Transcripts
1. Introduction: Do you ever feel
your figure drawings look stiff or overworked? If you've ever marveled at classical figure drawings
from the Renaissance and wondered how the masters made it look so
effortless and easy. This lesson is for you all guys, you to draw any pose
from the inside out using the GSL method
for figure drawing, we'll start by drawing
the action or gesture. Then build structure
on top will also learn how to draw beautiful
lines that breathe, making your drawings feel
effortless and confidence. I'm Fay Lu, figurative artists and founder of wind Canvas. I've been drawing figures
for over 20 years, learning from master artists, practicing from live models and teaching life
drawing classes, helping my students improve their skill sets and portfolios. I developed the GSL method
for figure drawing, which has been instrumental in my own professional practice. So I'm excited to share
it with you today. In the next set of lessons, we'll review what the G, S, and L represents and apply it to three
different figure drawings. A female sitting pose, a male action pose, and recreating a famous
master drawing by Raphael will learn how
to draw them together. So you can follow
along with my guide to demo and step-by-step
instructions. If you're new to
figure drawing or have trouble with proportions, I recommend starting with our beginner friendly lessons on proportions and
the GSL methodology. Otherwise, get ready to level up your figure drawing skills
with these studies. And I can't wait to see
what you create at the end. Don't forget to share your
artwork with our community. See you in class.
2. GSL Method: Drawing a Female Body: We're going to draw this
figure step-by-step, starting with the gesture, then building onto the shapes, and then drawing
her outfit on top. The first thing we're going
to draw is the gesture. For the gesture. You can see that
sometimes gestures are more shape based and sometimes they are
more in line based. In this image. I would say that going for a more shape-based
gesture might be easier because look at that shape of the
bottom of her dress. We can all draw that shape
pretty effortlessly. If there is a very,
very obvious shape. You can use that shape
to start your gesture. I know we're stepping into
shape and not so much gesture, but I'm gonna continue
the shape onto the top of her body here,
around her shoulder. Like this. And look at the
size of her torso. Compared to the
size of her dress. The size of her torso would
fit 2.5 times roughly. So make sure that
your proportions are correct from the get-go. Don't make the shape too big. Then once we have that in, then I'm going to draw the arms. Before I draw the arms, I'm just going to draw
a little arm socket, then start to draw
in the gesture. So her arms are very
much like a V-shape. What you're drawing is
your jurist just drawing the action lines of her arms and the action
lines of her legs. I know that part of her leg is hidden behind her dress and
you can't really see it. But when you're
trying to gesture, you want to draw that
complete shapes. So I'm going to start
here and go down. Go up like this. I'm drawing her entire
figure behind that dress. Then look at the negative space here that's between her
dress and her legs. See that negative space. Make sure that you get that in and you use that to help
you with your proportions. And then finally,
this link here, this leg here is a lot lower. Comes down like this. If you look at her eye heals, you can put those two lines
in to help you place them. Make sure you get
that waistline in. Her head has a separate gesture. So if you look at her hair, the shape of her hair is similar to the
shape of her torso, except her torso is going this way and her hair
is going this way. In her hair is a
little bit bigger. Notice where the arms connect. Her chin is right above it. So to draw the gesture of
her face, it's like this. Really your gesture is going through your figure and
not around your figure. There's a gesture of her hair. Draw the gesture of her
hair, just like this. The other gesture that I see is this rose that she's holding. The rose has its own
kind of gesture. I'm going to put
that in as well. Usually I don't spend this
much time on gesture. My gestures are all
really quickly, but I did want to break down my thought process so that it's a little
easier on you guys. You'll notice that I curved
the arm down like this to include the hand because the hand is kind
of the end of your arm. So look at the gesture
that your hand can make. Sometimes like here, you can see the gesture would
look like this. But if I do this, then the gesture would change. Don't leave out the
feet and the hands. Instance, those have
really nice gestures that will add to the action
