Figure Drawing & Painting: Explore the Magic of Water-soluble Graphite Pencils

1. Welcome to Class!: While realistic pencil drawings may take a while to complete. Coda painting is a lot faster, but it may seem intimidating for those of us who aren't used to holding a paintbrush or handling water. And that's where what actable pencils come in. They're a perfect blend of both mediums. And in this class, I'm going to show you how to use them to easily paint gorgeous figures with a simple system. Okay. Hi, I'm was. I've been painting with Watercolors since 2019. And my thing is to research and share my findings with the world, and that's why I teach online with 25 classes here on Skillshare, but also a white branch of art videos on YouTube tutorials on Patrin and water of workshops in my local community. Watercolor and wo stable pencils are one of my favorite mediums to use, and I know that a lot of us own a box set, and yet there's very little instruction as to how to use them. That's why in this class, I'm going to teach you how to use the graphite kind to paint beautiful figures. First, we'll go over the supplies I recommend to create this type of artwork. I'll also share examples of what I paint with this medium. Then we'll practice the only two techniques that you need to complete the project. Because what I love about drawing the figure and painting with a graphite pencils is that they're easy to use. You need zero sketching and painting experience to paint the project, this elegant figure of a ballerina. Together, we will practice a very easy sketching technique and practice it again once you're more confident to draw the actual project with my guidance. Finally, you'll learn all the steps in my painting process to quickly turn a graphite drawing into a painting. The best is that water sitable graphite pencils are so versatile that you can use what you learned in this class and apply it to other subjects going forward. You can even do that with watercolor and ink pace pencils because what works with graphite pencils works for the other ones too. What are you waiting for? Let's meet next and get started. 2. About the Class Project: I'm glad you decided to join this class because you're about to learn to paint realistic figures with basic supplies, basic techniques, and a fantastic medium. Although I hardly ever took any dancing lessons in my life, I find that dancers and ballerinas make perfect subjects to practice on when it comes to figure drawing and painting. They're elegant, and I love to draw their dance clothing, especially when it's textured. I know that sketching can be intimidating. The fear to get it right gets to me every time to be honest and sometimes makes me procrastinate. But you'll see that I'll help you draw with correct proportions through smart observation techniques. Then you'll learn how to leverage pencils and paper to create a three D effect in your art without getting into perfectionism. If you don't believe me, check out my art and zoom in on it and you'll notice it is far from perfect. Because drawing figures is more approachable than it might seem and so is painting thanks to the simple and forgiving medium. If you need support while following along, make sure to download the sketch. You can also download a reference photo, a photo of my art, and the list of the supplies in the resources section of the class. Of course, you're also welcome to reach out for help when necessary in the discussion tab. You can also share your process, share the exercises, and your finished piece of art in the project section with me and other students. I think it's time to dive in, so see you in the next lesson for a quick tour of the supplies. 3. Recommended Supplies : In this lesson, we're going to talk about the supplies we'll need to complete our project. The first thing we're going to be looking at are the what a suitable graphite pencils. This is what I'll be using today. This is the fab Cast graphite acohal box set. I know a few of the brands offer the same kind of set, so you can see that in there you have a choice of five pencils, hb2b, B, six B, and eight B. Usually, that's a selection that most box sets of what a stable graphite pencils offer, and you can also buy those in open stock if you prefer. What I suggest we use today is either an HB or a two B pencil for the sketch. Then we'll be using a four B pencil to place our mid tones, and finally, a six B or an eight B pencil to place the darker tones. What I like to use and you can actually see it from the way my pencils are looking right now. I prefer to use the two B, the four B, and the eight B. For paper today, I'll be using this Saunders Waterford watercolor paper. It's 100% cotton paper, it's cold press, and it's 300 grams/square meter. But for watercolor pencils and water suitable pencils, you can also use drawing paper. A good one that I've tried before is Strathmore 500 bristol paper. Then you can also use a sketchbook. One that I could recommend is the beta sketchbook by Stillman and burn. It's 270 grams/square meter, and it's cold press as well. It's water colored paper. There really are a variety of papers that you can use. I think what's important with water sitable pencils in general is to really aim at a paper that is thick like this so that the water doesn't make the paper warp. Then you also want to find paper that is smooth enough that it's easy to actually color with a pencil. What you also want to look at is the tooth of the paper is the surface here. You want the paper to be pretty smooth with some tooth as you can see here. Ideally, you don't want something to be too smooth. Otherwise, the pigments not going to grab onto it that well. In the same way, I wouldn't recommend something too rough in texture because that would make it very hard to color. What I'll be using today for the project is going to be a six by 8 " sheet of paper. Yours can be slightly larger if you like. Remember, you can use drawing paper, watercolor paper as long as there is some tooth to it, so it can be hot press, cold press, if it's watercolor paper, and the thickness needs to be there too. We'll also need a scrap piece of watercolor paper and you can really go for anything you want here, even a paper you don't like and you're not using that much. Just to try the main techniques and do a quick warm up with our pencils. Then you also might want to have a piece of copy paper or really something very simple, just to draw on and practice your sketching skills. Let's talk about paint brushes now. For this project, since we're going to be getting into a little bit of detail, I would recommend to go for paint brushes that are round and pointed like these. These are actually watercolor paint brushes. That's what I use with watercolor pencils and water soluble pencils. I really like the point here, the fine tip because it really helps me get into the nooks and crannies of my drawing. It's especially convenient with figure painting. Now, if you have a paint brush like this one, which is more of a round paintbrush, you'll notice that if you wet it, it tends to come to fine tip. You can make do with that if you manage. That's what I used to paint with as beginner for a long time. That's all I