Transcripts
1. Introduction : When you think about
drawing texture, what do you think of? Many artists might think
of painstaking detail. Spending hours drawing
every single blade of grass or every single
leaf on a tree. Often that makes the work
look amateurish or overdone. It might take hours to
complete that kind of drawing. There's another way of adding texture to your
drawings with pen. And it's paying
close attention to how we perceive texture
in the real-world. The key to drawing texture is knowing which parts we perceive, which elements of the
texture on noticeable. And that's what we
can focus on to make them look realistic
and authentic. I'm Sam, I'm a pen
and ink artists living in Halliburton, Ontario. I draw fancy landscapes
in some real ones too. And I've drawn stuff
for private clients, record labels and more. Texture is central to my work. I find it a special challenge to see how I can incorporate textures from a real-world
into a black and white medium. I don't have color to work with. It's just line, shape
and shading that has to evoke the perception
of a texture like grass, like brick, like a cloud. In this class, you'll learn how paying attention to detail, darkness, and distance to textures changes how
they can be drawn. You'll see how simply
fading out textures or adding less detail can give the impression of distance
and make your work look more professional,
authentic, and immersive. Then you'll get a chance to
put these ideas to the test. You'll learn how to draw four different types of textures. And then at the end, you
get a chance to put them altogether in one final
drawing of your choosing. This class isn't structured
to be a masterclass or painstakingly
long texture expos. Instead, it's just
simple techniques and tricks and tips that I use and hopefully
will help you be more confident when
approaching texture. It's perfect for
people who may have done some pen
drawing in the past, but feel unsure about how
to use pens to effectively craft textures and then implement that into
their drawings. More experienced pen
artists might benefit from a chance to question how they incorporate texture
into their work. Texture is what gives
our world dimension. And it does that to
your art as well. Learning how to be smart about texture and learning
how we perceive textures in the
world will help you create immersive drawings
that feel a little bit more authentic and take
a lot less time to complete then drawing every
single blade of grass. It's a challenge, but
it's really fun too. And I'm excited to
start drawing with you. Ready to go? Let's get drawing.
2. Project Overview : So this class is structured
in three different parts. First, we'll talk about
the power of observation, and then I'll invite
you to go out, observe a texture
in your own space, whether it's inside or outside. And then we'll reconvene
and talk about what observing real-world
textures can teach us about how to draw them. Next, I'll go over three kind of abstract themes in
regards to texture. We'll talk about
light and shadow, distance to the texture and how to choose
which textures in your drawing to draw and which ones not to draw
more on that later. Lastly, I'll go
over three commonly used outdoor, natural
environment textures. Along the way. You'll be able to incorporate those into your
own final drawing. You'll end the class with
an observation drawing. Some knowledge of abstract concepts in regards to texture, and then a chance to
put it altogether. In your own drawing. You can either copy what I
draw or draw something totally unique and be sure to post
it in the project page. As far as materials
for this class, I use Micron pens. I really liked the
way that they lay down ink on the page. They're really consistent. And you can use multiple
different sizes of nibs to get strengths of line and different darkness
in the textures you use. I'd invite you to use
micron or Staedtler pens, something similar
there archival, meaning they last and they
stick really well on the page. However, if you don't have that, even a basic ballpoint pen
will work for this class. The main point is to get drawing and no matter what
kind of pen you have, it'll work for this class. I'm not too picky. I
don't really talk about Penn thickness in this class. It doesn't really impact
what we're going to draw. As far as paper,
anything you have works. I really like using
thicker paper. I have a sketchbook here
with about £100 paper. It's nice and thick and it allows me to draw a lot
of ink on the page. However, even if you just have printer paper, that's fine. You'll need about two or
three sheets for this class. Well, let's dive in. We're going to start with observing textures
in a real-world.
