shoulders, same stuff. I'm now working out the upper torso area down to the hips. This is where that gesture is pretty obvious, I think. There's an obvious C curve rhythm there. You notice when I do it though, I'm still careful to include that big volume of the rib cage. It's actually quite helpful to draw very lean models whose ribs you can literally see because it really helps drive home just how big that rib cage volume is. It's responsible for so much form and shape in that area. There's a nice plumb line to help me find the knee. Those shorts that she's wearing are pretty great reference because you can quite literally see the cylinder or at least the partial ellipse that happens when the leg comes out from underneath the shorts. There was a plumb line connecting the two knees, the knee on the left being slightly higher than the one on the right. I gave the upper arm on the left, just a quick bit of shading. It helps it look like it's reaching backward. Anyway, the two props, the shield and sword are very important to this pose, like the storytelling of the pose. I really want to make sure I get them in. You'd be amazed at how difficult it can be to make the drawing look like the character is holding something rather than the thing just being stuck to them or something. All right. So I chose a foot to start with. The feet are equal in this pose, that is equally difficult to find. I just started with one, then I plumb lined my way to the other. At this point, the drawing is done, but I have 15 seconds left, so you might as well make some lines darker, commit to some shapes, figure out some more volumes, whatever you think will make the drawing just that much more informative. And there we go. That's exactly how I used to start my life drawing sessions for my first five years of drawing, 32nd poses, 1 minute poses, and two minute poses. We filled up about an hour doing just those. Hopefully, with this sample size here, you get an idea of how you can approach them. You can draw as many or as few as you'd like. But I do recommend doing this every day that you can. Even if it's just like 20 minutes or something. In 20 minutes, you can do, ten, 20 drawings, depending on how much time you a lot to each one. That's valuable. It's way more valuable to do something every day than do a lot of something one day. 26. How To Study - Shape Focused: All right. In this next section of Prescribed study regimen, we are specifically studying artists shapes. They're shape choices. On screen here is a Glen Keen drawing of Disney's Tarzan. You already know I'm a big Glen Keen fan from the very intro of this class. And this drawing here is no exception. It's got beautiful mark making, almost sculptural, planer style mark making. You know, I kind of looks like he's drawing with a hatchet. I really like that. But that's actually already getting off topic. What we really want to study here is the shapes being used. Before I do a drawing, I just want to show you the things that I'm drawn to, no pun intended. For example, I love the almost triangular quality of this forearm shape like that. Then it tapers into a more graceful C curve here, and then a sharper curvy thing here. Those two shapes meet and because of their differences, they are interesting. They're both simply designed on their own and the juxtaposition of the two is interesting to me. Now, shapes are one of the more subjective areas of art. Just because I like this drawing, I don't expect that everyone will like this drawing. Although I do hope that you see that it has good qualities to it in terms of design, at least thoughtful qualities. No shape here is done on autopilot. Even something as simple as the cuff of the sleeve. I think a less mindful artist would have drawn a cuff just like a rectangle like this, maybe throwing a little button right there in the middle, in the middle of the cuff like that. But Glen Keen didn't do that. His cuff has a little taper to it. It's wider at this side. There's also a little C curves, if I were to draw it up here. There's a little curve there, then it goes really wide, and there's a little sharp little curve that goes like that before coming back to the starting point. I hope you can see just in this short comparison up here that this shape is just visually more engaging than this shape. And it's more engaging because it's designed to have little differences embedded in it. Doing that makes your shapes less predictable to the audience. Now, you don't have to do that with all of your shapes. But as one of my teachers put it once, if any of your shapes are going to be consciously seen by the audience. That is, if they have any size to them like the cuff of the sleeve, you should probably design them to be as interesting as possible. I'll show you an example of a shape that maybe doesn't have to be quite as designed. It's the straps here of the overalls. These are pretty small shapes in the drawing. I mean, they're certainly visible, but they're not meant to steal any attention. In that case, you can keep them a little bit more, let's say bland, but purposefully bland. All right. Let's start drawing here. Unlike the last figure drawing section where I narrated things after the fact. Here I'm narrating it live just to hopefully put a microphone in my brain and capture my thoughts as I go. Also, I'm not under a time limit this time, which is why I narrated it after the fact for the figure drawings. There's no way I could do a drawing in 30 seconds while talking about the process. The first thing I'm going to do though is follow the same initial process. This is the head. Here's a cross contour for the eye line. Let's throw a brow in there. Now, I'm not totally interested in getting every shape and every line exact. I want the shape relationships to be as exact as possible. But in terms of the exact likeness of the character or something, that's not really what's on my mind here. But let's just block in a face. I will actually talk about the planes of the head in a very basic tip level right after this. But one thing I know is true about the head is that the brow sticks out. Then it comes in for the eye socket. This is a cross contour, I'm drawing, like a center line. Then the cheekbone comes out again. Then the bottom half of the face is more or less straight, has a subtle curvature to it like this. Anyway, what that means functionally is for shading, I could throw this bottom of the box like the eye socket is almost like the bottom of the box. I could just throw that in tone and it starts looking realistic. Even the bottom of the nose, there can be a little bit of shadow. Well there often is a shadow under the nose. I can throw that in there. The mouth sticks out. I'm more interested in the overall shape of the jaw here. I really like this strong masseter muscle, the chewing muscle that Tarzan has because he lived his life in the forest in the jungle and his ear is over here somewhere, and his hair cuts this nice straight line this way and then straight line this way, only to be relieved by a subtle little curve there, like a half moon shape. Then let's not forget this nice little lock of hair that comes down. This is one ofthose shapes that doesn't have to be totally designed. It's just a small little incidental shape that comes down. The silhouette of the hair and the head is much more important here to this drawing. Now, the neck comes down and here's where I will switch into gesture mode. The gesture, of course, will help us map out the drawing so we know where we're going. We have a high shoulder and a low shoulder. They're about there. I'm imagining plumb lines, but instead of imagining them, let's actually physically draw them, and then we'll plumb line the relationship between the shoulders, get the angle right. Then from there, I can roughly figure out a curve and find the hips. It's about there. It's angle opposes the shoulders. This is why I draw lightly because I don't know for sure it's there, but it's about there. Then his leg is somewhere down here and sleeve, I might have to reduce the size of this drawing a little bit. Okay. Perfect. The shoulder. I'm still in gesture land here. The shoulder comes down and turns into this arm that is basically a graceful tapering S curve is how I'm seeing it all the way down to the hand, that is this tapering S curve. And then this arm is more straight. It's almost like a It actually is like an S curve as well, but a very flattened one. The closer you get to straight, the more energy the arm has certainly that back arm seems like it's spring loaded, ready to take off that back arm looks like it's ready to push Tarzan off the ground at any point. Whereas the front arm does not look like that. The front arm looks like it's more gracefully moving with the flow of the body. Was that back arm is the one that's loaded to go and actually looks like it has been going, putting Tarzan in this current pose. Then the torso is like this v shape. Which is classic of a fit physicality. He's got that v shaped torso. Then we have the trapezius, the muscle that comes off the back of your neck, making this nice C curve shape that I'm just gesturing in just roughing in. I'm also going to include some of the clothing in the gesture to the collar, the shirt here that make these little interesting little S curvy things. There we go. There's my gesture. Let's give it a little thickness to the arm here. Indicate what maybe shapes we might be using here, where things are the cuff might be about there. I'm plumb lining it with the leg. We have a nice framework here for the drawing, I think. Now, I'll just switch my pencil to a darker color, so I can just go over everything with my let's say finished line. Although I am going to keep this drawing sketchy, there's nothing fully finished about this drawing. The word finished is a little weird. This is a finished drawing. It's just the sketchy look is what the artist is choosing for the finish. Information wise, it's complete, it's finished. And I think information is a much more accurate measure as to whether something's finished or not. A finished drawing doesn't have to be perfect cleaned up line. It can be, but there are different types of finishes. I'm drawing some lines within the hair to support the silhouette. These lines follow the overall shape of the hair and they use the same lines that design the silhuette the same straights and curves that is. Then what we can do with a Glen Kean didn't do this in his drawing, but if you have hair, feel free to shade it in, even if it's a blond haired model or something. Oftentimes hair can contain some of the darkest darks in your drawing or painting. As a force of habit, I do like to shade in hair dark. There's a beautiful bit of negative space here on the right. I'm using that to place the collar relative