used. But I do think it will be a little bit harder to create those fine details we're going for. In the supplies list that you'll find in the resources section of the class, I've listed all the details about the supplies I'm using today, so feel free to go and check it out. Other convenient supplies for water soluble pencils is a pencil sharpener. I know this is very basic, but usually most basic tools are the ones that work the best. This is just one of those sharpeners that all school boys and girls are using here in my country. You see, I didn't go with anything fancy. Another very convenient and simple supply to use is a ruler, basic one once more. Actually, you'll see that I do not use the ruler when I sketch my figures. But you can, if that makes you feel comfortable, that's why I've added it to the list. Of course, since we already know what pencils will work with, we'll need any, a simple one once more. Just to add a few corrections here and there, if we need to. Now, if you're familiar with watercolor, these are supplies that you know that are very handy when working with water. This is a water jar. With watercolor pencils and water soluble pencils, we only need one, especially for figure painting. Because usually with watercolor painting, we'll work with two of them, one that is intended to stay clean, and one that's intended to clean our paint brushes and that generally ends up being very dirty. Well, here, not only do we not need a lot of water that is very true for water soluble pencil work in general. And for figure painting, you'll see that we do not work on wet. There will be no background. We'll just work directly on paper. That's why one water jar is plenty. Then we'll need paper towels or a rag or whatever you prefer to have, and this is probably one of the most important supplies to have for water soluble pencils and you'll find out why when we start painting. Now, masking tape is also one of those supplies that we use a lot in watercolor painting, and this is absolutely optional here. However, I like to use it. Because when I paint, I don't want to have to worry about my sheet moving around. Having masking tape really helps me make sure that the sheet stays into place. Now you know everything about the supplies that we need when working with what a stable pencils. Next, I'll talk to you about what these pencils really are and what you can actually do with them. Okay. 4. About Water-soluble Pencils: In this essen, I'd like to introduce you to what a soluble pencils and just what a soluble graphite in general. What a soluble graphite is not the most popular medium out there, and yet it is extremely powerful and that is why I wanted to make this class. Something very important you might want to know about this type of pencil here is that it differs from regular colored pencils and graphite pencils because of the binder that's in it. The binder in these pencils is water soluble. That's what makes them water so graphite. That's the main difference. Otherwise, ins, it is going to be very similar to graphite itself. I personally really love these pencils because I think that it's faster to draw with them and you can also get this cool watercolor effect, which we will work on in this class. In the drawing, coloring and watercolor community. A lot of people know the pencils. What a soluble graphite also comes in the form of a watercolor stick like this. Daniel Smith is the brand that offers this product. Then you can also find it as a block. That would be convenient for you to actually use on large surfaces. Well, the stick is going to be convenient to use water soluble graphite on the go. You can even find those sticks for regular watercolors too. Then a product I really like and recently discovered is this graphite gray watercolor. This is actually Sminke but I think that other brands also offer this color. This is really nice if you're used to watercolors, you really like the concept of water solle graphite and you want to include it in there. You really don't need all of those tools. With the pencils alone, you can do a lot, and I'm going to show you exactly what. I love this tool so much. I've been practicing and experimenting, and I want to show you this little bird first. You can see this looks like the figure painting we're going to be working on today in the way that I've executed it. It's exactly the same techniques, and I just wanted to show you this one because the class is applicable to any subject that you choose. It's not just for figure painting, you can really tackle anything else, even the full landscape if you'd like to. This is another way that you could use water soluble graphite pencils. Here you can see I've used it for figure painting as well. The only difference is that there is color, and that's because I've combined water soluble graphite pencils with watercolor pencils. That's another way that you can use them. Okay. This is a similar example. The difference here is that it's not figure painting, it's just still life. Again, you can apply the techniques I'm going to teach you today to a bunch of different subjects. Now, these two paintings here look like watercolor. They're actually watercolor pencil paintings. There are landscapes, as you can see, if you look closely, you can tell that there is a lot of the graphite showing in there. That's when you can use your waterle graphite pencils as an addition to give a different flavor to your painting. You could even do this on a traditional watercolor painting I've done it before. There are really no limitations and it's actually a great tool to add little details. Here, for instance, I've used Mola stole graphite pencils to emphasize the shadows here. To also emphasize detail in the birds and make them pop mar. Lastly, you can see that on this watercolor painting of this beautiful bird. I've used my graphite pencils to just add little twigs. Then I've used some watercolor graphite gray paint to give that simple painting a magical mood. I hope you enjoyed this little presentation about was graphite pencils, and I'll see you next for a quick warm up exercise. 5. Quick Warm-up Exercise: This lesson is going to help you understand how water soluble graphite pencils work. You'll notice if you know how to use water color pencils, that they're pretty similar. Let me pick one of those pencils. We'll go with the four B for the little demonstration. The main technique here and that's the one we'll use today is to color with your pencils as you would with reckon pencils. While I'm not pressing very hard, you'll notice that I'm not very careful either. I'm going pretty fast. Here to cover a larger area, I'm using the side hair of the pencil rather than the tip. Of course, you can press a little if you want to add mark pigment. Okay. And then you could of course, use the tip to create fine lines and details. These are the main techniques for water sortable pencils, and then another big one, of course, is to activate the paint. To activate the paint, you're going to need your water jar. I'd like to have my paper towel nearby. What you want to do here is just wet your paint brush. With water soluble pencils, it's very important that your pain brush is not dripping wet. That's