How To Draw A Robin: Draw Along Tutorial

1. Introduction: If you want to get better at drawing, but you're overwhelmed by what to draw or how to start. Then you found the right class. This lesson is part of a new series called a sketch club. I'll bring you a range of interesting subjects to practice your drawing skills. And I'll take you through how to draw them step-by-step. Hi, I'm Emily from the Pinto room, majority teacher from New Zealand. And I love teaching people how to draw to get good at drawing, like with anything, you need to practice. One of the main difficulties I have as a teacher is motivating people to keep practicing. Life gets in the way or it's just too hard to know what to do or what to draw. And next we'll sketch club can help. This particular lesson is on how to draw. A robin will start with some warm up exercises and, you know, take you through each stage of the drawing step-by-step, including planning the drawing was simple shapes, creating different types of texture for fevers and adding impact with contrast. I hope you enjoyed this class. 2. Materials: For this lesson, you need pencils, drawing paper in an eraser. If you only have irregular HBP and so it'll be fine. But if you have them, these pencils will also be useful to HB pencil for light sketching. A to B pencil for shading. Six B pencil. If you want to get some of those dark black tones in your drawing. You might also like to use a Q-tip or a tissue is a smudging tool for blending your shading. Keep watching for more tips on paper pencils and erasers. We'll just carry on to the lesson if you know what materials you're going to be using. Regular sketchbook paper is fine to use. The more texture your paper. Here's the more forgiving it is when it comes to shading. You can show a large area more easily and the shading marks won't show up as match. On smooth paper. You're shading marks will be more obvious, but you can create soft blends using a smudging tool. Smooth paper requires more patients and a careful touch. I'll be using a mix of regular pencils and mechanical pencils. Mechanical pencils are handy for creating sharp detail for hair or fur or feathers, and you don't need to sharpen them. The leads in mechanical pencils are changeable and they come in different grades like regular pencils. I use a to-be lid, a couple of different eraser options. And erase a pin is great for erasing fine lines and highlights of here or fear. And I use a putty eraser as well because you can mold it into the shape of the area that you want to erase. If you don't have any of these extra tools and materials, please don't worry, you can do this. Listen with a regular school pencil, plastic eraser, and a sketchbook. 3. Warm Up Exercises: To start with, we're going to go through some simple warm-up exercises. And these are really specific to the drawing project that we're going to do. So they will help prepare you for the skills that you'll need for our drawing project. I usually just use old paper for the warm up exercises. It's still sketchbook paper, but this isn't an old in cheap sketchbook. You can also use the front and the back of the page or even go over pages you've already drawn on. It's really just to get the, the practice of the coordination of your hand on the paper, you'll need an eraser and also a pencil, a tube pencil would be good because we're going to be doing some sketching in some shading as well. To start off with, let's just draw some really basic shapes. This is just to get back into things. We start with a circle. To draw a circle would use really short lite Max. Little bit lighter than what I'm drawing to draw darker so you can see it on the video. Once you've figured out the shape with those short lite Max and you can edit them. You can go around into drawer, little bit more of a permanent line over top. Let's do a few of these circles. You end up with something that's kind of wonky like this. That's weird. If you're working light enough, you can just eat it over top. Maybe get rid of any of the bumps around the each, smooth them out. Then when you're happy you can go over a little bit darker. And another one. Try the same thing, but this time with some ovals, we're trying to get it equal on each side. So the same curve here as there is here. Also the top and the bottom should be equal. And if you find that difficult, you could even just make a few little marks to start with. The sides and the top and the bottom. Could even put a cross-section through it. You can make sure that everything is even. And in sketch your way around. Joining those dots. Have a go at some long triangle shapes. And these are all similar to the shapes that we're going to be using in our project. Again, if you want to, you could make some little marks with the tip of the triangle is going to be, the top two corners are going to be and then join those dots. Doesn't matter if they're not completely, even for this exercise. Now that we're warmed up, we're going to move into some slightly more complex exercises and these are going to be based on shading. The first thing is just to get used to that shading motion. Moving your pencil back and forward. I'm holding it a little bit further back than normal, so I'm getting the side of the pencil. I'm aiming for a nice light layer of shading. It doesn't have too many gaps in it. And if there are a few gaps, I can just move my way back up those gaps. You can go back and forth over the same area. We're aiming for a nice even layer. It's not patchy with different dark or light areas. We're going to start at one int and we're going to layer over top, little bit darker, a little bit more pressure, shade halfway to about there. And then we're going to try and fade this out into this bottom layer, starting back in the darker layer. And then as you come towards the lighter layer underneath, you got to listen the pressure. Maybe slow down a little bit. Gradually get lighter and lighter and lighter until you get something that moves from dark to light. And if you need to, you can eat it there as well. So there might be a little bit in here. I need to go a little bit darker. We're going to do exactly the same thing again, but this time we're going to fill in a shape. So if you draw something that looks like a half oval shape, we're going to fill that in with shading. Nice light layer side-to-side. We're going to try and add the darker shading along the bottom