Freehand Perspective Sketching: 7-Day Messy Drawing Challenge

1. Introduction : Can't draw well unless you're willing to get a bit messy. This is especially true in perspective when perspective drawing can feel especially intimidating or exact or precise. This class is all about getting messy. In this class, we're going to go small to tackle big themes and concepts in freehand perspective drawing. Over the course of seven exercises, hopefully done over the course of seven days, you'll have the chance to try your hand at different techniques in freehand perspective drawing, learning different concepts, thinking about techniques in different ways, and hopefully gaining some confidence, encouragement, and new skills along the way. You can bring into bigger perspective drawing pieces, paintings, digital artwork further on in your artistic endeavors. Hey. My name's Sam Gillett. I'm a skill share top teacher. Perspective has been a foundational part of my drawing practice, whether it's sketching and sketchbooks on trips or tackling immersive three D scenes that exist or some that don't exist at all. Perspective drawing is about how you perceive the world and how you connect what you see to what you draw. The connection between hand and eyes is so important, and that's what we'll be just practicing throughout these next seven days. I'm going back to the basics and practicing how we draw lines and how we think about the lengths and scale of what we draw to talking about vantage points, horizon lines, about distance, about scale, about depth, and about composition. Each of the seven days will take you through a different five minute exercise. You can do it while you have your coffee or while you unwind from work. By doing little studies of free hand perspective sketching, my theory is that you'll be better prepared and more confident to take on larger artwork after this class. Let's do the math. Seven days plus 75 minute or less drawing exercises. Plus, let's say one pen and one sketchbook. I think that's a winning combination, and I'm so excited to draw with you, talk about free hand perspective with you, and see what you create, as well. Let's get sketching. 2. Project Video: This class is broken up into seven projects. And ideally, it's designed to be done over the course of one week with a drawing, little sketch each day. This is made possible by the fact that we're doing these sketches in a small format. Each one is small, meant to be bite sized and welcoming for you to draw quickly. For this class, you'll be drawing seven different small, sketchy little sketches. It might not be work that you're super proud of. Maybe not pretty enough to go up on your fridge, but I want to see it, and I think the other students in this class will, as well. I'd invite you to post at least one or two sketches in the project page and include some notes about the sketch you've drawn, what you found difficult or easy or helpful about the exercise. Let's talk about the materials and supplies you'll need to complete this class. Skin is a brand in a kind of sketchbook that's really synonymous with sketching, whether it's urban sketching, whether it's jotting down ideas, whether it's taking notes in university. These sketchbooks have accompanied me through so many years, through so many countries and through so many times in my life. I love the fact that they're hardcover, meaning you can lay them out on a table and draw flat, but they're also small enough to fit in a day bag, and they don't take up muchroom in a backpack as well. However, on a lot of my trips recently when I'm doing smaller sketching in particular, I love to use these Muji sketchbooks that are even smaller and even thinner, as well. I used up this entire book on a recent trip to England, and it kind of set me into this pattern, and each time I do a trip, I take a book like this and try to fill up all the pages. However, for this class, I don't think you should think too much about the sketchbook you're using. The key is that it's small. The reason we're drawing on small sketchbooks is because I think that limits the size of the drawing we can create. And it makes it feel more manageable. We can focus more on the techniques on the concepts and on the subject we're drawing, rather than how we kind of fill a page or rather than getting overwhelmed by maybe the time it might seem like it takes to fill in that page. The exact drawing tool you use doesn't matter too much here. The focus is going to be on perspective techniques, not really, you know, how we lay down the ink or graphite on the page. Being said, my main daily driver when it comes to sketching is a Penco timber mechanical pencil. It's about a two B softness, which means it's a little bit on the soft side. The reason I like drawing with a softer pencil when it comes to perspective is because I like seeing the marks that I'm leaving on the page. Sally, and this is totally optional, but one thing I found really useful when it comes to my drawing practice is by associating drawing with something I really enjoy. And it can seem a little bit obvious, but especially if drawing is something that's a little bit tough for you or you're just getting into drawing, associating it with a great snack, hot chocolate, coffee, tea, or a great, you know, cookie, something like that can be such a great way of making it a little lovely ritual, a part of your day. I often draw at night while I'm listening to a podcast, and I find associating art with another art form or with a lovely treat or an indulgence can really make it seem like a more, you know, treasured part of my daily routine. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about line. We're not even going to talk about perspective in the first day of this challenge. So I'll see you tomorrow. We're going to talk about line. We're going to talk about the marks we make on our pages and how those can translate into three dimensional spaces. 3. Day 1: Drawing Lines: If you are watching this, that means you have taken the plunge and joined my seven day free hand perspective drawing challenge. So excited to draw with you today. But unfortunately, we're not going to be drawing perspective today. We're just going to be making marks on our sketchbook. The way that we think about laying down lines on the page can change how we tackle three dimensional scenes and perspective drawing writ large. That sounds like a pretty hoy, toy lofty statement, but let's dive in and talk about what I mean. In this day, one lesson, we're gonna practice drawing lines. So first, I want you to put down your pencil and pick it up. How you pick up your pencil and how you hold it, that'll change from person to person. I'm not going to tell you how to hold your pencil, but you can see that I'm holding my pencil in between my thumb and my forefinger. But the key here is that I'm holding it lightly. I think gripping your pencil lightly is so important when drawing in general, but especially when figuring out how to draw in perspective. The tighter you grip your pencil often makes your lines wobbly or makes you draw too dark or too light. Let's try it out. I if I draw slowly with my hand gripping the page, I, for one, find that very tiring. My hand might cramp up, and for two, I find it helps me it makes me draw slower. If I'm drawing a little bit looser, I find it easier to draw lighter lines, and I find often it's more sustainable in the long run when I'm drawing larger scenes, especially. Next, the control over your lines