to the jutting jaw, and this is the collar here and it cuts in with this beautiful strong straight. Then from just under the collar, using the t principle. Remember the T principle, remember the t that looks like this. Now I know that the shoulder will come out from underneath the collar about there. Okay. Now we can find the armpit area here of the shirt, and we can throw a little folds action here. If you want to learn more about clothing folds, which I don't consider to be a beginners topic, but I have a YouTube video that I just made last month about it. In fact, you can consider a lot of my YouTube content to be supplementary lessons that you can use to build with on top of this fundamental information contained in this class. My YouTube channel, I would say is targeted toward more intermediate level artists and skips over the beginning stuff that we're looking at specifically in this class. Once you have these fundamentals in this class down, You can then go to my YouTube channel and plug in the lessons a little bit more proactively, let's say, than maybe you otherwise could. Where the shirt opens up here is this beautiful little intricate. I'm not even sure what it looks like. It looks like a continent on a map or something. This particular shape I'm drawing right now. Here's the pit of the neck right here. External mastoid muscle tracks down to it. Now, I totally messed up this part of the shape. Glen Ken did not do that. His neck he let the neck be wider. Of course, Tarzan would have a huge neck and then that goes in like this. Glenen didn't do this, but I'm going to shade the bottom of the sorry, the upper part of the neck where it meets the lower part of the jaw, just in a bit of shadow because that part almost always is in shadow, obviously cast from the jaw. And anything that's under anything else like underneath the collar, both collars here, feel free to just throw a little shape of tone in there. Make sure your shape of tone is still designed. It's a simple shape like that, and this shadow is a simple shape like that. Always keep your shape simple. That's as close to a rule as you'll ever get in art. There's almost never a reason to have a shape that's not simple. Even if it's a non interesting design like the overall straps that I just talked about, it's still a very simple shape, right? Okay. Let's use those shoulder straps to design this nice v shape here. Also, we can go over the form with it. Notice I'm not doing this. It's not straight. It goes over the top of the shoulder or the trapezius, I should say, down the chest and we can get this one here, then it juts out a little bit as it has a bit of slack there and now it can come down and attach somewhere over here to the pants. This one has a little bit more tension to it, so it's a bit straighter and it attaches to the pants somewhere here. We have this now triangular torso for Tarzan. But look at this, the shirt at the side here. It's the shirt is slightly oversized, so it bags out here at the side. It's got this nice little shape. My shape is less interesting than Glen Keynes there. Let's fix that. Let's make it, it's more like that. The weight is at the bottom of the shirt. Let's make it straighter there. Remember straights contain a lot of weight or force, just like this arm was straighter because it's spring loaded, ready to go. It's pushing the whole figure forward, so it's straighter. All right bit of correction to do here. It's occurring to me that the torso is too long. I'm just going to use the magic of digital tools here to go like this. That's better. I might even just rotate it a bit. Of course, if this were drawn with a pencil, you'd have to erase and redraw. If anyone out there is worried about cheating, don't be. Use the tools. Also, the overall strap. I'm going to redraw this as well. It comes in more at an angle, which is more appealing visually. Actually, let me undo that as well. It's closer to the shoulder. The only reason I care about that is I like the fact that there's less space here and more space here. That's the only reason why I really care that this shape goes roughly in there. I don't care that it's exact, but I like the delineation of space there. Then there is a nice little line for the pectoral muscles, or I should say the pectoral muscles causing a few wrinkles in the shirt there, and then this comes down and straight. There we go. That's a bit better. These little wrinkles in the shirt, you don't even really have to know much about clothing folds, get the lines to be uneven and straight. Then you can, you know, track this almost cross contour line over the form. Functionally, this is a cross contour line that I'm drawing now, and there we go. We have the look of a wrinkled shirt without really understanding exactly what the clothing folds are doing physically. Clothing folds is something that I didn't learn for several years. As long as you put a few directional lines in your clothing, within the cross contour tracking over the surface. You can get to the point where it looks like clothing that is indeed folding and wrinkling and stuff. Here's that shape I talked about in the opening, this nice triangular shape that mirrors the triangular shape of the torso itself. I like that, and just a quick shading here because the arm is pointed back. Let's just throw it in a bit of tone. There we go. Then from that, it fits beautifully into this curvy more graceful C curve, then on the other side, it's two straightes. Notice, that's so much better than just doing this. This would be too symmetrical. Even if you offset the symmetry, you could do that, and it's fine. This shape would work, but it's better, I think, to do it this way, where you have curve here, and then the appearance of a curve here, but that curve is made of two straightes. It's just a nice again, to use the word again, mindful design. And there's that cuff that I like, and now that I have the cuff, I know where the leg is. All the while, I'm tracking this negative space here. I talked all about that in the shape chapter, and this is where that pays off. It's one of the few bits of negative space in this drawing. There's that and there's this and maybe this part here. That's it. There's no other real negative space in this drawing, that's okay. But you notice that this negative space is big and this one is small. There's differences everywhere. You should always not to overuse the term, but you should always be mindful of designing differences into all of your shapes. Here's the wrist. The wrist is like an echoing of this shape, is a curve here and then a straight here that cuts in, and then the hand is just loosely drawn and I will imitate the looseness of it. Hands are another thing that I don't believe is part of a beginner's regimen. I have several YouTube videos, two of them actually on hands, probably about 40 minutes of material on hands. Again, hands are one of those things you can plug into these fundamentals and you can find it on my YouTube channel. They are pretty complete lessons on hands. Anything I would say here would probably be more redundant than anything. But the tools you've learned in this class will absolutely help you draw hands. This is looking good. We just got to get this other arm here on the right. It's got this subtle C curve. This part of the arm is straight, and then the elbow or the inside of the elbow joint is here. I'll landmark it by way of these curves. Now, I just made a tangent. I made a mistake. Watch this. The bottom of the shirt is here and look where I put the inside of the elbow joint. It's continuous from that. That's not good. You might say, Oh, that's continuous rhythm. And you'd be right. But in this case, it flattens the form because the inside of the elbow is at a different level of depth than the bottom of the shirt. This part of the form is closer to us. Whenever you have something like that, you want to separate it. I do not want a perfectly continuous thing there. I'm just going to put it lower, like the T principle thing. I want to put it lower like this and then suddenly the arm stands out more as its own form. There's a beautiful straight here, followed by two curves, a curve here and a curve there. Then there's the little ancillary little sketchy fold things that are still designed. It's like three straights. I don't want to don't just do that, don't scribble something. You could scribble, but make sure the scribbles are still forming some cohesive design. Then the cuff of this sleeve, which is folded out, it's got this nice, again, tapered shape, S curve here, really nice curve look at that and then culminates up here feeding right back into this curve. To me, these shapes are not just the shapes in this drawing, but how a good artist uses shapes. It's like poetry. It's like reading a poem and being enthralled by the structure of the stanzas and the rhymes used, going off that analogy, it's boring to read a poem whose structure and rhyme you can anticipate. It's much more interesting to read a poem or even just a story where you can't see what's coming next. That's what you want to hit with your shapes in your drawing. I think it's very much like a poem because you have so few shapes in a drawing, just like you have few words in a poem. It will give the audience a pleasurable experience when they can't predict what you're going to do next. For example, this hand, the top of the hand comes out, then there's a knuckle and the finger breaks the angle and s straight down. And because Tarzan is like an ape, it's hitting the middle knuckle of his finger is hitting the ground straight. There's a lot of weight on it. We get that nice straight. Even this little line I just drew this curve here. If you imagine a stick hitting the ground, it's like this. Well, the finger is like a fleshy stick. It's going to be squishing a bit as it hits the ground. That's what I'm doing with this finger. Then there's another finger here, similar principle, straight. In fact, let's draw a straight line to track the entirety of the fingers onto, then it's like that. I really like how the cuff of the sleeve is cutting the hand off at a diagonal. That's interesting too. You don't see an equal amount of every part of the hand, knuckle there, and my cuff is a bit longer in my drawing than in Glen Keens, but that's okay. Bottom of the thumb. It's always interesting to throw in a little case shadow. Maybe interesting, maybe it's not the right word. It's informative perspective wise. If you get a few shadows in here and the reason it's informative is because suddenly we get to compare the vertical distances of things and in a way, your brain can almost throw in a perspective grid there. A cache shadow tends to be a great way of revealing perspective. Now obviously, in this drawing, he's missing what would be