3. Observing Texture : The world around us is
made up of textures. We see lines, but
within those lines, everything we see, whether
it's a tarmac, asphalt, whether it's a tree, whether it's a forest
expanse or a mountain, they're made up of textures. I believe that observing the texture is we want to
draw in the real world. And knowing what to look for in those observations
leads the artist to drawing better textures
that more accurately reflect the environment or the texture you're
trying to draw. For example, if you haven't
looked at a forest, are not looking at the forest, you might miss the way
that the light plays through these evergreens here, or the way that the ones
farther away from us up here, more distant and more faded. Now these are concepts I'm
going to talk about later on in this class, in
subsequent lessons. But for now, let's
practice observation. What I want you to do is to
grab a piece of paper and your pen and to draw a
texture that is around you. If there are trees nearby, try drawing the foliage of the trees or maybe the
grass on your lawn. What about the sidewalk
in front of you? The texture of the cement there? Or even if you're just inside, try drawing the
texture of your couch. Different textures give us the opportunity to practice
looking for lights and darks. Different patterns
on the texture. Take five-minutes and try to draw the texture that you see. So remember, this is a
really quick sketch. You don't want to take
too much time on this. You're just trying
to get your hand used to being on the paper before we move
on with this class. And you want to get your eyes
use to observing texture. So what do I see in this bush that's
right in front of me? Well, I see lots of small, small spindly little
juniper branches as well. I do see the outline
first, and as I mentioned, I'm just going to draw a
little part of this bush. I'm to inking in this outline. First. I'm going to
have their basis there and underneath here you
can see that there's some of those those branches. But I mean, we're talking about in the main part of this class is texture, not drawing bushes. So I'm just going to
leave them like that. But then what do I see as
far as lights and darks? Because lights and darks, as we'll talk about
in later lessons, is the basis of how I go
about starting texture. For my brush here. I'm just going to really, really quickly shade in some of these dark spots
because I know that the light is shining
from the top. And whatever you're deciding to draw right now, whether
it's a bush like this, but it's a tree, whether it
is the wall in front of you. Pay attention to where
it's darkest and where its latest and
try to capture that. That's all we're really
going for in this lesson. Capturing the rough
outline of the texture. And no one's looking
over your shoulder. So it doesn't matter what
it looks like at the end. Just be really rough here. But as you can see, it's not really a fully
fleshed out texture. It doesn't look super great, but we're capturing the
feel of this bush, right? I'm not drawing the
individual Juniper leaves, but I'm observing the dark spots and observing where
its lightest as well. And kind of noting how there's some dark areas
within the light. I might add a few
little details here, but for the most part I'm just focusing on getting the feel, the overall vibe of the
bush. You could say. We're going to look at the observational sketches we did and talk about light and dark and how using tones and shading can influence
the textures we draw. I'll see you in the next lesson.
4. Light and Shadow : When you're drawing with pen, you only have a couple
of tools to create texture because we
don't have colour and we can't make people see the tree
by painting in green, which is an easy way to
make it appear like a tree. We have to use wine and shading, as well as light and dark to create the
texture we want to. First, let's talk
about light and dark. Shading is your
most powerful tool while working with Penn, other than line, I suppose, but if we're talking about texture, It's
definitely shading. And that's because when
we look at textures, our eyes are drawn to the
light and dark parts of it. That's what gives it its form. We have to capture
those if we want to successfully capture
the texture. And that's why it's so
important to focus on the dark areas by
fleshing those out, we can really help people
infer what they're looking at. Their eyes are drawn to the
dark spots of the texture. And therefore, we don't
really need to draw the highlighted spots as much or the highlighted
areas of the texture. For example, check out this
picture of a tree here. What do you see first? If you're like me, your eyes are probably drawn to the trunk. And then the dark spots on the
underbelly of the foliage. Believes that our darkest
around the bottom. And that's what really forms the texture of the leaves
that we want to draw. If we focus on getting
those dark areas right and tracing the dark
parts of the texture, we're more likely to create
a full, well-rounded tree. We don't even really
have to worry about the light parts at all. Let's recap that the dark spots that texture are the most
important things to focus on. By focusing and by detailing in the dark
sections of a texture. Our eyes are more apt to
infer or fill in the blanks. Next up we're going
to talk about distance and how distance to texture influences
how we see the texture.