is super important. You might have a hard time drawing lines that appear straight like these ones here. But there's a couple of tips that you can keep in mind to make your lines even straighter. Straight lines are really key when we're drawing in free hand. We're not going to make lines perfect, but we want to make them appear to be going in a straighter direction. Notice that my hand is kind of parallel to the line. When I'm drawing a line upward, I'm drawing it up like that. I'm not trying to draw a line sideways like that. You'll notice when you compare the two that these lines appear a little bit different. This one has an uneven structure to it. It's thin and it gets thicker, there's also a little wobbly little bit there. You try it yourself and let me know what you think. Draw a line straight up with your hand parallel to the line, and then one across with your hand perpendicular. I'd be interested to know what you find easier. I find drawing my lines up really follows the flow and the way the muscles in my hand work. I can move my hand up rather than crunching my fingers and then drawing a line across the page. That means that you can even switch the page around when you're drawing. Next, I want you to try seeing what it's like to draw with your whole arm, not just the rotation of your hand. Here's what I mean. When you see experienced artists draw and draw in perspective, especially, you'll see them using the whole page. You'll also see them moving their arms across the whole page as well. That's often it's useful to have your arm and your hand in a neutral position when you're sketching. As we talked about with how we grip the pencil, having your hand and your wrist relaxed can help your lines appear more natural and often more straight as well. Let's try a couple examples here. For this line, I'm going to keep my wrist in the same position, I'm going to rotate my wrist as I move up the page, you can see especially right here when my wrist is curved out, it's a little bit harder to maintain that control because right here, your hand is in a different position and I'm gripping the pencil differently than when I'm drawing up here. See that difference? I find it more effective to move my whole hand as I'm drawing these lines. So I'm starting with my wrist in a neutral position, and I'm moving my hand up the page. Try those and let me know what you think. Which method works best for you. Now, we've added a lot of lines to this page so far today, and we're going to add a few more. When drawing in free hand, one thing that you'll find is that you're often drawing over the same lines you've drawn. That's because often we don't get it right the first time, and drawing shapes over and over again can help us perfect them or perfect them to an extent. Here's an example. I want you to try to draw a circle. Now, my circle looks pretty good, but you can see how it's a little bit wobbly. There's some uneven edges there. It can be far more useful or efficient when you're drawing free hand to draw over shapes multiple times. This makes your drawing look a little bit messy, sure, but I think it adds some nice style, and it also means that your shape becomes the median of all the lines you've drawn. Here's what I mean. If I draw this circle again, I am going over those lines quite a bit. And, you know, maybe this is a little bit thick here, but you'll see how the shape of the circle actually comes out after I've drawn a whole bunch of circles. To me, at least, this circle appears a little bit more circular than this one. Now, you can do that a little bit neater, you know, if you don't have to draw as many lines as I've drawn on the right there. But you can see this shape on the left. I think this one looks even better. Try it yourself. Try drawing a circle just like this with one line, and then with quite a few lines, see what works best for you. This method is used in perspective all the time. And when we're sketching, especially sketching a streetscape or making a rougher sketch, going over your lines many times can help you kind of learn the shapes that you're drawing. It's a really effective method of sketching. Lastly, for today, we're going to practice some line weight techniques. That's because as we'll talk about in further lessons, the way that we draw lines and the density of these lines can convey a sense of distance, scale, and space. Those are all really important techniques when we're thinking about free hand perspective. I want you to draw five or six lines that start really light and get darker. You'll notice that I drew those lines a little bit larger each time as well, and we've almost created a little bit of perspective here in the lines that I've drawn because they get larger, as they come closer to us. Now, having these darker shapes, often they appear closest because as objects recede into the distance, the way that light works and travels and things like smoke or clouds or just the atmosphere in general, often obscures objects farther away from us. Their colors become duller and they become fainter themselves. In this part of the challenge, we really dipped our toes into the fundamentals of perspective drawing. And sure, we didn't actually do any perspective drawing today. But we developed a groundwork, these, you know, intensely valuable tools that we're going to carry on into the next few days of this challenge. We talked about how we position our hands when we draw, and we talked about the direction of our lines kind of corresponding with how our hand and our wrist sits on the page. We talked about moving our whole wrist as we're drawing lines, and then we talked about two super important concepts in perspective sketching. And that is drawing over shapes multiple times in order to really nail the shape, as well as drawing in shapes darker to make the shapes appear closest to us and farther away. Now I know we did not actually draw anything in perspective today, but have no fear. Tomorrow, we're going to really dive into it. So I'll see you in the next part of this perspective sketching challenge. 4. Bonus: Perspective Key Words: In this lesson, we're going to talk about vantage point, horizon line, and focal point and how those are really fundamental aspects of this free hand perspective drawing class. If you feel like you have a decent framework for those concepts, feel free to skip to the next lesson. First, the horizon line. The horizon line is where the sky meets the ground. It's also your eye level. So everything above a horizon line appears to be tilted downward or appears to be above us, and everything below a horizon line tilts upward or appears to be below us. If I draw the horizon line in the middle of the page, that means that anything up here is above the viewer. Anything below here is below the viewer. Now, artists use the horizon line to tell us kind of where we are in relation to the scene. If the horizon line is at the bottom of the page, that means the majority of what we see is going to be above us, and that can be used for making drawings appear intimidating, like we're looking up at huge skyscrapers or maybe that we're very, very small. Where we place the horizon line in our page really forces us to choose where we're going to place the most important objects in our scene. And that has to do with vantage point. The vantage point is where we are in our scene. If we are standing at ground level, we're going to be seeing more the underside of objects above us, you know, like that box I drew