his left leg or the leg on the right, but maybe it's coming out this way with the knee up here and it's coming down. Something like that. We can throw that in. Then if that happens, there might be a shadow cast from the arm onto the leg. Um, I'm just shading in the box, right? The leg box would look like this. This part that you just saw, this is a cast shadow just underneath the arm. Just like we did in the neck. I'm doing the same thing here with the arm. It's directly underneath the arm. So let's put it in shadow. And then if the box is indeed like that, we can let's just stick to the principles of the class and just shade in the box like this. And then this is where the box turns down where the knee bends, you know, that box is like this. The entire box is pointing down, so we can shade that in. But I'll just even get rid of it for the drawing. And then the cast shadow. Be in there. We need to make sure that hand that front hand is the front most part in perspective. It's the closest thing to us. I guess you could do the shadow like this and it would still work. But to give that hand a nice graphic contrast de pop, let's intersect it like this. That puts that hand front and center. It's a beautiful little centerpiece of the drawing. Now, Glen Ken didn't include that shadow, but he easily could have if he kept the drawing going. I suppose I'm breaking the mold of GlenKens drawing here and taking it just inch further than he did, which is not to say better. I'm just continuing with the idea. Okay. So there we go. There's a little lock of hair that I missed down here. A couple of folds in there. Because this is such a little tight space in here, I'll just shade that in. If I wanted to, I can imagine a box for the leg like this. If I imagine that box, I can shade in maybe one plane of it, the side plane here. But I don't want to get too heavily involved in shading. I think shading is often used as a crutch, especially for beginning artists because the tendency is to think that shading will make your drawing finished or complete or even good. Your drawing should be informationally complete without shading. Shading is great. I mean, I make my living off painting and painting is all about shading fundamentally, but a good draftsman, someone who can draw well, does not rely on shading. There we have a nice little study of Glen Kean's sketch. I think the shape information is accurate or accurate enough, anyway. Again, it's not a perfect copy. It's the relationships of the shapes that I think is accurate. If you want, you can notice little differences and say, I like the chin shape better in the original and clean this up. It juts out downward a bit more. You can find all kind of little things that you might want to now put into your drawing. But I will discipline myself to stop here and note where I was successful. That's key to your learning. Make sure that once you've done a drawing, you look at it, and you say, where was I successful? Where was I not? In my drawing, there's a little tangent here where the thumb just meets the leg. Notice in Glen Ken's drawing, there's a separation here. Now that's a small detail for sure, but I may want to adjust mine. Either I add the separation or if I'm close enough for the leg to overlap, let's just overlap it more. Make sure I'm very conscious of the t principle that I'm now using on this hand, which is different than the glen Keene drawing, but this works just as well. If the knee is like a box, there's going to be a box there. All right. I spent what? A 20 minutes on that, 30 minutes. That's about the time I'd expect for a conscious shape study. Shapes take a lot longer than gesture because they're more intricate. There's less room for searching. You have to be more exact with them. This is a good example of something you can do a couple of times a day maybe. 27. Head Drawing Primer: All right. I don't think this course would be complete without a basics of head drawing section. Now, fully understanding the head is a whole complex topic. I actually have a whole seven hour course on just understanding the head. It's one of those classes that this class will prepare you for. However, because you're going to be drawing a lot, you will have to draw heads, I'm assuming. I wanted to go over some common mistakes that I often see from beginners and students, and I want you to know what they are and know how to avoid them. Just so you don't slip into any bad habits. The character on the screen is from Pixar's Luca. You might look at that and say, Oh, that's a pretty simple drawing. It's the shape of the head is like this, it's symmetrical. We have it like this. The forehead goes about there. We have the nose here, which is like a circle shape with some nostrils, and there's an eye here. I'm not going to get this exactly right, but there's an eye here. And an eye here. These are basically just all circles. We have some large irises looking at us, and there's a smile here and the chin comes in like that. Before you know it, you have a cute little character design. Of course, he's a young boy, so let's give him some big ears. This is the type of drawing that most people will get right. It's very simple to put together a head, at least a cartoon head drawing that's seen from the front like this. Side note, I love how the hair is like little mini croissants or something. I absolutely love that little touch. Okay. So we have that. And then of course, the eyebrows will just rest over the eyes like this. This represents a drawing that I think many of us can do, no problem. There's not a whole lot of complexity to it. It's just a bunch of circular or round shapes stacked up against each other. Let's just throw in the ear cartilage here. It always helps to give some depth to the ears. Okay. The thing that this drawing doesn't challenge you on is it doesn't really require any knowledge of planes to draw that. It's a roundish face drawn straight from the front. The planes are all foreshortened into the appearance of flatness. You can squeak by here without knowledge of the planes of the head. I see a lot of students who draw straight on poses of the face like this quite well. It's an appealing design, nice shapes, et cetera. And that's great. But let's just set this aside for a second. Where they will commonly falter is when you have to draw the head from a three quarter view and suddenly you're dealing with a whole new level of perspective. Here's the mistake that will happen. I'm going to purposely draw this incorrectly. They'll draw the shape like this, a similar shape. Then they'll put an eye here and an eye here and the nose here and the smile will be here. Of course, you've got your ears like this and you'll have your eyebrows over here. Let me just move those drawings here so I have a chance to fit in the hair, and I'll just rough this in. This is where people will start going wrong, and I'll just throw in some irises here. The problem is this face looks flat. It's just like a warped version of this face. That's due to the fact that if I were to draw a center line down this face, it doesn't appear to track any facial planes. It's still it's almost like a spherical face with features just pasted on, almost like they're stickers. You know, rather than being rooted in structure. And I think what happens is when you look at a face from the front view like this where it sort of can be drawn relatively flat, it tricks you into thinking that a three quarter view can also be drawn quite flat. Take a look at this little illustration by Mark Beam. This is a great example of how the planes of the head look in a three quarter view. Let's go over this with a mid line line. The brow comes out. Then right at the base of the nose, it's called the glabella. It goes in, then the bridge of the nose comes back out, and this character has quite a long nose, we'll go straight down. Then for the bulbous ball of the nose, it comes out and then down. Then the rest of the face is pretty round as it comes down to the chin. Now this character has a very stylized chin, almost like a Simpson's character. It goes quite a ways in, and then the chin comes out a little bit before wrapping around to the jaw. So that's the center line down the head. Let's imagine a similar center line or a cross contour down this part of the head. Again, the brow comes out, right where the eyebrow is, it actually comes out even more. There's a muscle there. There's also a bit of bone there. Then look at this, it plunges deep, deep down for the eye socket. If this character had no eyeballs and the eye socket were just like this, which is what our skull does. Suddenly, this is a deep crevice that goes in. But let me undo all that. Look at the eyeball back. We go deep in for the eye socket and then the eyeball is round, comes out like this. Then we have a little plane here for the bottom lid that comes out and then down. And then that cheek comes way out because we have cheek bones here. The cheek plane comes way out before tapering into a smoothish curve that mirrors this curve to go down. This is complex topology. This is just a cute little kid character. Let's quickly mark this up in a sketch. Let me just quickly block in the parameters, the perimeter of the drawing. This is how big I want the head to be. This is where the eye line is. Now, before even placing any features, I want to figure out the far contour. This is the brow. That brow is going to come out. Let's see it comes out like this. And there's that little bit of bone that comes out just where the eyebrow is. Then we plunge deeply into eye socket, which goes in, gracefully tapering back out. Gracefully in this case, because it's a child, chiseled mountain man would have more sculptural quality to the planes, like a sharper quality. But the planes would all be the same. It comes in for the eye socket, out for the cheek bone, and then we gradually come down for the cheek. Now we're hitting the jaw here. So he comes a bit more sharply in. I'll give this character a bit less of a Simpson's chin. I'll just give him more traditional chin right here, and then we come in for the jaw. What this contour is that I just drew is very much like the center line I'm drawing here. That line I just drew is very similar to that contour because that's what that contour describes in a three quarter view. Now here's the next big thing, the globe, the base of the nose, this part right in here. Because this is a three quarter view, this part is going to be compressed in space. It's going to be foreshortened. The base of the nose is not in the middle of the shape here, it's not here, it's over here. Because again, we're in a three quarter view. The globa comes in, this is a nice big V shape on this design, which is why I'm using it from Mark beam. It's a nice V shape here and it comes