or the motion of the piece. What I'm really mapping out
as my approach to drawing figures with accuracy
and proportion and form. So we're going to skip form today and we're just going
to stick with shapes. So after your gesture, you want to focus on shape. We've already put
in some shapes, like for example, the
shape of the dress. We've already done that
because this is more of a shape-based gesture versus
a line-based gesture. Now, what I'd like you to do
is instead of outlining or starting to draw the figure
based on what you see, we are going to dissect
this image into shapes. Shapes that are very
simple, not complex shapes. The first thing we
have is this dress. I'm going to make sure
that I get the shape right because the gestures
a little bit off. You can see that the
bottom is fancy. So don't worry about that. Just keep it nice and simple. If you wanted to draw in some of these lines
on the dress. And you can put someone else in because they create
shapes within themselves. I see a very, very clear triangular
shape under her leg here. This is the back of her dress. You want to make sure you get
that triangular shape in. Shape is also really useful for looking at negative shapes. So let's look at the negative
shape that's in-between. You see this little
triangle shape. Try to put that shape in
relation to this shape. So I can see I moved to close this triangle almost
lines up here. Then from this triangular shape, I can start to put in
the average shape. The negative space. Shapes will really help
you with your lines. And it's almost
like a second pass at getting an accurate drawing. You see that triangle shape
that's made from her arm. I'm going to put that
in, reinforce her back. Now I'm going to
draw the shape of her arm and the
shape of her hands. So these are smaller shapes. But again, try not to look
at her as if she's a girl and address just try to
look at her and think, what abstract shapes do I see? Now, I can start to put
in the shape of her leg, which is also a
triangular shape. We're working with positive
and negative shapes here. Keep your shapes as
simple as you can. Now I can kind of put in her
head the shape of her face. You see, shape of the rose. My shape in my gesture
are very close. In this example. What you can do now is just
step back a little bit from your piece and just
glance back and forth at the reference
picture and at your picture, just glance back and forth. When you move your
eyes back and forth, you'll start to see where
things need to change. One of the things I see is her hand right now is
too close to her face. I'm losing that negative
space between her arms and I think the angle needs to come down a little bit more. Now is the time to
make any adjustments. Before moving on to your lines, I wanted to make her
arms a little bit lower. I can see like if
this is the rose, her hand is actually
holding the rows. It's like at the top. I just wanted to make sure that my hand is in the right place. Just a heads up like if
you're into designing your own characters
or stylizing this, I have no issue with you
making this your own, like making this
into a character. Like, let's say you turn
that rose into a lollipop or a microphone and then you
change the style of her shoes. That's okay with me. I'm just here to help you with your gestures In your shapes. This is where you get
good proportions. If you miss the gesture, you can have a very accurate
proportioned drawing, but it will lack action. It's gonna look stiff. If you skip the shape step
and just go into lines, your proportions are
going to likely suffer. So don't miss these two steps. Most people, they really
just start at line. They don't really
put any time into these two parts of the drawing. Now that you have your
gesture and your shape, and you're pretty happy
with how it's looking. You're all set up for your line. It's so much easier to
draw your line when you have a good starting point. Obviously, there is online where it's just kind of uniform
all the way across. This is a straight line. Obviously, you
have curved lines. You also have lines
that breathe. The breathable lines is
what we want to use. If you look at the
reference picture, you'll see that even
the lines on her dress, the folds are not
always perfect lines. Sometimes the lines are thicker on one end and
thinner on the other end. So this is called
a tapered line. Sometimes the line comes
in Really is soft and then it gets harder and then
it exits very soft as well. Kind of like when
you do a checkmark, when you do a checkmark, you're pressing really
hard at the bottom and you're flicking
that checkmark up. At the top here, you get what's called a fade. So you can see that this
line fades in and out. We can also start hard and then fade out
and then end heart. These lines will give you a