why I'm just going to remove some of the water here, so it's just damp now. Now you can go ahead and start activating the pigment. Here, I'm doing a little bit of back and forth to dissolve the pigment really well. You can see that it's getting darker and darker because I've used more pigment here. Working with blood stile graphite pencils is just a very simple and very straightforward color and then activate the pigment. Okay. In case you're wondering, all the techniques, all the things we're going to practice today. You can apply to water color pencils and even ink based pencils like the intense pencils by Doran and it's going to be exactly the same. Something we did not talk about is the difference between all of these pencils here. We do find box sets that come with a range HB 2b4b6 b and eight B for a specific reason. H and HB stands for black. And all B pencils stand for black only, and they're going to be softer. The leads going to be softer than the H pencils, which means this one is going to feel drier. Well, these one are going to feel a little bit creamier. Pigment intensity is also going to get better and better as we move up in the numbers. For example, the AB pencil here is going to be more rich in intensity than the two B pencil is. This is exactly why in the supplies lesson, as suggested, you pick and HB or a two B pencil for the sketch. Because these are just lighter in color. They're just easier to erase and easier to work with in the beginning stages of a drawing. Here, this is what we'll be using for sketching. That's actually how I use what adobo graphite pencils. That's my technique. This is either H B or two B. And the HB pencil feels so much drier and a little lighter compared to the two B. To build up contrast in our drawing in a way that feels safe because we're not going dark too fast, we're taking it step by step. I like to pick the four B, which is the pencil that comes between two B and eight B along with the six B. With that four B pencil, what we'll do is just color like this. Then we'll just activate the pencil. Remember we don't want a brush that's too wet. Okay. You can see the color really shows, which means that from there, the drawing will start coming to life already. Now the reason why I did not fill that out is because we will leave white space in our drawing for the highlights. This will be the light tone in our drawing. Well, this will be the mid tone. Maybe you're familiar with this. If you want to build realism in a drawing, you really need light tones, mid tones, and dark tones. That's where the white of the paper comes in. The four B pencil comes in, and finally, the eight B or the six B, whatever you want to pick. That one is a lot darker. And that will help us balance with the white of the paper and create high contrast. And also emphasize the dark areas for them to pop against this mid tone here. Let's activate that now. And look at this intensity, how rich this is. You can tell the difference. This is a big reason why I love this tool, water stable graphite pencil because with a very simple set of just a few pencils, we're able to create a variety of tones and rebuild realism fast. Thanks to the fact that they're water stable. If you're familiar with the term value, this is exactly what we have here with the white of the paper, this mid tone here, and this dark tone there. We've built a series of values, they're going to help us create something realistic and that looks three D. I hope this was informative. Before we tackle the project in the next lesson, I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about sketching with what a sitle pencils. So see you there. Okay. 6. How to Easily Draw the Figure: In this lesson, I'd like to talk to you about sketching. I want to show you how I go about sketching my figures in the easy way, the most simple way that I could think of. I've printed our project here so that it's easier for you to see what I'm doing. But also another one. You have another example to refer to. The way that I sketch is I rely on lines and circles. I'm going to use this drawing to do a quick demo and then the next lesson we'll actually sketch the project, but you already have some experience with this one here. I'll make sure to attach that to the resources section in case you want to work on it too. What I do to sketch this as easily as possible, is just find where the drawing actually starts and where it ends. With two horizontal lines. Then I would find the middle of my sheet. Let's say it's going to be this here. The next step is I'd use my fingers. This is a big one. That's where I was telling you you don't necessarily need a ruler. I'd like to do it approximately and use my fingers. I would look for a way to find my first landmark here. Let's try and find the middle in this figure. Let's see. Well, it seems in luck as this is almost the middle here. So I'm trying to find the middle, it'd be towards this part of the body. Yes. That would actually be I know this is where her back is arching. Now I have the middle, but I want to know where the chin ends. I'm going to try and find a way to place that landmark. Let's take the top of her fingers here, this is the proportion between the top and the chin. I'm noticing It's about a third of the whole figure. Even if I'm drawing on a piece of paper that's a lot bigger and I want to make this figure, I know this is about a third of the entire figure. That's how I know the proportions without measuring anything. Here, of course, it's easy because I'm drawing right next to it on the same scale, but you get the idea. Now that I've got the chin now it's just circles. I'm going to start with one that I'm seeing here. Then I'm seeing another one here, another one there and one here for the head. This is the sequence you would want to reproduce. It doesn't have to be exactly similar, but that would help. Here, start drawing. You see, I'm doing this pretty quickly. I'm not overthinking it too much. Can we know again the chin comes right there. Now we already have the overall shape. We can even see another circle right there if you look closely. See when we have that, it's going to be easier now to shape the body to link at the dots Of course, we can refine that as we go. Okay. Okay. I'm just linking the dots and I'm sketching again with that HB or two B pencil, so it's easy to erase. Now for the legs, we have a line that's a little tilted. Again, you can measure and notice that the knee actually is way between this part here and the foot. This is how you know where to place it. Now, if you want to know where the foot should be placed, and notice it's going to come right here where the shoulder is. So I'm really doing this fast to show you. Knowing it's going to be easy to refine our drawing with a suitable pencils anyways. Now I'm seeing the knee here comes up compared to this one. So this helps me decide where to place it. Yeah, the foot is slightly higher. Okay. Okay. You see, this is not similar, completely similar to the original. But you can again, refine it as you go, and it's still pretty good. Doesn't need to be extanly what your reference is like. The line here for the arm seems to be slightly tilted towards the left side, and the hand actually comes right here. This is how I'm going to make it. Then for the fingers, I'd like to just draw lines at first and not even worry about the fingers themselves. We can still do them later later on in the process if we want to. Now to do the face since it's upside down. I would just to the sheet, that would be the easier way to go. But you get the idea, get the main lines in your drawing, and then you can refine the placement and you can quickly get to the original here with just a few lines. I hope this was useful to you and I'll see you in the next lesson to start sketching. 