in. Let's keep track of our center line. The brow comes out. Jets out a little bit here. You don't have to include that, especially in a cartoon design, but Mark Beam did, and I like it. Then it comes in for the base of the nose, again, the globlla then the bridge of the nose comes out. Again, this characterize quite a long nose. We'll replicate that. Then we have the nice ball of the nose, which is pretty easy to draw. Is this bulbous shape, and we have this thing. Again, to complete our center line, we come down and we are coming out for a spherical shape for the nose. Let's stop there and put in the eyeball. Here's the critical thing that I've seen so many students miss. The eye is overlapped by the nose. Look at the character here. The nose line is here just to quickly rough it in. The eye is behind it. This eyeball is behind it. If we're just quickly draw it up here, here's the nose, the eye is behind it, and we have iris like this or something. It overlaps it. This is true on realistic faces and well designed cartoon faces. The eyeball is here. I'll draw the whole eyeball first, drawing it right behind the nose. I'm just ghosting it in, Then I can quickly get in the eye lid, the eyeball comes around like this. Then let's get he's got an upper eyelid that is partially closed. Let's get that in it describes the form of a sphere. Then this character's iris is looking down into the right like this. But again, let's arrase what we've ghosted. The eyeball is overlapped by the nose. Now let's move to the eyebrow. The eyebrow is a direct continuation from the globe up here and then wraps around that form like this. It appears like the eyebrow has to wrap around the head. Because that's what it's doing. The eyebrow is traveling behind the temporal ridge here where the temple is, and it's becoming invisible from this view because it's wrapping around the head. Let's immediately pivot now to the other eyeball. Whenever you have two things, two eyes, two arms, two legs. I do like to draw one then the other whenever possible. Sometimes in a gesture, I don't. But whenever I'm finally figuring out the final forms of the figure or the head, I do like to draw neighboring elements together. To eyes, let's draw them one after the other. It helps keep a rhythm. The eyebrows need to follow a rhythm that goes around like this. It follows the top contour of the eyebrow, around like this. This is something any good animator knows that the eyebrows have to follow, almost picture a unibrow. Picture like the entire eyebrow is a big unibrow. You want to be able to connect them. That's true with expressions, too, though I'm not going to quite get into expressions in this class. Again, it goes beyond the realm of a beginner class, but connect your eyebrows with a unibrow. This unibrow would dictate that this eyebrow would go here. Now, we want to know where the corner of the head is. Just think boxes. We went all over boxes in section two, Chapter two of the class. Where would this head be broken into a box? Well, I'll show you on the actual finished illustration here. It's right here. The box goes like this. This that I'm shading in is the side of the box. And the only reason I'm going around here is because I'm accounting for the eye socket. If I weren't accounting for the eye socket, it would be the side of the box would just be like this. What this means is we have to be aware in our head drawing. Going to undo that line, sorry. We have to be aware in our drawing where the temple is. You can just I'm pointing to my own head right now. You can't see it, but point to your own skull and find where your temporal ridge is. I might as well quickly bring up a picture of a skull. I'm talking about this area right here. Right where that bone is. You'll feel it. You'll feel a bit of a depression there where the skull is actually a bit hollow, and then you'll feel that bone coming out. Where is that? Because that's the side of the box. On my character here, that box is right there, and maybe I should actually do that with a purple line just because it's a block in line, not an actual line we're going to see on the head. Then we can use that to go down for the eye socket and this boy character has a very large eye socket design. Then we can come out down the chin down the cheek and it c terminates at the bottom of the chin here, right where the chin would be. This is the side of our box, and I'll just ghostly shade this in just so we know that's where the box is. Now I'll switch back to a dark line and I'll place the eyeball, the other eyeball. Be careful here. Don't put it, here's another common mistake. Do not put it too close to the nose. Because this nose, let's go back to the original drawing here. This nose has a plane. Obviously, here's the line of the ridge of the nose, But this part here that I'm shading, that's still nose. It's a big side plane that looks like this. If you were to imagine the nose as a box, again, imagining things as boxes is a critical skill in art, and I hope you've learned that from this class. Let's imagine the nose as a boxy form. Here's the front of the nose. The nostrils would be like here. The side of the nose is like this, the side of the box. It's a very common mistake to neglect the side plane of the nose. Do not do that. The side plane of the nose, in this case, rough it in like that, which means our eyeball needs to be beyond the side plane of the nose. Where the tear duct is right around here. Now, this character is not designed with tear ducts. A tear duct is one of the common things to eliminate in a cartoon design. You typically don't really need it and it will still communicate fine. If you were to imagine a tear duct, that tear duct would be just a little bit beyond the side plane of the nose. I'll throw in a tear duct in this character just for fun. Just to show you really. Then let's make sure that our bottom of the eyeballs line up, and then we can go around and we can have our other eyeball here. Then we have the eyelid. Again, let's line up the upper eyelids with just a ghosted plumb line really, and there we go. Then we have our nice eyebrow shape, which wraps around the temple like this. Around. Great. This is looking very dimensional, which is what we want. I really like this character designed by Mark Beam because he's really emphasizing structure. Now we have a gentle tapering mid line toward the chin, describing the muzzle of the mouth and then a bit out for the chin. No matter where you put the mouth. This character again, has that Simpson's mouth way down there. I'm going to put it somewhere here in a more traditional spot. The mouth can be drawn with a basic line. If you want a lower lip, you can put that in. The lower lip, just make sure that the lower lip appears to come out, then back down. And then that chin. Again, you can put it wherever you want, but generally speaking, the chin should come out a little bit. In the mark beam character, it's a very stylized one. I'll make mine a bit more traditional, and then we go up here for the jaw. Now, let me just erase this nose, so I have room to draw the ears. The ear is a fantastically fun shape in this character that I just butchered. Let's do that better. Let's just get this cartilage in the ear lobe here and then It's an S curve. It's for a basic ear lobe design or cartilage of the ear design. You can shade this in because it's a recess, and then the side of the head flares out like that, which I really like. Of course, let's plumb line our way to the other ear. This would be the top of the other ear. Let's get those in line, and there's a nice bit of perspective on this box. We have the other ear let's plumb line the bottom roughly. We need to drop that a bit lower. Then we go like that, and we can shade this in. For the top of the head, I always like to define where the hair line would be, then this character's hair is almost like a Bart Simpson type of thing. There's a lot of Simpsons parallels with this character, which I didn't really realize until just now, actually. It's almost like a child Bart Simpson and spiky hair like that. The hair could be anything. If this character had longer hair, you would keep the hair line in place. You would just raise how high the hair goes. Maybe it's something like this, however high you wanted it to be. This character doesn't have any sideburns, but the sideburns can come in down to the ear like that. There you go. This is a more properly drawn head. I should say more accurately drawn head. Obviously, there are no rules in art. You don't have to observe structure. But one of the main things that will make your art look professional or let's just say beyond amateur, is if you have structure and then you're playing with structure, that's something that an amateur artist generally won't do. They will default to flatness. Flatness is unfortunately what happens when you don't have the knowledge. That's the default position. I think we generally want to avoid that. All right. So back to the Luca example, we now should have very recognizable midlines. Let me just start this one again, actually. The hair line would be up here hidden by this tuft of hair. But we go out for the brow. Gently tapering down for the glabella. In this character, it's a smooth straight line all the way down the ridge of the nose, going out for the bulbous part of the nose, there's a plane break here. This is the underside of the nose, so it goes down. Then let's just ignore the fact that there's a mouth there. Because again, we're just analyzing structure here, not really facial expression. This line is a nice tapering round, not spherical, per se, but let's call it a flattened sphere. Let's throw a midline down this part of the head, again, out for the brow. Then right where the eyebrow is, we plunge into eye socket. Now this is a much narrower eye socket than the mark beam design. It doesn't go in as far, but it does go in. Let me just erase that for a second. It goes in for the eye socket and then round for the eyeball, of course. Then there's just a little ridge for the lower eyelid, goes out then down. Then it goes dramatically out for the cheekbone. This is one of the most dramatic planes of the head is that cheekbone. You can see it tracking its way along the head. It's quite a formidable plane. You can look at it on this character too. It's a box shape that points up. Then this part of the box points downward. But anyway, getting back to this character, cheekbone, we go out and then gradual taper just like this curve down to the lower jaw. The outer contour, just like we saw in the marked beam drawing is essentially a drawing of the cross contour here that we just did. We go out for the brow, gently in, in this case, for the eye socket, but in nonetheless, then out for the cheekbone pretty dramatically. One