much more realistic look. Then this slide, a hard
line all the way across. Try your best to put
thoughts Into the lines. Don't just kinda outline
everything the same. I'm going to start right here. Because the back is
a really nice place to start because there's
a really nice curve. I can see some
tapered lines here. I don't want my lines to connect unnecessarily because your eye will connect them automatically. So I can see a triangle
shape in here. So I'm just finding
shapes that are easy for me to draw and
putting those in first. Then if I look at the
side of her dress, I'm going to use
later line here, maybe a line that breathes
a little bit better. Now what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna put more details so you can see that
there's a bump here, the back part, her butt and her leg is causing this curve. And then as it comes down here, it's a little bit straighter. And then as it comes
here it's more curved. Look at the line work here at
breathes, it has variation. Now I'm going to do the
other side of her dress. Thanks that don't
worry about making these folds at the bottom exactly like they
are in the picture. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you want to sort of mark
in some of the big ones, you can just draw in
some of those shapes. If you feel like that will help. Break it down for yourself. I'm almost thinking about
line as if it's music. Do you guys know what
the term crescendo and decrescendo means? A Crescendo looks like this. And a D crescendo looks
like that in music, right? So this means you're
gonna get louder and then this means
you're going to get quieter with your line. You want to think of your line
work like that to write as your lines get thicker,
it's emphasizing something. And as your lines get thinner, it's kind of letting that
go back into the distance. We're going to think of
line from now on as music. For example, if we
look at her leg here, notice how the line at the
bottom of her leg is a lot thicker than the line
at the top of her leg. Because the line at the bottom
of her leg is some shadow. I'm going to on
purpose make the line on the bottom thicker
than the line on the top. Make that thicker and
then the line on the top, I'm gonna keep nice and light. When you are drawing knees. Use more angles in the knees. Try to draw the knee with
angles because there's bone, there's a kneecap. So anytime you're drawing bone, you want to use more
angles and anytime you're drawing like flesh or muscle, you can use more curves. The other thing about legs, when you're lining the legs
as you want to make sure that the lines have an overlap. So you can see her calf
is slightly overlapping, her thigh in terms of this line. So now I'm just going to draw
in the curve of her leg. And then the other side
is much straighter. I know that there is
a slight curve to it, but you want to make
sure that the curve on her shin is a lot less than
the curve of her calf. I kind of made her calf a little bit too wide
at the bottom. Pay attention to your line
work and try to make sure that every single line that you put
down counts for something. That it's not just
like Minds list. Since you've already
set yourself up. Now I'm going to put
in the triangle shape here using my negative
space as a guide. And I can now see that this
leg should be thicker. You want to make sure that
both of the calves and both of the thighs are
the same thickness. You don't really see this one as much because of a shadow. Really use your negative space to help you find your
positive states. For example, like the space between her dress and her arm, is really hard for
me to get that right unless I draw the negative
space in-between. I know it's a lot
to think about, especially like with
line variation, It's not the easiest thing to
keep in mind all the time, but I think being able
to break it down like this will definitely help you focus on one
thing at a time. Because if you're
just outlining, you're kind of doing all three. Like you're trying to
keep the gesture in mind. And you're trying to
draw the shapes and the lines and then it
just gets overwhelming. You guys are drawing the hair. The hair is a really
good opportunity for you to use some
of these lines. I've made her hair more
voluminous than in the picture. That's okay. I'm just going to add some style to the hair. Doesn't have to follow
the image exactly. By the way, I'm
making the bottoms of my shoes nice and thick. I would always start
with the bottom, the bottom shape of the shoe and makes
things a lot easier. If you're drawing hands, it's probably easier if you
guys draw like a mitten shape first and then divide
that mitten into fingers. And don't worry about
making the rows perfect. You can change that
into whatever you want.