7. Let's Sketch!: In this lesson, we're going to sketch the project, so this beautiful dancer here. I'm going to start by taping that sheet all around with the masking tape. Again, so it doesn't move around as we work. Actually, we don't even need to tape it all around just the top and the bottom will be enough. Okay. Now I'm going to work with my two B pencil. You can pick up an HB pencil and my eraser, and I'm not going to press very hard. Normally, I don't even work from the same scale. I just really did this so you can see how I take my measurements and proportions. Of course, again, you can download this drawing from the resources section. It helps you also when you sketch. The first thing you want to do, remember, is to find the top of your drawing on the bottom. Ideally here, we'd want to leave a little bit of white space on top and at the bottom. I'm just going to make it here. Then down there. This is where the feet are going to be and the hands are going to be up here. Now, I want to find the middle of my sheet. That's where it can be convenient to have a ruler. If you want to make sure. For example, here, I have this spot here, that'd be the middle. You can actually see that this dancer is standing up straight, so this could be the main line here. This will help us. The legs will come on either side of this line. The arms also will come on either side, and then the head and the rest of the body will be centered. Next step is to find our first landmark for the actual figure here. I really want to see what's the middle, where the middle of this dancer is located at. I'm just going to start measuring with my fingers. If I wasn't printing a sketch of it, normally I work from my computer, I do it directly on my computer screen, but I thought it would be easier to show you this way. Here I would try to find the middle. Let's see from the top of the hands to the waist here. This is not quite the middle. Now let's start from the top of the hands here to this spot right there. Okay. This is more like it. If I take actually this hand, which is higher up, I think we can make it the middle. Yes. From the top from this hand here, which is further up to this spot is exactly the same distance than it is from here to there. That gives us a good idea that the middle is actually going to be this spot. That's where again, you can use your ruler if you're not sure. For me, it's going to be over there. I know this is the middle of my sketch, and this helps tremendously. From there, it's going to be easier now to start working. Now I'm trying to think of what I can do and to decide on the next step, I'm looking for shapes. What I'm seeing is an oval shape here. That's going to be something important I want to look at. Now to actually locate this oval, same thing. Again, I use my fingers. I'm going to try and work from this area here since we have it on our paper. We have this first landmark. See how I can find the middle. Here to the chin is too much. Now I'm going to try the base of the neck and this is better. What I'm doing now and I'm just doing the same here. I'm trying to find the middle. This would be about right. That means this is going to be where the base of the neck is now, which means from there, it gets easier to actually place my oval because I know the oval shape comes further down from the base of the neck. It's just easier for me to make it. Okay. I'm trying not to press too hard. And you see already how we have the placement of each arm. Okay. Now we have another circle right here, which should be the head. Remember the base of the neck is this line here, which means the head would be somewhere around there. Don't worry if you're not sure that your proportions are exactly perfect because right now, I know mine aren't and I'll need to refine this drawing later, and that's fine is always how I do it. I'm just trying to really observe and notice that the circle here here there's a lot more space on top than there's going to be at the bottom. I'm to find the same space. We know the head is right there. We can also look at where the neck is located compared to this line here. I think the neck is going to be more towards the middle of the drawing. If you trace that line we had from the beginning, we can see it. Now we know the neck is somewhere around here and we know that the dress is going to fall. There are the belts. Again, we can refine this later. I'm going to keep moving on. Now I see we have a small space between this part here and that part, so I'm going to try and find it. It will be somewhere around here. You can remember use your fingers if you're not sure and take measurements. Okay. I'm also noticing that the belt ends towards where the hands located here. So the hand is going to be here, then it means the body, the waist, it's actually located in that area. We really have to start somewhere. This might look like it's disorganized, but I'm placing a few landmarks here and there, and then I'll just add corrections if I need to. If I notice that it's not right, I'll erase, but little by little, we're going to place more and more landmarks until we have something on paper that allows us to actually move on. Now from there, I'm noticing the chest is going to be somewhere around here. It's actually lining up with this spot right there. So we can already link the dots. And I keep looking at my reference as I do this. Again, this is really just a sketch. So the drawing will help us make it even better. I keep adding more landmarks. Okay. Now we have the neck here. We can start working on the arm. I need to leave a little space for the hands. This is going to be the wrist. Now the goal is going to be to link this area here to the arm itself. You see how from one line, one landmark to the next, we're able to move on and keep drawing. Now I'm looking at the thickness of the arm to try and get the same And I'm not hyper focused on getting everything to be exactly like a drawing for now. Now if I want to know where to end the arm here, again, I can use my fingers and try to find, here it is. Try to find the middle. This is actually right in the middle from the bottom of the chin here to the top of the belt there. That really helps. All I have to do is find it be around this area here. And you also can look at the way it lines up to the rest of the body. Which means that the arm is actually more towards this area here. I was a little bit off. This is really through observing that you notice how things are aligning with each other. I'm noticing here that my arm seems very thick so I can change that. This is not a problem. Remember, we don't have to get it all