of the most dramatic plane changes again is that cheekbone. Then we gently turn straight and then turn under for the jaw. Let me just get rid of those lines and we'll start fresh here. I want you to also observe the line of the nose here. Let's go from the edge of the eyebrow down the ridge of the nose here. And you notice in this case, it's a much more soft form than the mark beam one was, but it does overlap the eye ever so subtly. This is barely a three quarter view. It's somewhere between a front and three quarter. If that head were turned more, it would overlap the eye more. The eye overlaps where the ridge of the nose is and then below the eye is where the ball of the nose comes out. Then let's look at this eye here. First, let's identify where the other ridge of the nose is. It's about here. We have that glabella part right there. Then we have that nice side plane of the nose, which in this case is designed to be a bit thinner, but it is still there. Then just beyond that is the eyeball or the other eyeball here. So hopefully this illustrates how this character is drawn exactly the same way as the Mark Beam kid character we just looked at. It's just the shapes are different. Switching now to this character here, which is the guy we started this section with. Let's identify another part of the form, the side of the box, this temple region right here. It's where the eyebrow breaks, the angle of the eyebrow breaks. That's probably the most reliable way to identify the side plane of the head, is this point right here. It goes out, then it follows the eyebrow down because this identifies the eye socket. And then we gently taper out for the cheek. This is the side plane of the head. If you wanted to more dramatically light this character, with a more emphasized light shadow relationship, You could simply shade this plane darker, and this is shading the side of the box and you could see it looks accurate because we're observing structure. You could do the same thing for the eye socket. If we wanted to deepen that eye socket, you could just shade this in because we know it goes downward, and I'll even shade in this part of the eye socket. Leaving that v shape though for the globa. See what I'm doing here? I'm leaving this v right here for the globe because that part goes up. If we were to draw a horizontal midline, it goes like this, out then up for the globe and then down for the eye socket. Again, this character is very round. He's a very young boy. He's going to have smooth features. That's true of real humans as well. Babies, toddlers, and children all have very smooth features. Rigid planes don't develop until at least teenage years, if not later. Then we have this kind of thing. I've made this character feel more plainer and sculptural this way. I've deviated from the Pixar soft design, but the shading looks accurate, like the forms of the character still look accurate. If you were designing this character, it might be wise to start rigid like this and then simply soften the edges to taste. Just to emphasize the cheekbones, I'll take one of the lighter values up here. I'll just put this in where the cheekbones cause the form to jut out. Then I'll take the slightly darker half tone value. And put it here to represent the gentle flow of the cheek. Again, what I'm doing here is I'm stripping this character down to the bare essentials of structure. This is the structure you need to know in order to then improvise from it. By the way, the term structure and plane changes refer to the same thing. The plane changes are the structure. This is the form of the head. We can apply this value to the top of the nose and then here is where the bottom of the nose is. There we go. We could also take this shadow value here and apply it under the chin, where that head finally turns under and meets the neck in shadow here. We just blend these two values together because it is a very soft character. Just to be fully accountable, we get a mid line in. Let's do it across the middle of the head. We go out for the brow, in for the glabella, which tapers down the entire ridge of the nose out for the ball of the nose, then down for the bottom of the nose, and then gently around to the chin. This part of the head out for the brow, right where the eyebrow is, we go deeply in for the eye socket. If we were just imagining the eye socket, we would continue that as a concave shape. If we were going out for the eyeball, we would go out this way. Remember the eyeball sits inside the eye socket, and then out dramatically for the cheekbone and then gently down. This structure is ubiquitous. Every character, every person you've ever seen in your life has that structure. It just logically follows then that you want to implement that structure into your designs, be they cartoony or realistic? It doesn't matter. That means the profile view of the character is going to be extremely important because it's really going to show off those plane changes. Here's how big I want the head to be on my page, and I'll have the head facing this way. The eye line will be about here. Here we go. The brow comes out. Now the angle of that brow coming out is up to you. That's the design of your character. I'm just inventing this as I go. I have no idea what this is going to look like. But if you know the structure, then you at least know your structure will be right. The brow comes out. We go down for the glabella a little bit. Then we go out for the nose, and let's just round off the bottom of the nose about there. Then we know that the rest of the face gently tapers down in a flattened sphere. There we go. The mouth is going to be somewhere in here. Generally speaking, the lower lip will come out a little bit like this. This looks like a female character now because of that, the thickness of the lip anyway. Then the lower lip can be a little bit of a bump that comes out there. Then the form goes in and gently out for the chin. Again, that chin can be shaped however you want, and then we go up for the jaw. And, you know, I'll show you depending on where you put these features, it really makes a huge difference in the design, and that's where you can spend days, literally, iterating where things go and how exaggerated the shapes are. Let's make this chin narrower. We're playing jazz with structure right now. This is maybe a nice, more pleasing shape than I had before, maybe. The nostril would be by the way located somewhere here because again, this is the bottom of the nose as if the nose were simple box shape. Now, where's the eye go? This is where a lot of beginner artists will get it wrong. They'll put the eye too close to the front of the head. Remember, there is a eye socket here. It usually is helpful for me to imagine the glabella. The ridge of the nose would be here. The glabella would come up. Again, it's very narrow in a profile view. That means the upper eyebrow is here and it comes around. Now, where is the corner of the box? Well, again, in profile, it's going to be about here. Where does that eyebrow break, at the corner. Then we use that side of the box information to draw to track through the eye socket and down the cheek to the edge of the chin like this. Then we want to also account for the side plane of the nose. What I do is I take a point from the base of the eyebrow right here. Come in for the eye socket, just like this curve did, we come in almost mirroring it, then down and we meet the wing of the nose there. This is all nose. That leaves this space for the eye, and that eye can be, again, you can have 1 million different eye shapes here. But let's just do a basic thing. I'm just improvising this. It's probably not going to be the most interesting design because I'm just free handing it without even iterating. There we go. Let's make sure we have a little bit of a ridge there for maybe the lower eyelid. If there's an upper eyelid, we might have some thickness to it there. And now I'm realizing that the brow might be a bit short. The eyes generally on a human head, by the way, are located halfway down. It is another common mistake to make the eyes located too high up the head. A common beginner design will put the eyes a third of the way up the head like this. This is a trap I still fall into all the time. You can see it here. I wasn't planning this drawing, so I accidentally put the eyes a bit too high. Now, there are no rules, remember, it's okay to do that. You can do whatever you want, but in this case, maybe I'll just take this, bring this down a little bit, maybe just take this, bring this down a little bit. And you notice in these adjustments, I'm still not harming the structure. The structure is still intact. Now I can make the brow travel a little further before meeting the hair line. And then that head can wrap around. The ear, by the way, is generally located halfway back to the cranium. If we just ghosted in a plum line that's about halfway, the jaw would come up and the ear is somewhere in here. Then that cranium goes back and we go right into the neck, which is something like this. Again, from here, you build the hair. I like to build the hair, at least initially as a separate consideration of shape because after all, the hair is just something that grows on top of the head. It's not part of the head structure, really, because the hair can do anything from no hair at all to Fabio hair or something. But the hair just builds itself off of the main form. Again, just like anything else, hair shapes very dramatically. This is where you might look at a fashion book or something and be inspired by modern trends of hairstyles or something. Then if you quickly wanted to apply some boxy shading to this, simply take this side plane and go ahead and shade it in. Put all of this in tone really. The hair can be even a bit of a darker tone, I'm just doing this very messily, but that's okay. I can just go back in and clean it up a little bit. We know that the eye socket goes inwards, that's the bottom of a box which can be shaded. The cheekbone comes out. We got to make sure that this part here comes out. That part is in light. This is assuming by the way, the light is coming from anywhere above, either directly above or somewhere off to the left or right, as long as it's coming from above the face, you're going to get shading like this. Because we're used to seeing light coming from above, be it lighting from indoors via light bulbs or outdoors via the sun or the skylight, generally speaking, we are lit from above. There we go. We have some basic shading happening. I always do like to apply a bit of a ambient occlusion value, which we saw in the perspective chapter a little bit, under the chin here where it meets the top of the neck. This area can be a bit darker. Because that chin is just barely turning under like formwise almost like a sphere turning under, you can extend this value a little bit out toward the chin. Then from here, that's your basic structure. Then from here, it's just a matter of adjusting edges. How soft do you want these forms to appear? If you want them soft, very soft like the luca stuff, the Pixar stuff we just looked at, just make these edges extremely soft and start blending things. This is obviously not an advanced shading guide, but just in general, you can start adjusting your edges here. Generally speaking, I like to keep the brow edges on the harder side and the cheekbone and cheek and chin edges on the softer side. As a very final step, you can put even some half tones. Half tones being values that are closer to the light. Typically, the side plane of the nose is in half tone. The lower lip can get a bit of a half tone. Underneath the lower lip can sometimes even get a shadow, just a tiny bit of shadow here, depending on how steep your planes are in that area. If you want, you can finish it off with just a couple little reflections in the eyes, little highlights. Again, this is a structural template that you can use for any design. 