3. GSL Method: Drawing a Male Body: How do you draw anatomy? You know, how do you
draw big muscles? And I know we've
drawn a lot of girls, but we haven't really
drawn like big torso, six pack a pack, lots of muscles and
this kind of pose, Let's draw in the
overall integer here. He's kind of like
curved diagonally here. I'm drawing the top of
his arm all the way to his foot with one curve
like I know it does this, but I'm just going to
keep it simple for now. I'm gonna mark
where his foot is. Then I'm going to draw the other part of his arm which kind of
comes down this way. Then I'm going to mark
where I think his waist is and then draw the other
leg coming down this way. His foot. You can sketch out
an alignment there. Find where you think
his other foot is. Now I'm marking down where I
think his knees are right. So I usually start with one knee and then I go and I
find the other knee. And then I'm going to
draw in both of his legs. Almost looks like a cube here. Now I might mark in the
gesture of his feet, remember these are
just gestures. Then where I think
his shoulders are. You can measure it
out like for example, if you think his torso is
about the same size as calf, you can kind of compare and estimate the
size of his torso. His torso is very
triangular here. And I'm going to mark where
I think his fists go. I feel like I made his
torso a little long. It's probably about there. If I find the middle of
his arms for his elbows, draw a line between one
elbow and the other elbow. I can see that his head
is underneath that. I'm going to sketch in his head. Notice you see the
bottom of his chin. So make sure you put that in. Next, you can find some
secondary gestures. So I'm going to put in writing
his butt goes overall, I feel like I made his
torso really short. So I'm going to adjust adjusted, bring it a little lower. This is my basic kind of lay
in keeping it very rough. I noticed that the space on this side is wider
than this side, which is why I moved his
head over a little bit. This is more of
like a longer pose, drawing rather
than a short pose. Next I'm going to try to
draw in his ribcage and his hips and where his
legs are attaching, like where his arms
and legs are attached, imagining he's got a lot of muscle kind of all
around his ribcage, so it is really hard to find it. I'm going to start
with his head first because I can see
that pretty clearly. Because he's looking up, his head is going to
be a lot shorter. A lot shorter than it
would look normally. Because it's tilting
up, it's condensed. I'm going to draw the kind of like the bottom
of his chin here. Notice how thick his neck is. I noticed it's really short here and really
long on this side. When you're drawing somebody
super, super athletic, It's kind of hard to see the ribcage because all you
see is the muscle on top, but it is important to
know where that ribcage is and how big it should be
in relationship to the head. Generally speaking, males have slightly wider rib cages than
females and much bigger. It's roughly about two
times the size of the head. Let's sketch out his ribcage. Make sure you make it two
times the size of his head. And it's roughly an egg shape. His ribcage is also tilting up. I'm drawing like
that whole kind of underneath his room cage there. So next is the hardest part is figuring out how to
draw those hips. And sometimes if you can't figure out where
to put the hips, you can put in where
the legs are bending. Like where are the legs
are attaching to his hips. They're attaching this way. This way. That's the underwear shape. So after you find that
underwrote shape, it should be easier
to put in the cube. The prism for the hips
look at where his butt is. His butt's kinda hear
where that butt is, is where it's turning is how those hips are
turning and kind of where this corner
here is his sit bone. If he was sitting,
that's kind of where his bone would be
touching the surface. I want to make sure that I
don't make his hips too wide. Because if you make
them too wide, then it starts to look
less male and female. Next, I'm going to start
putting in his leg. This leg is very foreshortened. If I look at where his knee
is in relation to this knee, It's like if I look at
this part of his hip, it's like right below the hip. So his knee is right here. Kind of like in the
middle of that hip box, kind of covering it
up a little bit. I'm going to draw
the cylinder for this leg and then attach it. And then I'm gonna do the
same thing for his other leg. This one's a little bit wider. Now it's like that. You can see that this, this cylinder is like overall
it's fatter than this one. Because this one you're looking
at it from the side and this one you're looking at
it severely foreshortened. Okay, so now let's
attach it to the bottom. I'm going to draw
another cylinder that's kind of open this way. It's going to attach to his leg. You'll see that one foot appears to be smaller
than the other, but it's just at a
different angle. So you want to try to make that shape as