earlier. However, if we're standing up in the sky, we're going to see the tops of objects. Or if we're standing beside objects like we are here, we're going to see the sides of these objects as well. And don't ask me what these boxes in the sky are because I don't know. But this is how we create a sense of scale in our perspective drawings. And often, if you're drawing, especially out in the wild, in a city, for example, you're gonna be placing the horizon line fairly low because so many of the interesting things and cities that we want to draw tower above us, you know, like a lovely cathedral or huge skyscrapers. Now, vanishing point the third concept we're going to talk about in this lesson is where all these perspective lines meet. It's on the horizon line. That's key. You can see how these lines don't all directly go right there, because I drew them in with free hand. But the focal point is where those lines go towards. And there are kind of infinite focal points because objects in a three dimensional space are not always perpendicular and horizontal. For instance, these boxes are both parallel, so their parallel lines all lead back to the same point in the horizon. However, a box moving the other direction this would be going back to the horizon in a different direction. You see if I added a box going the same direction up in the sky, it's going to have a different vanishing point. Now, these are infinite and we talked about how we can place objects on the horizon line that appear to be above us. Their vanishing point is going to be way up in the sky. If you follow these lines, they're going to meet way off the paper up there. When you hear me talk about vanishing point or the focal point in our drawings, that's kind of what I'm referring to. It's the area where those lines converge. And in this class, I'll be talking about the vanishing point quite a bit because that kind of directs how we draw our lines and where we draw our lines on the page. I'll also be talking about the Horizon line too. But that's kind of a groundwork for perspective drawing. I went through that very, very quickly. But if you want a more in depth exploration of perspective, you can check out some of my other classes that I've linked in the class description. 5. Day 2: Boxes Above and Below : It's day two of this drawing challenge. I'm excited to see what you create today. Today, we're going to be sketching a small little house. However, we're going to be doing so in a couple different ways and from a couple of different vantage points. So this second day of the challenge is focusing on just that Horizon line vantage points, and our perspective of the scenes we're drawing. Now, if you remember the lesson where I talked about, um, vanishing point and Horizon line, I drew some boxes. I didn't explain how I drew them. Well, this part of the challenge. That's what we're going to do. We're going to start out our journey into actual perspective drawing by drawing some boxes in different parts of our page. But first, we need to add a trustee vanishing point. For this part of the challenge, we're just going to do that across the middle of our page. Doesn't matter if this line is straight or not. And then let's put a vanishing point on the line. Remember, the vanishing point is where all the parallel lines in our drawing on one side of the drawing, at least, are going to converge. We now want to draw a box above and below our horizon line to experiment with what it looks like to actually see an object that is above us and below us. Let's start with above us. What we want to do is draw two really light lines like you're drawing a very long triangle out on a 45 degree angle. Now, these lines can kind of be any angle you want, but they should lead towards that vanishing point, and the top line should be a little bit longer than the bottom line, so they end in a 90 degree angle. Well, that's actually more than 90 degrees, but the one side should be straight up and down on your page. Let's do the same thing here on the bottom. Lines very lightly that form a little triangle where the bottom line now is going to be longer than the top one. We're going to draw it off, so there is a vertical line kind of going right up and down the page. It doesn't matter if these two vertical lines are aligned. Now, what we're going to do is draw one more line on each side. This one a very light line kind of going down to the right hand side to form a right angle, and this one kind of coming up here to form a right angle. You notice, I tried to make these lines pretty light. And that's because they're kind of like a guideline. I just find it's much easier to judge the angle of a line to meet the vanishing point if I draw the whole line. We don't want the whole line in our shape, though, so we're going to cut it off here with another line that's parallel to the first vertical line we drew. And then a line that's parallel to that horizontal line. You can probably guess what we're going to do next. We're just going to square off this shape here. You'll notice that these lines are not perfect. There is some wobbliness. There's some wiggliness to the lines themselves, and that's all right. In fact, I think that should be encouraged because especially when we're thinking about free hand perspective sketching, this is what gives your drawing character and helps you develop your own art style as well. You'll notice I'm also drawing over these lines multiple times, just like we talked about in the first day of this challenge yesterday when we talked about drawing over shapes multiple times in order to get them right. That's helping me to kind of define these boxes and cast off their little guidelines that we use at the beginning. And you can erase these lines or leave them whatever works for you. We have our boxes below and above us, and you can see how this is such a great way to add building blocks in our perspective sketching technique. You know, right now, these are just boxes. They don't mean anything. But just by adding a few details, we can make them into houses, maybe a helicopter, you know, floating planes, anything like that. We just kind of keep those fundamental ideas in mind about the lines going back to that vanishing. Now, some might say this is one point perspective, and it really is because we just used one vanishing point for these horizontal lines to go back to. But I find thinking in such rigid kind of guidelines sometimes cannot be super helpful because if we want to add details to this drawing, you know, or boxes that go other directions, then we have a whole bunch of vanishing points, and it can be kind limiting if we think, Oh, we just have one vanishing point. We can't add in other objects that are, you know, in other directions or other shapes. We have other vanishing points here above us, right? Like, these lines would eventually converge if we drew them high enough. Lastly, today, I want to shade in the boxes we've drawn. Now, I'm drawing some lines with my pencil here on the bottom of the box because I just decided for us that the light's going to be coming from the left hand side of the page. And that means this side would be in shadow, as well. You see how we've really quickly created a three dimensional scene that has depth and space and scale. Now, we have boxes below us and above us, but this really is also a good lesson in determining what you're drawing and where it needs to be. If we are drawing in perspective a small little house, we probably want it to be below us or at least on the vanishing point. But if we're drawing a huge hulking skyscraper, then we probably want it to appear to be above us or above the vanishing point. You can see that these shapes we've drawn can so easily be transformed into whatever you want them to be. We drew over the shapes multiple times to give them dimension and depth, and we started out with some really light lines using these as sort of guidelines as we create these boxes above and below us, the viewer. But remember how we talked about shading in this lesson. Well, that's going to be key in the next part of this challenge, because we're going to draw a sphere floating above us, but we're going to add some shading and talk about the importance of light and shadow in creating three dimensional spaces when we're sketching in perspective. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Day 3: A Floating Sphere: A perfect sphere is something we don't often see in nature. You know, you can look up at the sun and see the shadow on the face of it on the side of it. But we don't often see floating orbs up in the sky, except for today because that's exactly what we're going to draw. While we talk about the shape of a sphere, we're also going to be talking about shading because shading is an integral part of how we make things appear three dimensional. I'd say it's a foundational building block in drawing in general, but it's also going to help us further on in this challenge. In the last lesson of this free hand perspective sketching challenge, we drew a horizon line, and then from that horizon line, we drew two boxes above us and below us all without a ruler. Today, we're going to be drawing another shape and perspective, a sphere, but we're not going to use a horizon line. The horizon line is going to be imaginary. The focus of this lesson is learning how to imply perspective without having to use those guidelines or without having to have a vanishing point at all. What I want you to do is start off with just drawing a sphere. You'll remember in the video about line that spheres are, you know, a hard shape to draw, and it can be effective to kind of go over that line multiple times in order to make sure your shape looks very sphere like or spherical. But hey, it doesn't matter if the sphere is not perfect or if it doesn't appear completely circular. That's totally fine. Right now we have a shape in a two dimensional space. This sphere is not a sphere at all. It's just a circle. In order to make it a spherical, in order to make it look like it's we're drawing it in perspective, we have to define a light source. In the last part of this challenge, we figured out that the sun was coming from the left hand side. But now let's try it from the other side. So if we're imagining the sun is coming from up here, it's shooting its rays towards our sphere from that side of the page. That means we want the shading to be on the left hand side of the sphere. But when we're shading objects like this in perspective, we have to be really careful that we observe how they, you know, cast shadow and how light plays off the different surfaces. When we were drawing a cube or a rectangle in the last class, it was really easy to identify where the shadow would be because there's harsh lines that the sun would only hit one side, the other side being in shadow. But for spheres, that is a lot less defined. Keeping that in mind when we're drawing shapes like spheres in a three dimensional space is really important. That means the shadows are going to be gradually getting darker as we kind of curve around the shape. If there's a coffee cup nearby, you can see how this works or soccer ball, basketball, any spherical shape. In order to start shading in, I'm going to add some hatching lines, some up and down lines in that crescent shape. I'm kind of mirroring the outside of our sphere. I'm going a little bit lightly, and I'd suggest that you start off lightly as well. And then I'm making them more spaced out and lighter as we get to that top right hand side of the sphere. You want to make sure that you have a smooth transition period between the density and darkness of the lines. That might involve adding some darker shading here on this side. Until we have a whole side of this sphere that is in shadow and a whole side that's in light. You know, you might not be happy with how you added shading to your sphere, but that's right. We can figure that out later, and you'll figure that out as you continue to draw. However, the key elements that we need here is one side of the shape in shadow with a highlight here as well. We have the highlight, we have the shadow. And there's some technical words for what these parts of this shadow actually mean and what they do. I'm not going to go over those in this part of the challenge, but if you want more info on shadow and the technical words behind it, check the class description. Currently, we have a sphere. It now looks three dimensional. But if we want it to exist in a space, we need to add a shadow, and that's what makes our drawing transform into a drawing of a sphere to a drawing of a sphere within a three dimensional space. We can think of this in a couple of ways. If the light is hitting the sphere like this, that means that the sphere is casting a shadow like that. We know that the shadow appears larger when the place is hitting is farther away. There's a shadow underneath my pencil, right? When I move my pencil closer to the light and the shadow is farther away, the shadow gets larger and less defined. When my pencil is quite close to a surface behind it, the shadow is darker and smaller. The same applies to objects when we're sketching in perspective. Pretend that the shadow is going to be right here on the ground here. We've drawn out the sides of our sphere. We know it's going to be roughly around there and roughly around here. However, it's not a spherical shadow. It's going to be a sorry, it's not a square shadow. It's going to be a spherical shadow. However, we know that we're viewing this shadow in perspective, which means it's going to be flattened. By drawing a really thin flat spherical shape, we give the sense that the viewer is viewing this sphere straight on and maybe we're standing on the surface that's underneath it. You know, I said weren't going to draw vanishing line, but if you draw a vanishing line kind of halfway between the sphere and the shadow, then it becomes clear that we're sketching a three dimensional space. These basic ideas are super key when you're drawing scenes in perspective or objects or even people. Let's recap the key parts of this challenge today. And that is that when you're drawing spherical shapes like this, the shadows are less defined. They should transition from highlight to shadow gradually. Next, is that the light really defines the three dimensionality and the perspective of our scene. Without the light in this scene, this sphere would not look three dimensional at all. And lastly, the shadows that are cast by objects in a three dimensional scene, they are determined by first the distance between the object and the surface that the shadow is on and also by where we're viewing the shadow. This shadow appears flatter and more oval like because we're viewing the shadow on this space in perspective rather than straight ahead of us. So we know we have a sphere floating above us, but tomorrow we're gonna be talking about scale and about layering different objects. 