28. Head Drawing Primer Continued: Okay. Here's a fun little character designed by character cube on Instagram, a highly recommended follow, by the way, just super clean form and lines and shapes. Let's break this down structurally. The brow in this case comes in, but it's still out compared to the eye socket. What we have is the brow coming in and then jutting out for that part right where the eyebrow is. Then let's just ballpark. This is a cross contour for where the eyebrow is. The upper brow comes in ironically, then out. The globe of the nose is about here, and we've even got some exaggerated wrinkle shapes as the frowed brow shows off where the glabella is. Then we have an eyebrow here. This is not going to be an exact copy of the drawing. This is a structural analysis. Let's follow that una brow thing all the way around. Now we know where this eyebrow shape is, and we know where it breaks. In this case, character cube his name is Kenny, by the way. Kenny is playing with form by having the eyebrow angle break this way. But the eyebrow angle still does break. We know the side of the box is about there. Now, we're looking slightly down at this character. We're not really going to see the eye socket taper in. That part is hidden by the brow, but we will see where the cheekbone starts coming out. It comes out here. This is a more gnarled chiseled character. In the Pixar example, we might have a cheek that looked more smooth like that, but this is a gary character. We have a sharp edge for the cheekbone and a sharp edge for the jaw as it changes to the jaw there. The nose here is equally pointy, that ridge makes a C curve. We don't have a friendly bulbous part of the nose, it's just a sharp curve here. Now, let's get the eyes in, classic overlap of the eye, just like we saw in the Mark Beam example and in the Luca example as well. Make sure we get a nice heavy overlap there. It'll make it look like we have heavy inset eye sockets, which is very suitable for a character like this. Remember, even the iris is overlapped by the nose. When I draw that is in there, I'm basically drawing a half moon shape. To indicate the overlap. We have a very wide plane for the side of the nose. We want to make sure we respect that as we block in now the other eyeball. Let's make sure we plumb line something here to make sure our sizes of the eyeballs are kept intact and we'll throw the iris in there. There we go. We have a nice baggy design for the lower eyelid and same over here. It's a little less pronounced over here, but we have another baggy eyelid there, which is great to communicate a aged or gnarled character, maybe. We even have some crows feet over here. If we wanted to, we could right now shade in the part of the ye socket here that we know goes down dramatically, goes inward dramatically. We could shade that in. Even this nose is very faceted. We could probably shade in this part here connecting almost the unibrow shape. That is something that happens a lot with very rigid noses. As you get that shading right under the glabella there. Now, if this were a more human face, we would have this design. That would be a more human version of this character. But this is a ogre character. Why not have some fun and Mr. Character cube does that by flaring out this shape. Instead of that's a very nice mouth he's drawn, I'm just going to simplify it down to its basic structure. It comes in for the chin and we have this shape here and it comes up for the jaw. And that mouth is say over here. I'm just going to keep the mouth closed. Again, this is more of a structural study. We've got our brow, which is coming in, although the entire brow form is still pushed out, but the surface of the brow comes in, which is a fun little change in structure, but still respecting the fact that the brow is further out than the eye sockets. Then we have that little part that comes out where the eyebrow is in for the glabella, down the ridge of the nose, and that bulb is part of the nose is non existent. It's just built right into the ridge of the nose, which I think helps with the unfriendly look. Then even though we have a pretty exaggerated muzzle here, it still is a smooth curvy form. The structure is still there. It's just ccatured. He's pushed the structure further out more out this way. And then there is some more fun being had with the chin shape here. It's more like this nice fun little curve that almost comes to a point right here. It's like this. Then you can't forget the little hairs coming off the guy. Notice how those hairs do not repeat in negative space or length. It's a nice variety there that this artist has obviously built into their muscle memory. You can tell when an artist has done that because all their shapes are just always appealing. Now here's a little fun thing, another deviation of structure. The temple bone and cheek bone is actually drawn because this is such a gnarled character. So we know that there is a cheekbone plane that should point up here, as we've already seen. That line is literally drawn in here in this design. It's included. It goes like this, and that line tracks its way up to the temple. And that line is shown in the character design. This is a bit of a deviation because on a human character, you wouldn't have the line there. The line would be here, where the eyebrow breaks, as I've shown you in the other examples. But again, this is where artists can play with structure. But that's the key. You are improvising and playing based on structure. You are very rarely ignoring it. You can choose to leave parts out if you want or choose to exaggerate things. That's all fair game. In my opinion, your choices should be based on sound structure. Because then even if you choose to leave something out, at least then you know what you're leaving out. If you're drawing and not even knowing what you're leaving out, then I guarantee you're going to leave out the wrong thing because you just won't know any better. Then to complete the sketch, we have the cranium shape, which even this is a nice, the way this curve goes is fun and we have something like that. Just make sure that if we ghosted this line through, it can connect down here and that would flow into a neck which doesn't exist in the original, but the neck would do something like this, I would assume or depends how wide the neck is maybe it's this wide. Who knows? This is where the design aspect comes in. This course largely is not about design. It's about the precursor to design, the fundamentals you need in order to design well. That's why I find it so fun to look at artists like Kenny here Character Cube on Instagram and Mark Beam and the Myriad of others. If you know the structure you're looking at, it's fun to ask yourself, how did this artist design this? What are they changing? What are they not changing? I'll shadow under the nose. You could once again use that side of the box line, which is literally drawn into this design to get a side plane of the head here. You can almost always shade the upper part of the neck darker as that's a shadow being cast by the overhanging jaw above it. You can get the recessed part of the ear here. If we're just finishing off this midline, this wraps around the head right in here somewhere. There we go. That's where tools now liquefy can come in. Because I have the structure there, it's totally a viable option for me to start pulling things around. If anybody here is sculpted in clay, this is something you do with clay all the time. You can soften the clay with heat if you're using an oil based clay or something and just quickly move overall proportions around. That's what I'm doing. I'm moving shapes, moving proportions, but I am not changing the structure. If I can just do something like this, the structure is unchanged or at least the structure is still intact. I'm changing the shapes. Which certainly changes the look of the character. Like here, I can give him more of a Frankenstein brow. That's fine. It looks more like Hellboy or something now, but the structure is still there. Liquefy is a great tool for changing your shape design, but it's not a good tool for changing your structure. That needs to be drawn by you. Then you can do some fun stuff like that and arrive at different iterations of your design. All right. Just wanted to close this section with a beautiful life drawing by one of my teachers, Nick Collision, believe it or not, that is a five minute drawing. Nick was and is incredibly fast. He is actually the guy who instilled the value of quick drawings in me. That is the benefit that happens to your art when you can capture poses very quickly. Anyway, I just really like the utility of the structure of the head here, how he quickly captures a head in a five minute drawing. You can see underneath the finish line, he started with a basic egg shape over which you can build hair or something, hair going down this way. Then all we do is carve the structure into it. We know the brow comes out. The eyes because this is a human, let's make sure it's halfway. Then we come in for the eye socket, come out, nice, gracefully round cheek and chin, and we come up and then we can maybe alter the hair line to come down and meet the jaw right there. Nick shows us where the globe is because we're in a three quarter view, he shows us this one side. We know the glabella is connected to the eyebrows, you can just throw that in. Then you can imagine the unibrow thing. Nick did not draw that, but you can imagine it, and then we know the other eyebrow is somewhere here. Now, where the angle breaks is covered by the hair. Then from here, it's almost like a scribbled bit of dark