5. Detail and Distance : If you check out this habit
whole drawing up here to you, you might be able to
see the door and you might be able to see the fact
that there are trees there. But you can't really see a
lot of the details, right? It might just look like a tree with a little bit
of shading on it. But if you zoom up close, you'd see that there are a
lot of details in the bark. The bark kind of curls
around the tree. There's also a stone that
lead up towards the door. There's even a mailbox that you might miss when
you're looking at it from your vantage point
behind the camera. In a similar way when
we view textures and when we wanted to recreate
them on the page, paying attention to
how far away they are from us is super, super important by ensuring
we create distance, by how detailed we
draw in the textures. We create more fully fleshed out three-dimensional
spaces for the viewer. Here's another example. If you check out the thing you observed in a
couple lessons ago, go up really,
really close to it. If it's a tree, even better, take a close look
at the tree leaf. If you're outside
in a public place, it might look a
little bit awkward, but really observe
the texture close up, checking them out close
brings out details you might have not
noticed from afar. But imagine if you drew
all those details, the drawing would appear
overcrowded and cluttered. Kinda put the viewer in
a weird space where it's not clear how far away we
actually are from the texture. Often it's what we don't
draw that gives the viewer a glimpse into how
far away we are from the texture or
from the object, for example, across this field. I'm not going to detail
in all these trees doing that would just
add some clutter to the background of the
drawing and take away from the detail of
the foreground, from the shards of grass that
I want to detail in here. Here's another example. In the drawing behind me here. In Rivendell, I didn't draw the individual trees and the tree line at the very
back of the drawing. The fact that the trees in
the front and the trees of the back are clearly
the same textures, but just drawn
completely differently. It gives the viewer
a glimpse into the distance and the
scale of my drawing. Keep that in mind
as you go about the third part of this class where we're going
to be drawing textures. The texture is closest to the viewer or in the foreground, as it's called, often
are the most detailed. The thing you want the
person's attention to be placed on should be more detailed than the stuff
in the background. Doing that creates a
cleaner composition. It also guides the viewer's
eyes towards what's most important and what's closest
to us in the drawing.
6. Style and Placement: Now, while this class
has been about drawing textures so they appear
somewhat lifelike, this next tip or
thing to keep in mind might seem a little
counterproductive. That is what texture is not
to draw in your drawing. Now, it sounds kinda like a mystery or like I'm
giving you a riddle. But let's break it down here. If you check out the drawing of Rivendell again, behind me, it's clear that there's some
textures that are not fully developed or are full-out
missing from the scene. Checkout the middle where
there's a waterfall, I kinda fade out so there's
almost white in that area. That's technique, partly
because I'm not very good at drawing rushing
water and waterfalls. But I also want to have the
illusion of fog or mist. And that's something that's
really difficult to draw. But by fading out into
white, I think the, I infers the fact that there is missed there or at
a point of interest, even though I don't
really draw it. Here's another example
in the foreground, or the part of the
drawing closest to us, is the way I fade out, the leaves and the
other foliage, as well as the bricks
on the bridge. Now in real life we
know these do not fade the closer they are to us. But in the interest
of the composition or the way the entire
piece is structured. To me, it makes sense
to fade them out, since I don't have a border, I don't want the
most detailed or the darkest stuff
right on the edges. I want it to be more
towards the center. Sometimes the opposite
is true as well. If you check out this drawing
of a castle on a hill, you can see that the
mountains behind it would most likely still be
detailed near their base. However, if I added
that amount of detail in that kind of
texture to the mountains, it would detract or takeaway from the main point
of this drawing, which is the central hill
in the castle on top. Therefore, sometimes
if you need to, you can play around with
the perception of texture, making things
appear a little bit lighter or less detailed to suit the end goal of
the drawing. Here. That is the focus on that central castle and
the hill leading up to it. First up, I'll go over
how to draw rock.