7. Day 4: Drawing Complicated Shapes: But today, we're going to be talking about a single object again, but a more complicated a more complicated object, a multi sided object. And unfortunately, for us, as sketchers, most objects do have multiple faces. From humans like myself with the side of my head and the front of my head to the camera. I'm filming this on. Objects are made up of different shapes. Thinking about those shapes and how it can break them down to basics is a key part of perspective drawing, especially when it comes to drawing without a ruler. So let's dive into today. In the last two lessons, we drew boxes, and we drew a sphere. And we're going to combine those in this challenge, which is all about drawing irregular shapes because today, you're going to draw your coffee cup, your tea mug, your favorite glass, whatever you have it. If it holds water, chances are it's what you're going to draw today. Drawing irregular shapes can be tough because you're dealing with a whole bunch of curved surfaces or uneven angles that don't seem to comply with our one point perspective rules. If you draw shapes like mugs and maybe they start end up like this, or maybe they end up like this. This challenge is for you. What we're going to do is define our handy dandy horizon line. Let's say that Horizon line is right here, that's our eye level, remember? Let's draw some eyes on it, so we remember that's what we're looking at. And we want to add in a vanishing point. Just like in the second lesson of this challenge, we're going to start by adding in a triangle of guiding lines. We're going to first break our complicated shape down into the basics, and that is making it into a square. Now, you already know how to do this. We talked about this before. We're drawing in a long rectangle and then extending that bottom line back to the vanishing point and squaring it off. Now we have our basic shape. But when we're drawing complicated shapes in perspective, we use these basic shapes which are easier to draw to help us draw the irregular shapes. So first, before we kind of round off our mug, we're going to draw in the handle, as well. We know the handle is going to be round as well, but for now, we can just add it in as another rectangle or another squared object right off the side. How now what we want to do is practice the technique we talked about, which is drawing complicated shapes like spheres or circles by drawing the shape multiple times in order to practice the angle and make sure that the circle we draw is kind of the average or the median between all the lines that we've drawn. Means that the top side of our circle hits the top side of our box, and the sides roughly fit in the sides of our boxes. This is a great way of making sure that the circles you draw kind of roughly match up to that one point perspective guideline that we've drawn. These boxes almost act as the perimeters of our shape. And we're going to do the same on the bottom. Now, we don't have the other sides of the lines on the bottom, but we can kind of mirror that top shape. And again, it's okay if this is rough. We're going to connect those shapes here and connect that shape here. You'll see how this shape can be kind of perfected or kind of adjusted over time as we draw. We have this spherical shape now, and that's kind of the basis for our mug. Coffee is often a my mug, but, hey, if you're a tea drinker or if you have something else in your cup, that's fine to include as well. Currently, we have the mug handle kind of sticking out directly to the side. However, you'll notice in mugs like this, that handle is kind of awkwardly shaped and often irregular, too, and it rarely ever sticks out directly to the side of the mug. The handle could be right here, off to this side or could be even invisible. One thing for sure, it's bigger than I currently have it drawn here. I'm going to extend that square using the square as a guide, but curving the handle down towards the bottom of the mug and adding some weight and thickness to that line as well. Now, you notice the mug I have right here has a little lip on it. If you like, you can add that too. Then when we add liquid to it to really make it look mug like, we're just mirroring that top line of the mug. And then shading in. You know, well, coffee is usually black, but hey, no matter what you're drawing, we're just going to shade in some of the liquid, whatever's in that mug. And then just like in the last class, we need to think about light direction and shading. If we say that the light's coming from the left hand side, that means the right hand side of our shape is going to be in shadow. So just like last time, we're going to add some hatching here. You'll notice I'm kind of curving the hatching around the side of the mug with the darkest spots coming on the right hand side of the mug. And getting gradually lighter until we hit the left hand side of our mug shape. Just like last time, if we're going to extend the shape of the mug, we know that as shadows get farther away from the object, they appear larger. You know, I've drawn this off to the side of the page. We don't have that much room here, but hey, we can just extend a little bit of a shadow that roughly follows the sides of our mug backwards, and then it's going to curve upwards because we know that the sun's coming from this side. So this angle is going to catch the sun, creating a upward curve on the top lip of the mug. This little handle here would also catch some of the sunlight and block some of the sunlight as well. We're going to add little handle to the side of our shadow. By taking first a square shape like this and then chiseling away our perspective into it, we can more easily create complicated shapes like mugs and add on shapes using those easier shapes that we've drawn. Method could be infinitely expanded, and it is when you think about artists drawing, you know, billowing fabric or ships or other curve shapes and three dimensional scene. In the fifth lesson of this class, we're going to be talking about how layering these objects, whether they're complicated or not, can also create a deep sense of perspective and how the size and scale and light and darkness of these objects is integral to creating immersive scenes. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Day 5: Layered Objects (Depth and Distance) : If you have a window, I want you to look out it. Now, you are looking out the window and you're seeing the scene outside the window. And when I ask you to describe your view, you probably describe what you see outside the window. However, your eyes are also picking up the frame of the window itself and maybe the desk in front of you or the garbage that you have on your window frame. Now, maybe I'm just speaking for myself as far as the garbage thing goes, but the general lesson still applies here. We see the world through layers, layers of objects. And in today's edition of the challenge, we're going to be talking about how we layer in objects in our scene to create space and depth and scale. Way that we draw objects in a three dimensional scene is really important, and that might sound obvious the way that we draw. But I mean in a very literal sense, how we draw them, the darkness of the objects and the size gives us clues about the environment. Today, in this free hand perspective drawing challenge, we're going to be practicing just that. First, we're going to add our trusty horizon line. It doesn't need to be straight. In fact, maybe today we can add some mountains or some other