obvious as you can. But generally I draw
them like wedges. Alright, so next let's
attach the arms. Like what is going on here? Like we need lots of
muscle to fill this in. What I'm gonna do is draw two
spacers for the shoulders. So those go right above
the ribcage like this. And then we'll figure
out we're gonna go cylinder the cylinder. So I'm going to draw the
top of this cylinder. Top of this cylinder. Here. We're going to attach it. We're gonna put the
muscles on later. Right now what we're
doing is we're just drawing the structure. This is the gesture. Then shape. But in this case
we're drawing form. Shape is the 2D or
form is the 3D. We're drawing form. If you're an animator, you want to focus on form. Shape always comes
ahead of form, but shape can be integrated into the gesture
just like we were, kind of like blocking
in those shapes. And then lastly is line. We have the GSL
gesture shape line. The line part is where a lot
of us struggle with as well. So let's start in
his torso area. There's a lot of muscles here that are kind of coming out, but they don't really have
anything to do with the form. Just like if somebody if
you're drawing somebody in the really big or they're obese, they still have the same
skeleton that we do. They still have the
same forms that we do. It's just everything like the fat and the
muscle is on top. Let's start by drawing like
figuring out his torso here. I'm going to start
to put some of these lines in and paying attention to what's in
front and what's behind. This is his deltoid. His deltoid is behind his bicep. Let's put his bicep in. His bicep is going to
overlap the deltoid. This is his armpit right here. And then over on this side we're going to make
this muscle nice and long. All of those muscles
attach onto that cylinder. This is his chest plate. The side of his chest was
coming out very muscular there. And then he's got some
side muscles on this side, all the way it down. Their wrist is going
to be a lot box here. And then over here, this part is overlapping. Think about what's on
top and what's behind. This is overlapping. Here. Onto his other deltoid. Muscle. Armpit. Bicep. Bicep goes behind is on top. That's actually his chest
muscle that's being stretched. Then with this arm here. This nice and thick, really thick look
at the thickness of the arm compared to the
thickness of his head. Like his arms are almost
as thick as his head. I might actually make this
one a little thicker. This muscle group
comes out from behind, but sits in front of the arm. You can see it wrap
around the arm. Then you'll start to see these little these
little dimples here on the side of the chest. That's part of the ribcage
showing through back muscle. This goes into the oblique. Then I can draw his shorts, kind of wrap around like that. And then I might draw
the top of his shorts. You can draw some of
the folds as well. You do always want to make
the opening little bit like hanging below
the leg there. They'll see you like
his legs are flexed, rounded at the top. I added some wrinkles
in his pants. But they will follow the
direction of the form. At the top. You'll notice that his nipples are not at the site at all. They're like very
outstretched here because his whole torso
is being stretched. You can kind of put
them in and then make them a little bit longer. Then now we get to do the fun part where we
try and all the muscles. You can start to put
in some of the abs. Generally there's like four. That are underneath
the chest plate and then one that's like right
above the belly button. So the belly button is right in between the ribcage
and the hips. Then this one is kind of
going into his pants. You don't really see it as much. But just so you know
where these landmarks are and how they fit
across the ribcage. In terms of line quality, I'm really focusing on overlapping lines and where
to make the lines thicker. Which line goes in front
and which line goes behind, and how those lines
attached to each other. Now for the legs, he's got very muscular legs, but I do want to
show you my approach to drawing the knees
because I like to put these little nacho chips for the kneecaps because
our kneecaps move independently from
the rest of our legs. It just really show that muscle wrapping around the form here you can really see the
boxing IS of his leg. It turns into more of
a boxy shape here. This overlaps. We're gonna put his
calf muscle in. Notice that the socks
curved this way. That means that your cylinder are all kind of
curving this way. Your spirals or coils
are curving up. Really see that muscle. They're understanding
how these muscles wrap around your main shapes. A really important, I hope that this was helpful. This is a method that I
kind of developed over years and years of
trial and error because nobody showed
me how to draw figures. They were just like
draw what you see. Then yeah, it was really tough, but I find that this
really helps me understand the figure
thoroughly from the inside out.