7. Practice: Rock and Stone : Now next we're going to talk
about drawing ROC in stone. This is a really interesting
texture to tackle because it's a combination of
a organic shape and natural shape that you find
in a natural environment with some straight lines
or lines that appear straight to us as
we're viewing them. It's also a great way to
put it into practice. What we talked about when I
talked about light and dark, because the dark spots of Iraq are what's going to
flesh out the texture and make the rock or their cliff
face or whatever kind of rocky texture you want to draw,
appear three-dimensional. Let's dive in. So the first step in drawing our rocks today is to observe rock formations,
cliffs, Jackie mountains. Anything that is similar to the rock with a style of
stone that you want to draw. We then have decided
on a light direction because as I mentioned,
that determines, that the texture,
that determines how we perceive the shapes, the light and dark
areas on this rock. If I pretend that this is going
to be the sun right here, it's gonna be shining down
on our rock from this side. Then, before I even want
to start drawing the rock, I'm going to decide the
distance, as we talked about, textures change in
how we perceive texture changes depending on
how far away we are from it. For this rock, I want it
to be fairly close so we can see the different
light and dark spots on it. We can add a little
bit of detail without being microscopic, without having the rock
right up in our face. Because that is a little
bit too much detail. It would take a long, long time. So I'm going to draw this rock. And as I mentioned,
some people have different perspectives or different ways of
drawing textures. Some start in the
middle and draw with light and shadow
and dark spots. But when drawing
with pencil or pen, I do like kind of drawing
the outline of the shape. You can draw whatever,
whatever works for you. I want to have a rough idea of what this rock might look like. And again, this texture
can be transposed onto a wide variety
of rock faces, different scales as well. But here we have the
outline of our Boulder. We know that it's
fairly close to us, so we're gonna be able
to see the light and the dark areas and we have
this shape, this outline. We also know that the
sun is shining in from the right side
of the Boulder. I usually want to start
from the left side, start from the darker areas. But I'm going to
start very light and go over it multiple times. I know with rock there's
a lot of long flat areas. There's a lot of
multiple surfaces. They're not square,
they're not uniform. But on the rocks that I've
observed in this picture here, for instance, you can
tell that there's multi, multiple sides that are either farther in or farther
out on a rock face as well. We can go back to
Outline now and start adding some imperfections, adding some cracks
that start at the top. And I'm not lining
up the cracks. I'm very gently
kinda adding shadow. And I know I'm adding
shadow on this side because the light is
coming from that side. And I bet you can tell now, even from the little
work we have done, how you don't really have
to add that much texture. You don't have to add
that many lines for the shape to come alive. To seem rocky or just seem to kind of gesture to
our eye and our icons like, Oh yeah, I know what this is. I can tell from the shadow, from the illusions to rock. This is in fact Iraq. Now I'm going lighter here, as I mentioned before, I want to kinda stay
light so I can get an overall idea of the
texture and the texture field and then detail it in or add a little bit
more shadow afterwards, I might add a couple
of lines here of kind of protrusions
on the rock face. And you'll notice the pen
strokes that I'm using. And this applies
to pencil as well, is just straight up and down. I find going straight
up and down like this. Swiveling with my palm
against the page gives me greater control
over the darkness or lightness that I'm applying, the pressure I'm
applying to the pen or pencil by being really light on the page and almost
dotting in your lines as opposed to being
dark and jaggedy. I can just control the shape
or the textures that I'm creating here a little
bit better now that we have a little bit more
of the rock fleshed out. I wanted to start
shading in sides and I can also darken in parts
of that outline as well. Now, especially on
a rock face because there's so many
sides of it, right? There's going to be almost
unlimited amount of gradation or an unlimited
scale of the light and dark. It's gonna be some really, really dark spots and some are really,
really light spots. And by making sure we have
a full range of shading, we can make that come or make the rock come
to live, come, come alive. But making sure there's a whole range of
shading we can make the rock kinda come alive or seem really
three-dimensional. By giving the viewer
a whole bunch of different light and
dark areas to focus on, just like Iraq in the wild. The top here is where the
most light would hit. So obviously it's going
to be the lightest. And often when rocks
meet the ground, there might be some kind of faces that are almost inverted. And so you can darken
those in a little bit. Now that we've got the
basics of this rock texture, we're going to add
some vegetation, will focus on drawing grass and then drawing
tree bark as well.