shapes like that. We're going to practice drawing different objects close to us and far away and talk about what to keep in mind when doing so. If we do the same thing we've done before, drawing that alligator mouth here, that gives us a framework to a framework to work with if we pretend that this is the vanishing point. We're then going to draw a couple up and down lines. Now, these do not have to be evenly spaced out, but there's a couple of things to keep in mind. If we start with a line down here at the back, you want to add one maybe another distance here. Then this third line, the third shape should be a little bit farther away from the other two. That's because when we view objects in perspective, the distance is compressed. You can see this in the real world when you're viewing lines on the road in front of you, those lines and the distance between those lines appear smaller when they're farther away. Right now we have these three lines. And if we make them into a recognizable three dimensional shape, we can then experiment with drawing them light and dark to accent how close they are to the viewer. Let's make them into trees for this lesson today. If you've taken any of my other classes, you know I love drawing evergreen trees. Especially when drawing in perspective and drawing free hand, it can be easy to shy away from drawing organic shapes because it seems like they might be really difficult to draw without a ruler or difficult to draw three dimensional. We don't really need to worry about shading in these trees for this lesson. You see that I'm just drawing really light and jagged side to side lines, creating the little outline of this tree here. We're going to repeat that in this tree back here. You'll notice that the up and down vertical lines are our defacto or stand in trunks. We're building the tree around. But we went into a problem here, whereas this tree is now overlapping the tree behind it. And that is not a problem at all. That's actually what we want. The overlapping of objects is what makes a scene what makes a scene appear three dimensional. It's really important that objects can overlap because they appear layered. It appears that one is behind the other. You'll notice that this trees following the line the vertical line behind it, it means that it's a little bit smaller as well. We're now seeing how visual clues and patterns can evoke a sense of distance and scale. What I mean by that is when we draw the third tree, our eyes instinctively know that, A, these are trees, and we assume that they are actually the same size in real life. Because we've spaced them out farther as they get closer towards us, they appear like they're receding into the distance and getting smaller. When I view this scene, I instinctively know that this tree is likely the same size as this tree. It just appears smaller because it's farther away. It's that layering of objects that is so key to making them appear far. If we draw in more trees back here, we have the foundations of what is a really cool three dimensional landscape scene. However, it's important to make sure that the trees behind these trees get lighter and lighter and less detailed as they go back into the horizon. Adding some trees layered behind these ones as well, we can make these trees a little bit bigger and using our alligator mouth as a guide, not a rule for how tall the trees have to be. You can see how you could continue this pattern now forever back into the horizon until these trees themselves form our horizon line. Making these conical shapes or the triangle shapes at the top of the trees less detailed and more distant and lighter, it appears to me like the trees are receding into the distance. As you finish up this challenge today, I'd invite you to add some objects to the left hand side of your page as well. What else can we add to the scene using the shapes that we've already drawn in this class? One thing could be a little house using our guidelines that we've drawn, we know by now how to sketch in a free hand perspective rectangle and we know that to draw complicated shapes, we can further break down these shapes into perhaps the roof of a house. You can see that to draw this little house, I've added another rectangle on top of it and drawn a triangle in the middle of that rectangle face facing us. And I just mirror that line of the rectangle. Now we have a little cabin stretching into our scene. We could add a little river or a pathway. That also recedes back into the distance and is layering into the trees. You can see how quickly we've added objects into the scene that really do serve a purpose. They tell us about where we are and how far away the other objects are, how far away the trees are, how far away this house is, and how far away these lovely distant mountains are as well. I'd invite you to continue on drawing this cabin scene adding in little details as you see fit, but making sure that those details are faded out as you get farther back into this scene. That can include texture on the trees, clouds in the sky, or even grass on the fields and the river banks in front of us. 9. Day 6: Three-Point Perspective (Draw a Skyscraper!): The point perspective is how artists make you feel like you are very close to an object looking down or looking up and it's going to be what we focus on today. It's going to start with drawing a vanishing point above your sketchbook. This might seem weird, but hear me out. This vanishing point is gonna be a guiding line for our vertical lines in this drawing, making it appear like the skyscraper we're going to draw is receding up into the sky. We also want to draw a vanishing point to the right and to the left, effectively creating a triangle. And this triangle is going to be very important. It's going to guide how we draw the vertical sides of our skyscraper. First, we're going to add a horizon line. It's going to be a little bit farther down than halfway in your sketchbook because as we've talked about before, we want to add more space above the horizon line when we want the viewer to look up. We want to be at a vantage point where we're closer to the ground with more space above in the sky because we're drawing a tall, tall object. What we want to do next is draw a vertical line that generally aims up towards that vanishing point. And if you like me, move your sketchbook a little bit, you might have to shift because we want this line to be generally straight. But again, we're not aiming for perfection here. What we want to do now is connect this line to these vanishing points. And this is a great way of practicing drawing lightly without worrying too much about getting exactly the right darkness of line or thickness of line, just light guidelines. About halfway down each side line, we want to draw a little bit of a dot to guide us. And then this is where we're going to start using that top vanishing point. We want each of these lines heading upwards to generally point towards that vanishing point. That might involve drawing the line over and over again, but it certainly won't involve a ruler. We want this to be natural. We want to seem like these lines are kind of stretching upwards into the sky. And the tops don't matter right now because we've had the bottom, the base of our skyscraper. It appears like we might be flying a little bit. We're looking down at the bottom of the skyscraper, and the skyscrapers towering above us, as well. That's when these vanishing points really become important because we need