4. Master Study After Raphael: Let's do some more
figure drawing. And I have an example today, something a little
bit different. This was drawn in
the 15th century, maybe 16th century, which
is a very long time ago. Back then, people didn't even
know how anatomy worked. They didn't know
anything really about Oregon's people were
very religious. They weren't allowed to dissect bodies because
bodies were sacred. This type of drawing
is like really, really advanced because if
somebody drew this today, it would be pretty believable. Raphael was an Italian artist. You probably know him
as a ninja turtle, but he was a very skilled
draftsman and figure drawing. And he drew these
figures from life. So these were life studies. The reason I chose this piece
is for the line quality. Notice that the line work in the shadows are a lot darker. Lots occur. Notice how it's darker around the joints,
around the bones. Darker along the elbow. So anywhere where
there's shadows, where there's bones,
here's her hip. It's a little bit darker. Here's our needs a
little bit darker. So I hope you start to
recognize those patterns. And I'm really hoping
that we'll start to work on the line quality
for this figure. What we're doing today is
called a master study. The benefits of a master
study is that you are copying the techniques of somebody who spent their
entire academic life practicing to get there. So essentially you're
learning how Raphael interpreted this increase after all of his life
drawing practice. And when you're
doing a master copy, you don't want to just copy it. You really want to study
like why are you doing this? What can you learn? Why is this artist so
famous so that you can get the most value and impact
with the exercise. So what I notice first off with her is that
she's very diagonal. Sometimes what you can do is you can put your drawing
tool in that direction so you feel the movement or
the gesture of your subject. Just try to capture that up. First. Then there's always like
a counter gestures. So if you look at the other
gesture from the top of her shoulder to her arm, there's a bit of a curve
that goes this way. You'll notice that there's
like a big triangle from her hand here all
the way to her knee. Try to visualize that triangle. Always look for shapes. Shapes are your best friend because everyone knows
how to draw a triangle, everyone knows how
to draw a square. If you look for those things, it really helps you draw your figure much
more effortlessly. I'm going to draw the gesture of her foot down here
at the bottom. Right. Now this is a
very abstract shape. I'm going to draw in
the gesture of her arm. Maybe draw, sketch in kind
of like the an angle here. Everything else
where she's sitting, maybe block in the shape of the pillow that
she's sitting on. Just got a couple
of pillows here. One here, one over here. Then I might sketch
out her head. So you'll see that
there's a little button right here so you can kind of draw that
circle in and then draw the secondary
circle behind it. Was kind of like this. Be careful not to make
the head too big. But obviously we can
change it later. Instead of outlining like you don't really
want to outline, but what you do want
to do is you want to mark where the joints are. For example, if you know
that her armpit is roughly here and let's say her
hand is roughly over here. You want to mark the in-between, so that's kind of
where her elbow is. I don't want to draw an outline at this stage
because this is all, this is very gestural. We want to look for alignments
in the gesture phase. When you're drawing gesture, you want to think
about alignment. And you want to
think about rhythm. And you want to
think about angles, alignment, rhythm and angles, That's what you're capturing. You are not at the line phase. Remember, don't draw lines, just draw alignment,
rhythm and angles. The other thing about gesture, it's how you express the action. It's the idea of that action. So it's a little bit of
an abstract concept, which is why people find gesture really difficult to understand. And so did I in the beginning. But the more you practice it, the better you will
be come at gesture. The other thing I'm
going to kind of pencil in is maybe the
midline because it's, you can really see the gesture and the
action in that midline. You can go lightly. I feel like I put my knee
a little bit too high, so I'm gonna move
it a little lower. If your gestures
are your action, your shapes are your proportion. Proportion is something that a lot of beginners
struggle with. And if you struggle
with proportion, you need to go to shape. If you struggled with action, you need to look
at your gestures. If you find that my head is too small or my
head is too big, or I always draw this
part a little bit wonky. Go back to comparing your positive and
negative shapes or your positive
and negative space. That's what's going to help you to get my proportions right. I drew this part as a triangle because I can see a shape inside
that triangle. I drew the head as two circles because it's
very obvious like the shape pops out to me to draw the shapes to kind
of break it down. Now, if you are more
comfortable with shape, you can turn them into forms. Forms are basically 3D shapes. But I usually will
start with shape first. If we want to kind of break
down where her ribcage is, then I'm going to