perfect. I'm just going to try to work on it, so it looks a little better. I more accurate? If you don't want to go through the whole sketching process, you can of course, use the sketch directly and just to transfer it. But it will help you may do without sketches and just draw them yourself. So see how I've made this arm look a lot better. Remember that the face ends right here, but then we have the hair. So far, this seems pretty accurate to me. Okay. I think we're on the right track with it. Okay. Okay. We can also check the width here, make sure we get it right. I think this is a thick on mine, which means I might need to make it a narrow. It looks better that way. Now, let's take care of the other arm. Here the wrist comes in a place that further down from this one. These are the small details I'm paying attention to. Then remember that line we placed in the beginning. You'll notice finger merged towards it, which helps me that arm now. I'm looking at the gap between the actual line and the wrist. So here now, I want to check on this area here. That's where the line changes. Again, I'm looking at the width of the arm. Make sure to get it to look proportionate to the rest of the drawing. I think this is looking pretty good so far. Doesn't shock me or anything. Now, let's just refine the face a little bit. Now we have all that. Really helps. Where is the hair coming somewhere over here. And I need to make the arm a little wider in that area. That's when I'm noticing. If things don't work out exactly, you can also tweak the original sketch a little bit. For instance, I could get I could add a space between the head and the arm if I notice my arm was a little bit off. It's not going to take away from the realism. Okay. Let's place the ear. Now we have the ear. It's also easy to place the eyes. So we'll just draw a dot. The nose and the mouth. And it becomes easier to just make my drawing a little bit better. Just going to enhance the chest a little bit here. As you can see now, we already have something going on that looks pretty good. Now I'm checking out the little gap here, and I'm noticing may be nice to rearrange that a little bit. Although, as I said, we can go to tweak it a little bit and make the head to look like it's further away from the arm. Here, the back is arched a bit more than what I made it to be. Okay, so that looks good to me. We don't get into too much detail in that part here. We just want to get the main sketch like this one here, which is a very simplified version of the photo. And that can help you to turn a photo into a sketch, you have a bunch of free softwares that do that online when it's hard for you to simplify the photo itself. Usually, I'll work from the photo right away. But that can be an easier option. Now let's look at that address and also maybe the legs to find our replacement again. So here, that's the bottom. This is the bottom of the belt. Now if I want to find the middle, where would that be? Okay. Trying to find agical place to do it from. We can also try to find a third instead of half. For example, if I go from here to the bottom of the dress, what do I get? I get about a third, so we could try that. Now we're going to try to divide this space in that's too much. This is a little bit better. So I think the dress comes here. That helps us. And and this is a bit above the feet. I think this is where the feet should be located. They look pretty tall compared to the rest of the legs that's because she's tiptoeing. I just want to check I got it right. I'm just going to do this. This is a little bit more than the fourth. Let's check on that and see if I get it right. Yes, it seems to match this version here. I'm going to keep it that way. Now we can find where the feet are located here by looking again at their alignment to the rest of the drawing. I didn't draw the hand there, I forgot. Let's say we want to look at the tip be located to the hands. Here in this area, we can use a ruler for not sure. Without really taking deep measurements is what I wanted to show you. We don't really need to do that. Okay. So that would be at the bottom of that foot. Okay. I'm really lightly sketching it without getting into crazy detail. Now let's look at the other one. Does it align to something in particular. Doesn't really although we can get an idea of where that should be located. So I guess it'd be some around here. I'm trying to get the overall shape without overthinking it too much. There we go. I think that looks good. Now, I want to find this area. Try to see if I can find a pattern again with my fingers. Okay should fall here. Let's try it. No, that's too much. Too much, it's going to be higher somewhere around here would be more like it. We can also check the gap in between these two areas to get a good idea of where that is supposed to be. Now if I look at where this part is located, you can see it's almost in enlightenment with that one. That's why we can decide it's going to be here. Now we know where to direct this leg. Okay. So we can already have a rough placement for it and then refine that shape. And because of this, we now know where the other one should be. Okay. Somewhere around here. We can use our fingers to take measurements in the other way horizontally. If I want to know how wide the skirt actually is, then I could look at how wide it is from the middle line to the arm and try to find a pattern once more, is that half of it? It's actually going to be a more. The skirts going to be a little farther out than this, but it gives us a good idea. Okay. So be somewhere around here. Again, if you make the skirt more or less, why is not really going to affect your drawing that much. I'm also looking at this noticing that these two points almost to align. This is how all I have to do now is link the dots. Noticing also we want a bump right here. Maybe closer actually to this area. Then I refine it if it doesn't look right to me. It's also important to take a look at your drawing to step back for a minute just to check. Then here we really don't need to be too precise. Your same thing. Okay. I'll see if I need to measure placements here with my fingers. If it seems good to me, I'll just leave it that way. I want to overthink it. If it seems like it's well centered on the sheet and it looks coherent, then it's just fine. Notice how easy it is to erase the pencil. Okay. Now, we need to finish the hands and the legs. Here I'm dying to on this and noticing the knee be placed around here, aligning with this area, also checking on the thickness of it. Okay. And now let's take care of this one here. And I think it looks pretty good. Okay. Now, we just need to take care of the hands and remember we have this middle line here to help us. There we go with this one. A. Okay. I'm not getting into too much detail at this stage. So I'm done with my sketch. Now the next step is just to erase those lines that we've made all around. They're already going to be useful for the rest of the painting. And now we have this. We're ready to start coloring. I'll show you how I do this in the next lesson. 