the top angles of the skyscraper to be pointing downwards towards our left and right vanishing points. You notice these lines, if I continue them down, generally trend towards each side's vanishing point. Not exactly, but we're not aiming for exacts here. We just want to get the general angles. We now have a box, and it appears like we are pretty close to it, looking upwards and looking downwards. It's almost like a fish eye view, and I think that adds a lot of fun, you know, dynamism to our perspective sketch. However, we've just drawn a box. We haven't drawn a skyscraper yet. We need to add details. How we're going to do that is keeping our vanishing points in mind. We're going to start a little ways up the skyscraper with a line that goes down to the left and to the right, generally aiming towards those vanishing points. I like starting in the middle because I find that allows me to keep an eye on the spacing of my lines. It's much easier to space lines when you divide the space in half and then in half again, rather than working our way up because then you can kind of have a more holistic view of how much space you have left. We can then go halfway up the skyscraper with another line that generally trends towards this vanishing point and another one on the right hand side. Then we can go down our skyscraper and seeing how these lines appear to get more shallow and less angled as they get closer to the ground. When we go below the horizon line, we can see how these lines have to then trend upwards. What you want to make sure, though, is that the lines get closer together, the higher you are up this skyscraper. That's because of the term foreshortening. And foreshortening, as we talked about a little bit in this class already, is the idea of objects appearing closer together and smaller the farther they are away from you. It's a great way of using forced perspective, and you'll see that in street art or murals, when objects appear to get shorter and the angles appear more condensed, they appear like they're farther away. And you can really see that here, right, with these windows being much wider than the windows up at the top of our tower. The same is true when we draw vertical lines on our three point perspective as well. If I draw these lines here, this window here, and then I'll divide the space in half, I can then add smaller and more close together windows. So the windows up here farther away from us are much smaller than the windows down here, which are closer to us. But the vertical lines all generally trend towards that top vanishing point. And you'll notice my lines are not super straight here. That's right. That's by design. We want to be focused on sketching and the idea of free hand drawing here, which often means mistakes. It's about generally getting the feeling of the perspective right and not really worrying about those small little details. But we've effectively created a new perspective plane here with these three points that we've used. If you flip your drawing upside down now, you can see that three point perspective can just be flipped around to make it appear like we are right above this building looking downwards. You could see how this could be infinitely changed to make it appear like this skyscraper, goes down into a city or into a cavern or something cool like that. For now, I want you to finish off this part of the challenge by adding more perspective elements into your scene. And you can do this by ensuring that the vertical lines you're drawing generally aim upwards towards that top vanishing point, and the horizontal lines you're adding generally trend down towards either side. This can be useful when adding other buildings here, whether they're tall or short. Or even streets in front of the skyscraper. You can see how just with a few lines here and a few perspective points, we've managed to create a city scape or a city scene that's very messy. None of these lines are straight, none of them are technically correct. But we're capturing the essence of this perspective just by using a few perspective vanishing points. What details are you going to add? I'd love to hear about it in the class description page, and you can finish off this challenge by adding some shading because shading is a great way to add dimension and scale and depth to our drawing here. Oh by using some lines here on the left hand side of our skyscraper, we can make it appear like the sun is hitting it from the right hand side, bathing the right hand side or the left hand side in shadow. It's this contrast that can make buildings, especially drawn in perspective, appear that much more robust and three dimensional. By adding shading, we've effectively given the scene a little bit more depth. You can even add a shadow on the ground as well to make it appear like this three point perspective building is taking up a little bit more space in this scene that we've drawn. I love adding some trees here, some nice elements in the foreground to give it a little bit more depth, as well. But I invite you to keep going. What else can you add to this scene to really make it pop? I'd love to hear from you in the class discussion page. I'll see you in the next edition of this free hand perspective drawing challenge. 10. Day 7: Draw your View: Today, we're going to be sketching your view, what's in front of you right now or what's near you in the room you're drawing in or the space that you're drawing. But along the way, we're also going to be talking about scale and how you can better measure the things in your field of view to make sure that the scale of the stuff in your perspective drawing makes sense. Now, I'd invite you to look out your window or look at your front door, maybe even snap a photo, so you have a reference of it, and then come back. We're going to be using that reference to draw a simplified version of the scene in front of you using the techniques we've talked about in previous editions of this challenge. When you look at your photo or your scene, I want you to identify three parts of it. That's the foreground, an object that's interesting or more central that's closest to us, the midground, objects or a part of the drawing that's, you know, halfway between us and the background, and just that the background. Objects that are the farthest thing that you can see in your drawing. Identifying these three planes or these three types of objects is really key because when we're sketching a three dimensional space from a photo, it can be kind of demoralizing if we think we have to draw everything. Drawing any sort of scene in a lot of detail would take a lot of time. You could spend hours drawing a scene. For our purposes, we're going to do a light sketch of the scene in front of us. An important place to start can be thinking about that horizon line. Finding a horizon line in your photo or in your scene can be a little bit difficult, especially if in my scene, there's buildings in the way. However, one valuable exercise can be tracing some of the lines that appear parallel to you as in leading directly back into the distance down and seeing where they end up. If we do that with the top the building on the left in my drawing and the top of the wooden slats of my deck balcony, we can see that they meet down behind the buildings in the background. Tracing those lines down gives us valuable clues as to where to put the horizon line. Since I'm on the second level here, I know that we can add the vantage point a little bit of ways off the