8. Practice: Grass and Bark : We'll talk about
drawing grass and vegetation because
that's something that I find really tough. It's so small it and often grass and bushes
are so detailed, it's hard to know
where to start. Well, as we begin here, Let's keep the things we
just talked about in mind. And that is the
light and shadow, the distance from us, and the composition
of our piece. What's important to detail that determines how much detail we add to this texture and where. That's a key thing to remember to help you not go crazy when trying to tackle large
textures like grass or bushes. So let's dive in. So if we check out
this picture of a field of grass,
we're gonna see that, as you might expect, it's not really
revolutionary to say, but the primarily thing
here is short lines. That's the shape of
the blades of grass. However, as we talked
about in previous lessons, It's finding out what
we have to draw in order to make the texture
appear convincing. We don't have to draw every
single blade of grass. Well, you could,
but I think you'd probably be here until 2024. So first we're going to just practice that
rudimentary shape. And I'm going to gripping
back on the pen a little bit, starting off heavy and I'm
kinda flicking, flicking up. That's kind of the shape I want. And as they get closer to
you, they're gonna be bigger. Maybe by this point
you'd be able to see the individual strands of grass. The key thing here is you
don't want them to be uniform. You don't want them
to be the same. If you look at the graphs
in your front line, unless you manicure it,
It's all different. There's different
lengths, different sizes, different shapes, different
directions, it's going. The key thing is fading out from tall to short in the background. So let's dive into the
actual texture here. I'm going to add
multiple little lines, little short little dashes, jags like we did on
this practice page. And it's gonna do them really irregularly to make it look like the grass is a
little bit uneven. Their little smaller back towards the rock and
then they get a little bit larger as they move
towards the viewer. I sometimes start in one place
when I'm doing a texture. But as you can see here, I kinda jump around
a little bit too. As we talked about earlier, I start a little bit lighter, a little sparse, and
then I can add more. I can add more blades of
grass in different areas that seem like they might need a little bit more tension
or a little bit more care. Now, as we talked about as well, It's the intentionality or the place that you draw the texture that's
really important. Here by the rock. We want to have it a little
bit more detailed because that's kinda where
our eye is drawn to. That's the spot that needs
a little bit more texture. To tell us that yes, we're looking at grasp. The rock transitions into grass. And that's a really key
crux of the drawing. Then we, as we see that the sun is on the top
right of the rock, we're going to draw in the grass a little bit
more detailed, a little bit darker here
to the left of the rock. That creates a sense
of shading and puts the graphs into its larger
context in the scene. I'm going to just
draw it over to the right-hand side
of the drawing here. A lot of little dots, little tiny little lines to just give it a
little bit more scale. And then I'm going over it
with a light wash of ink. So really, really
light on the pen and just kind of shading in a
large section of the grass. But I think by what I have
drawn and what I haven't, You can tell that
it's a grassy section of lawn or field
on a summer day. All by this small little lines. When taken individually, they
don't look like anything, but when placed together, hopefully they look like a grassy field
surrounding this rock. Now, trees are really,
really fun texture. I really love them and
hopefully you can tell by the care I put it into
this part of the drawing. As I'm observing the trees
that I want to draw, this is probably gonna be
kinda like an oak tree. I'm checking out photos. Along the way too. I've attached resources at
the bottom of this video in the class description page that you can check out as well. I know that the bark often
runs vertical and in jaggedy, lyrical or curly
shapes a little bit. And I'm gripping back on that
pencil or the pen, sorry. And creating these irregular
textures along the way, kind of up and down
textures that often have the darker spots on the left-hand side
because that's where the sun is coming from. Now, these dark areas that
I'm shading in there, the sections of the
bark that may be more indented into the
tree than the light spots. I want to add some darker
lines and darker areas of shadow to really flesh
out the idea that this tree is being
cast in the sunlight. And this left side would be much darker than the right side. When I'm looking at tree bark, I noticed that there's
so much variety in the light and dark
areas and that's what I want to capture in this texture. Even though we're a little bit farther away from the tree. I think it's an important part
of the drawing and that's why I'm spending a little
bit more time on it. Capturing these light
and dark areas. However, I'm fading it out a little bit towards the bottom. And that's to give
emphasis to Iraq, as I talked about earlier. You don't want to crowd out
textures in your piece. And I think we can understand or glimpse that this
is a tree and it's fairly detailed without
having to ink in the bottom. If I inked in that
with a similar amount of detail as I did with
the middle of the trunk. It would crowd out the
grass in the rock as well. Now in interest of time,
I'm not going to go over the foliage or the tree up top. However, I'd invite you to
finish that off if you like. You can, at the end of
these four examples, you can add different textures. And I think tree foliage would be an awesome place to start, paying attention to the
light and dark areas of it. However, a key part in drawing texture is
having other textures in the scene or other
spots to accent the distance and accent that
the scale of the scene. Here I'm drawing
some tree trunks that are much further away, a little bit lighter,
much less detailed. To give the feeling that
we're looking into a forest. There's a space behind us that didn't really take
much at all, much work. But even with those straight
up and down sticks, I think you can tell
that there's a forest. There. Didn't take
hardly any work, but by adding that,
I think that added so much emphasis to the tree, we did draw the last practice
exercise for this class, we'll be drawing
geometric textures, straight line shapes that
repeat like Windows, or in this case, brick.