representing the eyes. You can even shade in the eyebrows the eye sockets. In a quick figure drawing, this is a great way to lay in the head. You don't have to draw the whole ridge of the nose. You got to make sure this curve connects to a phantom ball of the nose. You can draw that whole thing if you want. Okay. I if you drew the whole thing, it would look like that. Nick would often leave out this line and just ballpark where the bottom of the nose is. He didn't do it here, but sometimes he would even just shade in the bottom plane of the nose, just like that. It gives the head a quick sense of depth. You can do this in your finished illustrations, too, of course. Just Nick was a master of these quick drawings and he would put this in all the time. Then from here, we can have that imaginary line coming down for the roundness of this part of the head. You know where the mouth is. The mouth is generally halfway on that line, by the way. And you can block in with a thick dark shape the middle line between the lips, often putting a bit of a dark accent around the corners of the mouth right there. Generally speaking, the corner of the mouth will line up with the edge of the eye on both sides. Then let's make sure the chin comes out. If you don't observe the chin coming out, it'll look like too weak of a chin. It doesn't look structurally sound anymore. So make sure that chin comes out enough, and then we can taper back in for the jaw. Then the neck in a three quarter view anyway, we'll usually poke out somewhere where the chin is somewhere around here. Then you can find the cylinder for the neck. You can find the pit of the neck, which is somewhere around here. Then from there, you can continue landmarking your features. Obviously, me talking through this, this took probably a couple of minutes to draw. But if you're just focus on the drawing, you could probably indicate a head in your life drawings in a matter of seconds using this structural information. As a last step, you might want to just mass in a tone for the hair that always makes it look nice and graphic and popping. I like to put in shadows under the chin. Sometimes I'll even just toss in a shadow across the globe as well. All be careful that could make your character look a bit too oh, as we've seen. Sometimes a quick half tone here for the side plane of the nose. If you really wanted to, you could throw the whole thing in tone. What that will allow you to do now is pick out lighter planes. Well, choose any plane that points up. The bulb is part of the nose points up a little bit. The cheek bone can get a bit of a lighter tone, this side as well, and you can get some structure this way. Play with your edges, of course, to make them appropriately soft. You could do this with a chalk pencil if you're doing it traditionally, or obviously digitally, you can just use a soft brush. In this case, he hair line is pretty high. The head is turning up legitimately facing up toward the sky here, so you might get a bit of a lighter tone for her head there. That's pretty much all the areas you want to put lighter tones in. If you want to go one step further and add highlights, the cheek bone often does catch a bit of a highlight. The tip of the nose often catches a bit of a highlight, the lower lip can catch one. Even the corner of the mouth can catch one. This is how if you had 10 minutes say to do a life drawing or not just a life drawing if you're doing your own illustration work or something. These are the places I would go to to find detail and rendering information and things like that, gesturing down to find the pose, but I'm not going to focus on the pose itself. All right. There is a quick primer on heads. I hope that helped. If you want deep dives into understanding the human head, you can check out my class called Understanding and painting the head. With that, we move on to the final section of this course. 29. 3-Point Perspective Demo: The previous chapter, I did a one point and two point perspective drawing. I did not do a three point. Let's do that. In this three point perspective drawing, we will be looking up. Just because in the previous chapter, I covered looking down and then said, looking up is the reverse of that, which is true. But I figured I'd go ahead and actually draw one to show you how I set this up. What I've done is I've just made a bunch of parallel lines on a layer, and I've just duplicated those lines to make a big layer of lines that are all parallel and vertical, and then I will go ahead and distort this. Every digital painting software you have will have this capability. I'm using Photoshop here. In photoshop, it's called the distort tool. So essentially, what I'm doing here is I'm defining where these lines eventually merge, and I'm putting them pretty high off the page because I want this to be a pretty normal camera angle, something you could shoot with your phone or something you could shoot with a normal lens, which, like we discussed previously, will tend to put the horizon line, and therefore, vanishing point pretty far off the page in a three point perspective. Now I've made another layer. I should have just kept my straight lines from the other one and just rotated them, but I'm recreating another set of straight lines, these ones horizontal, of course, and this will be one side of the three point perspective grid vanishing this way. Now, because we're looking up, I still want the viewer to be placed on the ground. It's like we're standing on the ground looking up, and I want that ground to be in frame at the very bottom. That means the horizon line is going to be way at the bottom of the page somewhere around here. When I distort my grid into place, I'll just make sure I'm placing the horizontal lines appropriately. Now I've just duplicated that layer and mirrored it across to the right, and now I'm just moving where those lines merge. I want this vanishing point to be closer to frame as we saw in Chapter four. Now, I just have to be careful as I further distort this grid that I don't change where the horizon line is. The horizontal version of these green lines has to be in the same spot as the horizontal red lines because that is the horizon line where everything appears flat. That's what I'm doing now going slowly to ensure that. I could have just drawn a horizon line, by the way. I didn't because I have these principles in mind, and I think at this point, you can do that as well. Although don't rush into that. I think if this is new information for you, you absolutely should draw the horizon line. Okay, so that's it. I'm starting to sketch within this environment. It's really nice having a real dense grid like that because I feel like it's almost like riding a bike with training wheels. I almost can't get the perspective lines wrong because I'm always within a few millimeters of a reference point. Again, because that grid I made is so dense. The downside of that is it can be difficult to improvise, I find because there's always a sense of rigidity as I'm drawing within this environment. But this is the exercise. This is why it's study and practice. You have to find out what is most comfortable for you. Some of you out there might really really enjoy having this dense grid always, no matter what you're doing. If you're like me, you probably enjoy drawing with fewer reference grid lines. But for the sake of showing you how to practice in this class, I do recommend trying this. I'm drawing a castle, by the way. Castles are excellent practice. Not only are they cool, but they have a lot of multi leveled forms to them, like spies at different levels and multiple floors, different sizes of turrets and walls. There are a good subject to see if your perspective is tracking from top to bottom and left to right. So on my other screen, I just Google searched for castle reference, and I'm just pulling ideas from those images, riffing on the reference. Now, the actual reference I'm looking at is not really important, and that's because I'm not copying any one piece. What's important is how I'm conforming all my shapes to this three point perspective. By the way, you're seeing this drawing progress at two times the speed. The other thing I happen to like about castles, at least when it comes to perspective study, is that you can practice your ellipse drawing as well. A lot of these spies and rooftops are hexagonal or octagonal or even just round. But in any case, you can practice how you're drawing those ellipses as they progress moving away from the horizon line. The ellipse at the top of the frame will be much broader than the ellipse nearer to the horizon line at the bottom of the frame. And we saw that in every form of perspective, 1.2 point and now three point. In three point perspective, it might be the most exaggerated, though, because we are looking up, which means the physical distance traveled from the horizon line to the top of the frame in this drawing is going to be a lot larger than if we were not looking up. That's one of those other things, you really don't need a perspective grid to keep in mind. Once you become experienced, things like the differences in ellipse curvatures, you can just put that information down with no grid and it'll start looking like perspective. In fact, a perspective grid doesn't actually help you draw ellipses because ellipses are round and a perspective grid is rectilinear. But having the grid there does fill the space with the illusion of depth, which I suppose does help draw the ellipse. Or at least it helps put you in the right mind frame to help you solve that particular puzzle. I'm just roughing in a little stairway there. I'm imagining the two rails of the stairway converging at that top horizon line. It's so far up there that those stairs are almost parallel lines, but not quite. There is just a tiny bit of convergence there to help sell the perspective. Now, if you feel that drawing a castle like this is beyond your current skill level, then what you can do and still get a lot of efficiency out of your practice is just reduce all these forms to boxes. Just make a castle out of boxes. Don't put rooftops or spies or anything like that. Just make it all boxes and maybe the odd cylinder here and there to practice your ellipses, too. Doing that removes any pressure of designing something. Your goal there is just to make it look like the forms are existing in a cohesive three D space. I find that students can often get down on themselves because they don't like the way their art looks on a design level. Like, Oh, it's not a cool concept that I just did. That is certainly a valid level of criticism. But oftentimes what I see as a teacher is the fundamentals are not even there in the first place to make something that even has a chance of looking cool. Of course, that's where