8. Draw the Main Features: We're ready to turn this sketch into a drawing and make it more and more realistic and to do this with what a stole graphite pencils. I'm going to start using a darker pencil and placing more detail and I'm going to use the four B pencil. You want it to be sharp enough at the tip here just because this specific drawing is detailed enough and it's not that large. That will help. The goal here is to turn this flat sketch into an actual drawing. Even before activating the paint, you can already see all the main features and it really looks like a drawing at the end of the lesson. And this stage is also going to be super helpful for us to refine everything, all the details. We also want to start placing the first shadows, so we can start pressing a little more, for example, here in the hand. It's a little darker. There's like a shadow there. I'm using the tip here because this is very detailed. Here also, we're noticing that we have a shadow. I'm just going to shade this. Okay. And add a little shadow here shading this part as well. A cool thing about what a graphite pencils is that when we activate the paint notice, we can also fix our drawing and make it look even better and if there are mistakes, that's no big deal. We can totally fix that. I'm starting to add some detail. Okay. Here we can draw decreases. Notice how this part here is darker than this one. Which means we can start shading a little bit with that pencil. We're just coloring lightly without overdoing it, so that when we activate the pigment, we have some there to be able to create that small shadow. Same here. Adding a little bit of pigment. Here, also, we want to shape the breast. That is an important detail for the realism to really build the three D effect. Again, you really need to observe your reference, that's really important. Now I'm going to work on the neck. Really shading that area right there because it's very dark on the reference. I'm not afraid because I know that when I activate the pigment, if there are things that I want to fix, I can do it easily. I might not color this part. It's very dark in the reference, but I might be careful with it because the backgrounds so dark, but here it's not the case, it's white. We're just going to keep it to the figure itself and remember that there's no background here. Okay. Now I'm shaping the hair a little better. And remember, we'll be using our AP pencil later on to improve on this, so don't worry if it's not as dark as it looks on the reference. That's not very important at this stage. We just want to finish drawing towards the end, and then we'll make it even more realistic later. My figure painting is really not detailed in the face that much. Okay. Again, if something's wrong, we can erase even at this stage, and you'll see what the water is going to help us also. Now, the mouth, I'm just not going to try to draw the lips, but just to draw the dark line between each lip. Here, I might want to add a little shadow for the cheek. The will be enough for now. Okay. Now, the arm here when you have the arm pit showing. Remember, it's possible to reshape the body a little bit. I'm adding a slight shadow here. I'm noticeing a shadow here with the wrist. Okay. Since we're drawing on a white background, we need to make sure that the other side shows in places. That's why I'm adding a little bit of graphite, but not all around, so it doesn't look like I outlined the shape in some strategic spots like here, there, so we can see where that arm is actually ending once we activate everything. Just noticing we have a shadow over here. Underneath the fingers here so that we can see them pop. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm going to make that part a bit darker two. I think that looks pretty good for now. I'm going to make that line a little bit more visible here. I'm going to start pressing a little harder. Now I'm starting to see where this is going. I'm pressing a bit down here. You can see there's a shadow. Notice also how this part is darker on the reference. I want to make this too dark because the dress is light, but remember the background itself is pretty light. It won't pop if we don't add color. You can see we're getting bolder as we keep adding details here. It's really a gradual process. Now, I'm going to just place little strokes that look like they're messy, but it's normal because if you look at the dress, we do have these pretty creases in it, and a pencil is a perfect medium to actually show that. Okay. Here, we're going to want to add a shadow. We can see it in the reference underneath. I'm not pressing too hard for it. Remember the dress is white, but we want to add it so we can see it's beneath this area there. Also adding a few creases here. I can keep refining. I'm being messy here, but it's actually nice to be able to place those little strokes. Okay. Same strategy here. You want the dress to show a little bit. That's why I'm adding a little bit of graphite. Now let's focus on the shadows in this area and we can draw the muscle here. We also want this leg to detach itself from the other one a little bit. That's why I'm adding some graphite here. This area is anyways, catches less light. Okay. Same here. I'm just going to press a little bit harder. Here, it's pretty dark. I'm trying to render that. We also have shadows from the dress on there. It's important to make sure they appear over here as well. Now let's take care of the feet and we'll almost done with this part. Okay. I'm being approximate once more here not trying to draw all those traps exactly. Here, I'm going to press it a little more to make sure I get the creases in the shoes. And let's not forget the shadow right there will help us make it even more realistic. Again, let's observe to notice this is a tilted line. Here we already have something that looks pretty good. The next step is going to be to activate this and that's what we're going to do in the next lesson. I'm going to show you exactly how to use graphite pencils when it comes to turning a drawing into a painting. 9. Activate the Paint: So now I'm ready to activate the drawing. You see that I have my water jar ready. I have my paper towel, can have a rag, if you prefer and I have my paint brush. I decided to go for that smaller one. I think it will be easier for this size. What we need to do is wet it, first of all. Then we're going to make sure to remove some of the excess. And you see it's very fast. I just dab it once or twice quickly on the paper towel and that's fine. Now I'm going to work section after section. Here in the hand, for instance, I would like to keep this area pretty light, which is why I'm going to start wetting that area, that's white. Now I'm going to start activating the darker part. You might wonder why I would even want to wet a part that we haven't colored. And why not just start right away by activating the parts that we color this? That's because by wetting the white part here, and we're going to keep doing this. Then when we activate the darker parts, they melt into the light ones, and that creates a natural gradient without you having to do anything extra. Instead of having a harsh line that wouldn't look very nice nor very realistic. That's a little trick that you can use to make sure you get a natural gradient in your water soluble pencil drawings. So