9. Practice: Brick (repeating shapes): So lastly, we're going to
talk about geometric shapes. I want to say geometric.
I'm basically going to talk about bricks. I'm going to talk about
straight line shapes, basically human-made
objects that have straight lines that are
repeating over and over again. Whether that's Windows
cascading down a wall, whether that's a stone floor. And this lesson will
be about tips to stay sane while creating
these incredibly detailed and repetitive shapes. How can we be smart about
what part of the texture we draw to make the human eye
infer what the texture is. Now here I'm going to go over this geometric shape and that is this side of this little cabin that we're going to
place behind the rock. I've sketched it in with pencil
to get the outline right. I'm not gonna go
over the pencil or the outline or how I draw that in perspective as much this time in the interests
of your time. However, we're gonna
go over how to add this brick texture without
bringing in the whole thing. Now, remember it's what
we don't draw that often gives the eye a clue
to what's there. By picking out the
kind of style of brick that I see in
this reference photo. I know that that's the main crux or the
cornerstone of this drawing. I want to capture those
rectangular bricks. And by drawing a few of
them in strategic spots, I can give the viewer an overall impression of a brick cabin without
doing all of them. I'm kinda going evenly
across the building, little clusters of bricks. Now, you'll notice they're
a little bit light because the cabin is a little bit
farther away from us. And often the rectangles
aren't the same size. That irregularity, I think, adds a little bit to this cabin because we don't want it
to appear a little bit older and a little bit decrepit. However, I'm not working
in the entire thing. I'm paying attention
to the key parts. For example, you notice how
there's more bricks around the door and there's gonna
be a few more bricks around the sides
of the building to give it shape and
to give it scale. However, in the middle
here I don't really have to add as much detail. We see the bricks on
the side and we get pretty good glimpse or a
pretty good grasp of what the texture is that applies to a lot of different
geometric textures. You don't have to
draw the whole thing. You don't have to draw every
line for us to get a glimpse of what the final
output actually is. And then it's the sun that
adds the final touch. By shading in, we can
then get a better idea of the position or the area that this cabin and
habits in the scene. A little bit of shadow really, really add some contrast. I think it's a fun
technique to try as well. I didn't really light
lines to your drawing. And then I'm gonna kinda
go over it a little bit more at a few more
details towards the side. And they're rectangles,
but as you can see, they're pretty lazy rectangles, sometimes just vertical and
horizontal lines capturing the the main lines we see in that reference
photo of the cabin. Before you create
your own drawing, I'll go over some
common mistakes, things to keep in mind
or things to avoid. Well approaching
drawing texture in pen.
10. Common Mistakes : Now if you watched
the introduction, you know that a big
thing about drawing textures is a lot
of people spend so much time drawing texture
and they often get it wrong. Maybe not technically,
maybe they have the texture,
technically correct. They've drawn every
single blade of grass, but it doesn't work
with the overall composition of the drawing. There are a lot of
mistakes that you can make easily and texture stuff that I've done and stuff I still do. I look at and I think, Oh, I could have done
that so much better. So here are some
top three mistakes people commonly make
when drawing textures. First, it's startling, too dark. Well, we talked earlier about how the dark parts
of a texture are often the most important with pen to get right into focus on. Often people draw in textures, dark right away
without kind of easing in to a permanent texture. Sounds kind of weird,
but here's what I mean. I mean, if you're drawing
a texture often I'd wanna start in pencil or
maybe even pen, but start out with
really light lines. Get a sense of the
overall shape of the texture before
drawing it in. How does the field kinda
fade into the distance? How has the field shaped around the central castle, for example? If I don t know that,
then I might start drawing dark spots farther away from the front of the drawing
and then have to even it out and ends up at the front of the drawing or the
foreground is super, super dark and the background
is super dark as well, and it just looks really muddy. So by starting out a
little bit lighter before you kinda focus
on those dark spots, you can ensure that you can keep everything else we
talked about in mind. Another mistake I
think people often make is trying to be
way too detailed. Adding too much detail
to your texture can take away from the overall
sense of your drawing, especially when you're
drawing with pen, because that often means
too much darkness. For example, if I tried to draw every single leaf on this tree, it's going to look