paper, just over half. That's because we're looking down on the scene a little bit. I then want to trace a very dominant line in my drawing. For me, that's going to be this gray building on the top left hand side of the page. I'm going to use that as a guiding line for the rest of the perspective in our drawing. I can guestimate the angle of that line, but then continue it down to that horizon line. I'll draw in this side of the building very lightly here. And that now gives us a clue as to how we can draw the rest of the lines in our perspective scene. For example, this building, the brick building here is a very dominant part of the drawing, and we can make sure that it's a square that kind of roughly leads back down to that horizon line advantage point, as well. I've identified two important parts of the drawing, one in the background and one in the midground. We don't see the bottom of each building, and so it's only important for our purposes to draw the tops of them for now. The tops are what we observe and what sticks out at us the most. We can then kind of sketch in some of the other parts of our background. For me, there's a little house back there in front of that brick building and a couple other vertical roofs. And you'll notice I'm being very loose and sketchy with how I'm drawing in these spaces. I'm not trying to capture all the details because that would be really difficult to do in a short class. However, what's next is we can draw in objects in the midground. For me, that's this balcony ledge, the railing, and the wooden slats. Making sure that this railing kind of generally goes back towards that vanishing point. I can then continue it down and add the glass railing along the middle of our page. You'll see that if you look at my photo and then look at what we've drawn, some of the perspective lines don't really add up. For example, the railing is actually seems more like it would be right on the horizon line rather than just below it. However, some of those little quibbles or mistakes can actually be right and not super noticeable when you draw in the rest of the image. If I draw in lightly the bottom of this balcony ridge here, I can then add some of the slats or the metal parts. You notice I'm kind of going over some of these shapes multiple times, but not worrying too much about the details. We're focused on the overall big picture here. If I'm going to draw something in the foreground of my scene, as well, I can think about this table shape in the same way we thought about drawing our mug. And that's making a complicated shape out of an easy, basic shape. If I draw a nice wide triangle kind of coming down from that vanishing point, I can then kind of square off a thinner rectangle here, extending it down onto the deck. Like so. Just like before, I now want to kind of sketch out a very thin table shape, drawing it over multiple times. We have the top of our table right on the deck in front of us. Again, this one appears a little bit below us, whereas the table in my photo appears a little thinner because it's more on eye level. But I think that's right for our purposes. I'm going to draw the legs down here as well, extending from the middle of the table. And the legs at the back, I'm making sure that they fall shorter because they're a little bit farther away from us. And yeah, this table is not perfect. It's not exactly how it appears in the photo. But for our purposes, we just want to capture the big picture items and the big picture of our scene. So now we have an object in the foreground, our table, objects in the midground, the balcony and the wooden slats and objects in the background. Just like in the previous lesson, we want to keep a couple of things in mind when we start to add details into our rough free hand perspective sketch. First, is that the objects closest to us are going to be the most detailed. That means it might be important to add a couple of details to the wood that surrounds us on the deck here. One, we can see that there are slats horizontally, wooden boards. Kind of coming across the deck. Just like before, I'm using the vanishing point as kind of a guideline here for how I draw these wooden slats or wooden boards. The boards themselves get wider and larger as they come towards us on the deck. And again, this is not exactly like it appears in the photo. But I'm capturing kind of the essence of the perspective of the scene, not exactly all the details. Next is the horizontal slats on the side of the balcony here. When I'm drawing repeating shapes like this, I find one thing that can be helpful to keep in mind is dividing the shape in half in order to more accurately get these lines. So if I divide the shape in half with a line going right back towards that vanishing point, it's much easier for me to guess the angle of this line as well that should also kind of go back towards that vanishing point. The same goes for a line down here and maybe lines in the middle that all lead back towards that vanishing point. When you think about drawing windows in my scene, you can add some guidelines or kind of guestimate, making sure that those lines appear to recede back into the distance. And from here, it's about adding the details as you see fit, making sure that the objects in our midground and foreground are darker, more dynamic, and more fleshed out than the objects in our background. Perfection is not the goal here. And if objects in your drawing are appearing a little wonky, just like my table, that is right. This is about practicing perspective. It's not about getting perspective, perfect. There are some further details we can add here in the background in my drawing, some other elements here on the skyline behind us and some light poles, stuff like that. Maybe even a fire escape on this building here. You can see how we've been giving ourselves the building blocks of a perspective scene. The next steps would be learning detail or learning texture or more complicated aspects of perspective, and maybe three year four point perspective as well. Those are all really valuable to learn, but these vital building blocks hopefully give you a little bit more confidence in sketching the scenes that you see. We haven't created a masterpiece here, but we've created a miniature little sketch that tells a story of our neighborhood or the view in front of us. And that's what I love about perspective sketching. It tells the story of a three dimensional space. So I'll see you in the end of this class, and I hope to see your work, as well. 11. The End: When you look back through your sketchbook, I really hope you see a progression from the first part of this lesson, the lines we drew to the last where we talked about distance and detail. Throughout these seven days or throughout these seven lessons, no matter how long it took you to watch them and do these sketching exercises, I hope you gained a little bit of confidence and developed an appreciation for what free hand perspective can really add to your art practice. Perspective drawing doesn't need to be intimidating and it doesn't need to be done on a big scale. Sketching in a little sketchbook can be such a valuable part of your art workflow. But don't forget to post your work. I want to hear from you. I want to hear what part of the class you liked best and what lessons you thought were most applicable to your hang ups in perspective. Most of all, I hope you keep sketching. I'd love to see what you create and thank you so much for taking this class.