now we're going to keep going, and you'll notice that I keep rinsing my pain brush each time and then repeating that step of rinsing wetting and then getting rid of the excess water. Because if you don't rinse it, you're going to keep transferring the pigment that you pick up. It's very important to do this. I keep going section after section. Okay. So now, again, I rinse my paint brush and I repeat. I'm still looking at my drawing to make sure that this is looking exactly like I want it to be. Okay. Now, I'm going to keep wetting the white part in between the arm pit and the edge of the arm. Look at how easily the paint actually melts into the figure. It's very easy. The fact we use a little water also really helps in preserving those wider parts. Remember that we want paper white parts showing to build that realism. Now I'm going to start taking care of the face. I'm sensing I didn't shade that face enough, but that's okay. I'm just wetting it and we're going to fix that. It's going to be easy. So I'm just wet it, and now I'm going to go ahead and wet the features. You see, I'm not super careful. Remember, this is just a figure drawing. It's not like a portrait where we want to be really detailed or anything. This can be a little bit approximate. It's fine. Now I'm going to take care of the ear and it's so dark there, I'm careful to rinse my pain brush frequently. Now the hair. I'm realizing I should have shaded the face a little more so I can just transfer some of that pain time activating in the hair. Transfer it into the face while it's still wet. That's an effective way to work. Now I'm going to be careful here to shape that head correctly, so it's not out of proportion. That will be a little bit hard to fix. I think this looks correct. Here we could imagine there's a bun so we can make it darker and that we can do later if we want to. Okay. I'm activating the neck and this is also a chance to reshape the face. Nothing is firmly set in stone yet at this stage, even though it might feel like it is, but remember we have a darker pencil to use later. We can fix little things and see I'm transferring paint here to draw the butt and I can also reshape that arm when I'm doing this. I'll just add a darker paint later when it comes to time to work with the B pencil. Now I repeat the process here. Okay rinsing my paintbrush each time, wetting the white parts first so that the darker pigments melt into the drawing Okay. Same for the arm. Notice how the arm here is not as close as the one that I drew compared to the reference, and that's okay. I actually don't really like the way that it looks here, but I'll just fix it later. It's not too bad though. Now the dress, we want to keep in mind. It's pretty light in color. I want to make sure to keep those whitest parts. Winning this first, and then following the movement of the body. That really helps in creating the shape that we're activating. Now, I'm looking at this part here. I want to make sure this area stays white. Okay. Now, that built. Activating the little creases here. This is so fast to do once you get the hang of it. Here is same we want to keep some of those light parts showing. This is a darker part, so it's fine. Here it's much lighter. I'm just activating the creases. Okay. This is very meditative I find to do and it's pretty not stressful at all. What a color painting if you've tried it, sometimes can feel a little stressful because you have to be fast. Here you can stop whenever you want and pick up where you left off. They also a good way to get into painting when you used to learn to work with a pain brush. Okay. So I'm going to quickly finish taking care of this area. It's a little darker underneath here. So it's okay to add more pigment, keep it less white. Okay. Now the legs. What I want to do with the legs is start with the bottom makes more sense to me to do it that way because it's so much on top. We can keep creating those shapes that we are seeing the shadow from the dress. Okay. What's enjoyable as well with water soluble pencils is the fact that we don't use a lot of water. It dries very fast, so we don't run into problems of one area bleeding into the other one like we would with watercolor. I don't even need to use a heat gun or a hair dryer to actually dry my drawings in between layers, and that's really nice. And now, same thing. I'm trying to recreate these lines. And they still show from the coloring part. That's because we're doing session after session, so we keep more control on the blending and it's easy to just activate the drawing as we actually made it. It will be very hard if we used a lot of water, everything we mixed together. All the paint and then add paint everywhere. If we were trying to blend everything at once, we would lose the actual sketch and drawing. This is what happens when you get started with pencils, usually, you don't know how to use them. It can be discouraging, but it's actually very easy to use when you know the techniques. I'm trying to make sure to keep those shoes light in color. I'm really doing this quickly. Now to activate the shadow, same thing, start with a clean paint brush from the outside here and just start blending so that all that paint melts into the white of the paper. So much nicer. Now we've activated the pencil. You can see this looks pretty realistic already, but it might be nice to add a little touch of color to it to make it even more three D, and that's what we're going to do in the next lesson, see you there. 10. Create a 3D Effect: In this lesson, we're going to repeat what we've done before by coloring and activating the pigment, except that it's going to be much faster because we're just going to add a little bit more pencil to our drawing. We did most of the work here. Now we just need to accent some places, and we're going to do this with the eight B pencil or the six B if you don't have an eight B pencil. It just needs to be a little than this version. Remember, light tone paper, mid tone, that was the four B pencil, and now this is going to be the dark tone. That's where you want to enhance features like the hair, here, the eyes, the nose, some shadows. That's what we're going to do now. Make sure that a pencil is actually sharp and let's start. Now I'm just going to really focus on those darker areas of all. You just want to accent some parts of the body. Try to focus on the ones that are darker here, for instance. And that helps us refine that drawing really well. We can also make a bun for this nice lady here. We're just going to do that here. I'm pressing quite hard now to make this happen to make sure that we get something really dark. Actually adding the bun here is helped me reshaping the neck also. That's nice. So, if you compare my drawing to the original photo, you can clearly see it's not exactly similar, there's a bigger arch in her back on the photo, I find. Also this part is a little bit shorter, I'm noticing. But overall, it doesn't look bad or not realistic. You don't really need to get into crazy detail with figure painting. Then you can also improve as you use the techniques I taught you in the class to sketch and get great proportions. I'm just trying to get the hair line to be a little