like a muddy mess. It might look kind of cool,
but it might not serve the overall purpose
of the drawing unless your focus is
just on the tree. If I spend four hours drawing
in every single leaf, I might feel very
accomplished at the end, but I'm not sure if that
tree would look any better for it by being smart with where you place details and what textures you focus on, your drawing will
turn out better. Lastly, and I didn't
talk about this as much in the other lessons, but it's paying attention
to light and shadow. We did talk about darkness, but the way that the sun, or the way that the
light will play off a texture can change
how we perceive it. If you check out this scene of grass leading out
towards this forest, you can see that in the sun, you don't really see the
individual strands of grass. Therefore, if we tried to draw all these
individual grass shapes, it wouldn't really
look like a field. And since we're drawing
with a black medium, we'd end up muddy in this scene. It look way too dark and
it wouldn't really capture what the grass texture actually looks like
in the sunny day. Instead, maybe we just add a
few little strands of grass. But I'll talk about this
later when we talk about drawing vegetation
in a further lesson, often light erases
texture as well. Here's what I mean. In this drawing of Hogwarts, you can see that this tower
on the right-hand side of the drawing doesn't really have much texture on it at all, even though it is
a brick building. But since it's farther away and this getting direct sunlight, the sunlight kind of takes away that the brick lines that
we'd see from this far away. Therefore, I kept it completely
blank because I want to accent the sun and the
highlight of that tower. And I knew if I added bricks, it would create the illusion that it actually
is under shadow. It would darken in the tower in a way that would take away from the contrast I want to create
with a light and dark. So to recap, paying attention to where the light
would hit your texture is really important by adding a shadow on the texture as well. You can really accent its place in the scene and do
that consistently. Now it's time for you to
create your own drawing. In the next lesson, you'll have a chance to put these textures together and add some
of your own as well.
11. Practice: Your own Drawing : I gave you three examples
of shapes you can draw. As you see, I put them
together in one drawing. Now, if you've
done that with me, this is the time for you to add some creative flare at some other textures that
you're curious about. Integrating the concepts that I introduced in the
beginning of the class. Try drawing a new texture and keeping in mind how it might look different the
closer it is to you and the farther away
it is from you. Try paying attention to the
way that the shadows are, the dark parts of the texture, create a three-dimensional shape or a three-dimensional
feel for the texture. And lastly, be smart about what part of the
texture you draw. How can you make your
life easier by choosing which sections of texture or which texture is not
to draw completely. Thus creating a drawing that centers the viewer's
eye on what's important while not
appearing too cluttered. If you'd like, you can draw
something totally unique. Throw out the examples I gave out the window and draw a
scene using your own textures. Try to include two
or three or four, and then post it in
the project page. If you'd like. Give a brief description
about what you've drawn, what you found really difficult, or what you enjoyed
about the process. And that's it. In the next lesson,
we'll wrap up the class and talk about
what we went over.
12. The End : So you made it, we talked about how to craft textures using
light and shadows. How to ensure that
the texture is closest to us are more detailed, the ones farther away fade out. We also talked about
smart use of your time. How to pay attention to which part of the texture
is important to draw in order to get the
overall impression of it without creating drawings
that are too cluttered. Then we went over three
different textures to draw. You had the chance to practice
grass and vegetation. You also got to track practice that rock, geometric shapes. And then we talked about the brick and these shapes
that are repetitive over time. I hope you had a chance
to put it together too, and I'm so excited to see what you've drawn on
the project page. But what's next? Well, I hope you
can take these tips and put them to use in
your own drawing practice. By keeping these ideas in mind, I think your setup for a more efficient and a little bit more of a fun
drawing experience. You don't have to draw every
aspect or every part of the texture that you want to convey or the texture you
want to put on the page. But being smart and by using light and shadows as
well as distance, you can create textures
that are really fun, that add to your
drawing and that are hopefully enjoyable
to draw as well. I'm excited to see
what you create. Thanks for taking
the class and I look forward to chatting with
you about texture. Again.