draw in her hips. Her hips here are pretty square. C. I'm drawing it as a box. Hips are generally pretty boxy. I think I drew her her rib
cage a little bit too low. I'm just going to move
it up a little bit. Now. I'm going to move onto her arms. So I'm gonna put a little
bit of a spacer on either side for her shoulders. Then from there
I'm going to draw the cylinder of her arm. Again, make sure
you draw the tops, bottoms of those cylinders. There's one cylinder. I'm going to compare where I put the elbow to wear her hips are and I can kind of see that there's a bit
of a space there. Whereas if I look at
the reference picture, it kind of aligns with the hips. I feel like overall ammeter
arm a little bit too long. I'm just going to show it a bit. Don't worry about
all of those bumps. Okay? Don't worry about
the muscle for now. Just try to focus on
the simple forms. Then if you are
drawing her hips, try to find the
middle of that box. Because the middle of that box, if you draw a little triangle on the middle of
the box like that, That's kind of where
the butt cheeks starts. It starts like right there. Then from there I'm going to
draw her leg as a cylinder. Kind of going all
the way down here. Towards the bottom. I'm going to draw
it more as a box. So this is gonna be
more of a complex form. So there's simple shapes, simple forms and complex forms. If you think about a form
as a sphere or a cone, or a cube, this would
be a simple form. A complex form would be a combination of
the simple shapes, for example, a cylinder
to rectangular prism. For example, in the wrist. If I wanted to draw
this part as more boxy. This right? Now It's a complex form that
I've just turned this into. Same thing with her leg. Draw that as a complex form. Always start off
simple because we tend to complicate things
when we draw. Just start off simple. You can always get
gradually more complex. Now for her foot, people have different
methods of drawing feet. Some people like to draw feat, especially when a foot
is on their tippy-toes, to draw the heel as a
circle and then draw the gesture of the
bottom of the foot. So say it's like that
and then connect it. So really it's like a rectangle and a circle that's connected by
these two lines. One thing I noticed
about my drawing and about the reference
picture is like if I compare the middle of
her pelvis to her foot, her foot is really close
to that middle line. Whereas if I look at
the reference picture, her foot is a lot less angled. So my foot's two angled. Her foot is more like this. So I don't think
I'm gonna change it because I drew it
in colored pencil, but I do want to acknowledge
that the angle is different. Next I'm going to draw her arm, draw that cylinder,
then her head. So even though I drew
two circles here, I'm going to attempt to
draw the ball and shield. The ball. She's looking up. Here's the shield. A lot of people have
trouble connecting the neck to the torso. Here you're lucky
because you can't, you don't really
see that connection because it's covered
by the hair. But let's draw that in any way. How it would connect, it would connect with
a cylinder like that. It's important to understand
how things connect, because you never want to just draw it and
hope for the best. You always want to
know why you're drawing things and
how they connect and don't avoid learning
about those connections. Next, I'm going to draw just
the shape of the pillow. The pillows are not
really that important. The long run, but it's
important that they're there. Then the last thing is
the shape of the hand. So the shape of the
hand, more squarish. It's kind of an angle like this. The fingers pointing
up upwards like that. I kind of exaggerated her hip. I don't think he would see
that much of the side. You can kinda see ulcer. She's leaning forward a lot
more so like this angle, I need to adjust. Make any adjustments that
you think you might need.
5. Continuing the Master Study: When you're drawing line, you want to think about
depth and variety. Actually line contradicts
depth really, when you put an outline
around something, it immediately comes forward
or becomes more graphic. But in terms of realism, when you're drawing line, you really want to
think about how to express fluidity rhythm. Again, there's also rhythm
in line, just like Gestures. Gestures are line-based. Line expresses a lot more
than it's given credit for. But let's say I start
to draw in her armpit, little bit of her
shoulder blade here. Her ribcage is usually touching
the line at the bottom. When your bony on the side here, your ribcage, that part
touches your Bone. Little pocket of fat here. Think about overlaps. Really try to copy how Raphael
interpreted this line. Think about this muscle here. Kinda how it gets darker. The hip is bony. I'm going to emphasize
it with line. That's what line does. Think about variety. Think about depth. Depth would be like overlaps. What are you trying
to emphasize? The knee here? Nice thick line. I think I'm going to make
her foot a little bit higher because it's bugging me. Here. I'm really thinking about
every single line I put down. I want it to have variety. Don't want it to look cartoony. Because you can always apply
this to better cartooning. Let that line breathe
as much as possible. You notice that she's got
like another link here. I forgot to draw
that shape actually. That shape. Gesture wise. It shares the same