more visible. Here it'd be really hard to draw the eyes in detail, so we really don't need to aim for that. I'm really just using the tip on my pencil. I still think the nose should be higher. With the water, we can attempt and make it like that. Can make more of a smile on her face if we want. Try to be careful not to add too much to the lips. It can become quickly overwhelming if we do. Here underneath the neck, we're going to want to add a shadow to make that face pop. Okay. And we can of course, press a little harder to make the hair stand out a little more and still get the neck to pop against it. To simple pressure on the pencil, you get the effect that you want. Here. Remember I didn't really like the way that the arm was right there, so I'm just fixing it now. Thanks to the darker pencil, I'm able to reshape it. Now let's just get more shadows over here. Okay. Maybe enhance the hello area there a bit. Here we can emphasize the details in this part. And also the creases, we can make them a little more visible by pressing really hard with the tip. That really adds to the realism really fast. I don't think this area needs more, maybe a little bit here though. Okay. And a little bit there to really get to see each area pop against each other. Now I'm just going to make this dress even more fun and emphasize some areas. Here, I find it might not be dark enough, so I'm just going to add a little bit of a shadow. Makes me think the face would need some shadow too, which I might add later. Here I want to add a few fun creases. Maybe emphasize the creases here as well. Some of them can stay pretty light. I just want to add some contrast here in this part of the drawing. Here also. Now, let's look at the face. I want to shade it to a little bit. Okay. I'm trying to spot the lightest parts, which should be around here on the cheeks, actually. And parts of the nose. Making the face a ser. And now let's move on. Okay. Thinking I want to increase the shadow here a little bit because her skin is a little bit darker here than there. I want to make sure it matches. I think here I'm just going to emphasize those shadows we see coming from the dress. I want to make sure these two parts are distinct from each other. I'm going to leave these parts alone. I think we did enough earlier. Maybe just use the tip here to make the detail a little nicer. And the creases also. I a little more precise. Here, I didn't actually add any creases earlier. Let's do this. I still want to emphasize that part a. And I think that's it looks good enough. Now I'm going to go ahead and activate this in the same way that we did it before. Always starting in the white parts and moving towards the dark ones. Don't forget you can also transfer some paint when it's on your brush. I feel like another area might need some shadow, pick up the wet paint where it's the most intense and transfer. Okay. Okay. Now, if you really were to zoom in my drawing, you can see a little bit of pencil here where the face was a little wider. But because we added darker version of that, then we're able to correct the proportions little by little. That's really cool. You really get to make mistakes and it's not a big deal. You can correct Okay. Now with the hair, we're going to be able to get that rich black or dark gray from our pencil. I can correct the hair line when I'm at it. How we shape the arm here. You can see how much more intense it gets when I run a wet brush on top. I really like the eight B for that. Just know that you don't have to activate everything either if you want to keep a line to look at obvious. I make it darker on purpose, darker than the actual photo just because again, the background is white and I want it to pop. I want some contrast against that background too. Let's use the brush also in a playful way here. We can transfer paint as we activate it and create extra creases if we want to. Remember that's okay if this part here is a little bit darker than the one on top because it's underneath so there's a little shadow. And a tip for you if you need to remove graphite. For example, here you want to make it lighter. Make sure to wet clean your paint brush. It's almost dry now because I removed a lot of the water from it, and I'm pressing hard to lift the paint and make it a little lighter. That's something you can do. If there's an area you don't like. Now let's work on the leg, same strategy as before, wet the bottom first and it's easier to make the rest of it melt into it naturally. I'm rinsing my paint brush very often. Otherwise, it will all get re dark and we'll lose all those little details we've added. Right now, all the shoes is really not much to activate here. That's nice because everywhere I added that darker pencil, the eight B, you can really see the lines making everything pop a lot better. Everything is a lot more intense, better defined. Now again, remember to activate this part, you can even wet more of it here. You really want to make sure that the areas surrounding the shadow are wet. Then you can push the paint into it. See here, I didn't wet it and now I'm getting a harsh line, so I can still do it, of course, as long as I don't wait for the pain to dry. Now let's do it here too. Okay. And I'm just going to transfer a little bit of the paint over here to make that shadow show a little bit more. When that's done, one last thing we can do is just enhance a few things in this drawing directly with a pencil and not activate. For example, if I wanted to enhance the mouth and make her smell. I could very easily could. I just added a little smile on her face. I don't want to do too much on the face so I don't ruin it. So that's it here. We're done. I'm just going to untape this now. Remember that you're welcome to post your project in the project and resources section of the class. I check. I'll give you some feedback if you need some or if you have any questions, you can also write it there or just to leave a message under the discussion tab. It's up to you, but feel free to share the project with us for feedback or just to show us what you've done. Hope you've enjoyed painting this along and learning all my techniques. I'll see you next for some final words. 11. Before You Go: I hope you had a great time using wood graphite pencils. Imagine now what's possible with graphite, but also wacoto pencils and ink based pencils. In the class, we learned it's possible to draw accurate figures with simple shapes, add graphite to build a three D effect, quickly activate the pigment, even correct and refine some areas of the drawing without perfectionism or any fancy tools. I pointed out the flaws in my own art so you can see how forgiving what a stable graphite pencils really are. I hope you got to experience this for yourself too. If you did, please let me know. I encourage you to share your process and your art in the project section of the class. You may also leave a review to let potential students know if the classes are right fit for them. If you want to learn more about this medium, I have three other classes here on Skillshare. I also share a variety of videos on YouTube and tutorials on Patrio. Thank you so much for painting with me today and see you in another class.