this entire class comes in. I'm hoping to give you the fundamentals you need to build cool stuff. I hope as you're watching me draw this and as you hopefully do your own practice like this, that this sketch is really nothing more than an application of the fundamentals. If there are any details in there, they're just quickly sketched in, not even pixel accurate, not even close to that. It's the larger forms that are accurate in perspective, in this case, the three point perspective grid. Notice now by the way, I finally gotten to the horizon line level, which in this case is basically where the castle sits on the ground. And all those lines are just flat. I've just sped up the video to about four times the speed to just give you a sense of how I'm fleshing out this area. The big forms are there. You can see me use those tricks like the X tricks, finding the middle of a plane, the middle of a wall in this case. Then using that midline, I just draw to the left and draw to the right to find those arches. Now, when I do draw to the left and draw to the right, that's eye bald. The midline is not eye bald, that's discovered with the x, but then from there, it's eyebad. Notice, by the way, I'm flipping my drawing around, flipping horizontally. That's a very common design trick. It helps your eyes see the image as if it were fresh to you. It's just a great way to spot mistakes very quickly. Not only mistakes, but things like repetition or poor shape design or bad design choices in general. Just think of it as a good way to get fresh eyes on the picture. Another quick little trick and maybe one that's self evident. You see all those arches on the ground level. I want those to be the same height. All I'm doing there is I'm looking at one of them and seeing which perspective line the top point hits and just making sure that all the others are aligned with that same point on that same perspective line as it tracks from left to right through the scene. That'll keep all those arches, the same height. Another little tidbit on three point perspective, both looking up and looking down. The perspective grid takes on the largest angles closer to the sides of the frame. You see now that I've got forms blocked in at both the left and the right of the shot, those are the most angled. The lines in the middle of the frame, those lines can almost be mistaken as parallel. They just look vertical. In fact, there is a line somewhere in the middle of the shot that is vertical. Lesson there is if you choose to do a three point perspective, you might as well make use of it and you do that by including elements on the sides of the frame that really show off the meat of that three point perspective. Otherwise, you might as well just do a two point perspective, which is totally fine, by the way. Three point perspective is not better than two point perspective, two point perspective is not better than one point perspective. Different ways through which you can filter the illusion of depth onto the page. The key point being they all have convincing depth. From there, it just becomes a flavor thing. What does your illustration want or need to best express itself and get across the story or the mood or whatever it is you're shooting for. Questions like that are what you branch into. When you're evolving beyond a beginner, suddenly the tools are there for expression. That is the tools become a means to an end. When you're a beginner, the tools are ends in themselves. And that's fine. You need to master them first. The tools at first, should be the B all end all. That's going to really allow them to sink in. But then there becomes a point where it's like, Well, what am I going to do with all these tools? In fact, I remember talking to Nick Koislian about this about 18 years ago now. Nick was my first ever drawing teacher. You saw his work in the previous video there about head drawing. Anyway, he was just telling me that the hardest part of becoming an artist is not the initial studying and mastery of the tools. It's after you have those tools in place where you have to sit down and say, well, what do I have to give to the world? That's a much harder question. And one that, honestly, no teacher can really help you with. The only thing a teacher can responsibly help you with is getting you to the point where you are ready to make that kind of decision. Anyway, back to the drawing at hand here. Another great thing about castles is there is so much room for overlap, one little vertical piece in front of another. I have three or four layers going here, and I don't mean photoshop layers. I mean, layers of castle stacked upon other layers of castle. Castles just have a way of designing themselves. They're a fun subject. In the end, you have what looks like a very complex drawing. But it's really not. It's just adherence to the perspective grid and then layering forms, one thing in front of another. By the way, I have no idea if this is architecturally sound, probably it's not. But I don't let that be a barrier for you. In films like Lord of the Rings, you have waterfalls coming from literally nowhere and people buy it because it looks cool. But again, whether things look cool or not at this stage, when you're a beginner or an experienced beginner just learning, something looking cool is a design consideration. We don't want to preoccupy ourselves too much with design yet. It's all about fundamentals. Does the picture work in perspective? That's the main question. All right. To finish this off, I'm going to add some basic shading, as I've done previously in this class. This is on a new layer set to multiply mode. I'm just using a simple soft ish marker brush with one value, you can see I've picked a medium gray there. My technique here is to simply imagine this castle as a series of boxes, which is really not a far stretch from what it is, and then pick one face of the box. In this case, I'll pick the right side of the box. And shade it in. I'll leave the line work intact. Again, this is on a multiply layer, which doesn't affect the lines. When I apply the value, I'll try and apply the brush as evenly pressured as possible. I don't want really too many minor variations. I just want this to be graphic and clean. Things are either in light or they're in shadow, no in between. That's a basic shading approach and really all we need for a piece like this. Even professional and more advanced painters will use this technique to begin their work. Then from there, they'll add all kinds of little subtle values and variations, like half tones and things like that. In this case, we're just not even going to bother with that, but you can achieve a pretty convincing sunlight effect just with two values. In fact, back in my earlier days, for the longest time, I would carry around a physical sketchbook with a black ink pen and one marker, kind of a medium gray marker like I'm using here. With just those two drawing tools, you could capture sunlight. And by the way, the shaded areas that are diagonal, these parts here, hose are simply cast shadows. All I'm doing there is picking a direction for the sunlight and making sure that where I do choose to put cast shadows that those diagonals are consistent. I don't want you to get distracted by things like cast shadows. Not in this class. You notice I didn't really cover cast shadows in this class. I don't consider them part of a beginner's drawing curriculum. They're distracting. That's in the realm of painting. Now, it is a fundamental of painting, but it's painting nonetheless. Let's get the drawing, the draftsmanship down, and then you can move on to that stuff. I have lots of other classes as well as YouTube videos that covers the basics of painting like that. I feel like what we're doing here is understanding drawing from the inside out. It's way less about how to draw a castle or how to draw the human figure and much more about understanding the form of things, their three dimensionality, the shapes that those three dimensional forms produce, and how to tie all that together with gesture, or in this case, tying it together with a perspective grid. I personally feel quite lucky to have been introduced to this method of learning how to draw because I feel like this gives you the potential to draw anything. You can go wherever your interests take you and apply the principles and techniques accordingly. I mean, I've been doing this stuff now for 22 years and I have yet to find a subject where this stuff doesn't apply. Anyway, I finished my shading pass and I have flattened that shading pass onto my line layer. Now I'm just looking at areas that feel blank or unresolved or maybe even incorrect and taking some time to address those things now before I forever close this drawing. I guess maybe that's a good thought to leave you with for this course. Try your best to consider your practices as disposable. The lessons you learn are indisposable, but the stuff you produce. As one of my friends once put it, draw into the garbage can, make mistakes, have successes, it doesn't matter. Just get the mileage in with constant practice and targeted practice, and then a failure is really as valuable, if not more valuable than a success. Everything you produce then will be a stepping stone on your way. For me, it's always been more about that than trying to produce something to post on Instagram. 30. Outro: Congratulations. You made it through the course. The tools we just went over for the last eight or so hours. They can sustain your growth for years. They did for me. I actually didn't get into painting or anything like that until about three years into my drawing journey. And for those three years, I just used the tools we just learned about. Now, you don't have to wait that long. In fact, I think you should get into things like painting and illustration and finished work. But when you study, I do recommend practicing these fundamentals separately, rather than trying to study them while making something finished. To that end, I've put together a little PDF document, you'll find it with the class, and it contains several different daily study regimens that you can follow along if you want some prescribed study. The regimens are pretty heavy on figure drawing because figure drawing tends to be the best gateway for every type of drawing. If you can do figures well, chances are you'll be able to do many other things quite well too. So check out that PDF, and of course, don't be afraid to replay chapters you've already watched, probably several times, because if you're like me, you'll find new little nuggets along the way with each successive viewing. All right. Thank you again for checking out this class. I truly hope you've enjoyed it, and that it helps your drawing journey, and I want to wish you all the best with your work.