angle like that. Then shape wise, it's kinda
like a trapezoid shape. Again because this knee is further away from
you than this knee. It should be a little bit later. It's not as important because
it's not as close to you. A little bit of
fabric here that I can kind of draw in as well. You can see that the
fabric is like it's there, but it's really not emphasized. It's there if you look for it, but I didn't even notice
it when I first saw it. From the hip. Draw this curve which
goes to the ribbon. And now I made it to her other
armpit like full circle. But a lot of people,
they just kinda jump to the line and they don't really do the rest of the homework. Then sometimes there are
people who are really good at just copying line and they
can get away with it but, or they're skipping
a lot of steps. But generally speaking,
your gesture is almost the most
important because it expresses the idea. First. The idea of the pose. If you only had 30 seconds
to express oppose, you can do that with gesture, but you cannot do that with
just drawing an outline. You'll notice that
her deltoid here, this muscle is flexed
because again, the deltoid is the muscle
that will raise your arm. When your arm is raised, your deltoid is flexed. I'm going to go a little bit
heavier on the line up here. Feel free to turn your
page if you need to. I'm trying not to for this demo, but normally I would be
turning the page so it's not awkward for me to
draw certain things. For her face. This is a really weird angle. Just make sure that
you have this curve figured out before you
start drawing the face. So the most obvious curve
is like right under here. I started by drawing the underside of her chin,
which is right here. Because I can see a visible space between her
chin and her shoulders. I see this space right here. That's very obvious to me. That's kind of where I started. And then I drew the eye
socket and the cheek. And now I'm going
to put in the nose, then put in the mouth. If that's hard, don't worry. Just like come back to
it, Just do it later. I kind of feel like I
made her head too small. She looks manly because I
made her head to smoke. Let's make her hedge
slightly bigger, better. Then this arm has very, very light lines
because it's supposed to recede and go
into the distance. I got her flat then for the rest of the items
and not really just going to put in some more
expressive lines. Value will emphasize
certain areas, but value gives you contrast. You'll probably
notice that contrast, emphasis, proportion. These are all
principles of design. Just like your elements of art. Line as an element of art
shape is an element of art. Value is an element
of art and you need your elements of art to express
the principles of design. You can also shade with line, this is called hatching
or crosshatching. Shading with the line is really
effective because you can express the direction
of forms by hatching. What I started with
is my darkest darks. So whenever I shade, I always say, Okay, where is my darkest dark? It's like right under that foot. So that's where I'm gonna
start shading first because it's the
fastest way to shade. Then once I've done that, I'm going to put a bit
of a cast shadow on the bottom of the
foot like that. Then what you want to do is
just squint at the piece, just kinda squint and see
where those shadows are. Where the most obvious
parts of those shadows are. When I squint, I see that
there's shadow here. I see that the light is
coming from this direction. From the top. This is my light source. Always know where
your light source is before you start shading. So if I know the light
source is coming from there, then I know that all of these shapes here
will have a shadow. Sometimes you can
kind of draw that in and then shade
it pretty quickly. If you're using content, you can just do it in, use the side of your content and kind of do it in one pass. Here I'm the hatching. Getting darker. Sometimes you'll see
artists kinda like Hatch one area like
let's say they do this. They kind of blend the
background with the figure. So if I did this,
I'm saying, okay, I want this leg to
be in the distance. I'm kind of blending it
in with the background. Take your time. I know I'm
going a little bit quickly. But take your time with this. Shading is really, it becomes a lot easier
when you start to understand form more
and how to actually shade things that
they look more 3D. One thing I'm gonna do now with shading is I'm going to
put a bit of a gradient. I don't want the foot
to be so prominent. Think about where you want
your emphasis to be, right. If I look at this figure, I want the emphasis to be like
at this part of her body. So I'm going to give the
overall leg bit of shading. Now. Her leg is not as important. Emphasis in contrast are
related to right now. Whereas before her leg had very high contrast because of the surrounding darkness here. But I don't really
think her leg is that important or maybe I
disagree with Rafael. Made her foot overall darker and I also made her
foot a little bit bigger because I felt like her foot was too
small in his drawing. Sorry, Raphael. Time to add some quick shading. Then you can take some
creative license as well. Like I'm gonna make her
hand a little bit darker. I like the aesthetic of it. I'm gonna make this
arm a little bit darker because I'd like
the aesthetic of it.
Winged Canvas, Classes for Art Nerds