each year. So if you imagine the light's coming from the top, this part here will be a bit darker. In this part here will be a bit darker. We can just go around the each same way as we started here from the each. Let me go around this each. Just using short shading motions. You could use small circles if that helps. Doting that area up so that it's darker. You see how I'm booting it up gradually. I'm not just going really dark with a hard line, but I want to control how dark it gets. You can always go darker, so it's better to start light and build up and it's going to move up the shape, listening the pressure on the paint. So as you go, come back down here and do it against it dark. Maybe just covering a small amount of space here. And then trying to get that nice transition between the dark in the middle tone here. You can do as many of these as you like. I might do one more. And the reason we're using this shape is because in our project there are some features that are similar shape to this. There are lots at 1 in quite dark underneath. Again, we're going to shade the whole thing, holding the pencil towards the back. Moving quite quickly back and forth. You can go over several times. You have that nice even layer. And then starting at the darkest each smaller MAX, smaller movements this time with your pencil and maybe circular movements as well, if that helps you to get a nice transition. Starting dark down the bottom. Gradually. Taking pressure off your pants are as you move into the lighter area. Just take a look at it and see if there's any way we think you need to edit it. Maybe soften the transition between the light and the dark. Maybe you don't have enough contrast and you need to come back and darken up the darkest area. We've got one more technique to practice, and that is texture. And a lot of the drawing that we're going to do today is going to be made up of texture. And we're going to be using this flicking motion. Start by taking your paints so you can hold it quite close to this time and pushing down fairly hard and then you just flicking up and off the page. You should find that when you first push down you've got quite a thick pencil mark. And as you lift off the paper, you've got this small point at the end of it. Let's try that again. But this time with a curved mac, space, him quite close together. We're just going to continue that in layers. They can overlap. Might be a little bit shorter or longer or close to either a fairer Padlet. It's not so important that it's more getting that nice natural line Flowing flicking line. We start to get the illusion or a pattern of fur or feathers or some kind of textured surface. Then the other texture we're going to create is a texture using shading. Similar kind of motion is what we were using here, but we're going to just create a small mark of shading. Come down and create another small marks that you're almost doing like shape. You can see I'm leaving some white gaps in-between my shading. Almost like I'm creating a long shaded line, but I'm winding that around like a, like a snake and creating a pattern Net way. This gives the illusion of a texture on a surface as well, but it's a lot softer than this one here. And it's really good for food that is not in such high contrast. You can't see as much detail as you can for something like this, but you still get an idea of texture on the surface. Indeed, if you wanted to, you could increase the contrast of that by going over some of these areas. Kind of looking for shapes like this, shaded shapes like that. And then adding a bit of darker shading to the bottom of them is if they've got a shadow at the bottom. Usually shadows are cast. The bottom edge of objects or itches. It includes things like feathers. Now we've got something that looks a little bit like maybe the feathers on an owl. This a couple of different tonal values in the color. We've practiced just sketching some basic shapes. We've practiced layering the shading and getting a nice smooth transition. And then two different texture techniques that we can use in our project. 4. Finding Simple Shapes: When you start a drawing and you're using a photograph or a subject, It's really important to get into the frame of mind where you're looking at your subject, the way that an artist would look at it. Basically what that means is looking for simple shapes. I want you to just take a look at this image and try to ignore the main details that you see. Try to ignore the feeders, the eyes and nose, the feet, and see if you can break it down into those simple shapes that we used in the warm-up exercises. So ovals, circles, and triangles. We're just looking for the biggest shapes. So we might find that we can draw and say a diagram for this image using just four main shapes. I'm going to show you what those shapes look like in a moment. But it's really good to try and visualize this for yourself. If you've got a tablet and some kind of drawing device, then you might upload the photograph to the tablet and draw over top. Or you might even print out a second copy of the photograph and just draw over top with a pencil or a felt-tip pen. The main shape that I see when I look at this as this big oval shape of the body, it can be useful to think about the axis of the oval shape. Whereas the dividing line, what angle is that on? And that can help us get the right kind of pose for the body. The next shape that I would be looking for is the shape of the head. We could put a few markets Here just to see where the boundaries are. Probably comes down to about here. See a little bit of a crease there. We've got 12. Then the third shape that I would add, this third simple shape that I can see is this triangular shape of the wing. I can see actually two angles at the top here. It's some kind of quadrilateral rather than a triangle, but it has a nice triangle point on it. And then the last shape that I'd put in would be this shape here of the tail. Really long triangle shape, a little triangle under here that we can add as well later on when we take it to the next step. To complete this diagram, I'd also look at the angles of the legs. This very slightly different to each other. We have a look, hold a pencil, we're up against it. His one. The other one. This is how we're going to begin our drawing. Breaking it down into simple shapes, will sketch those out. And then we can bring in a little bit more detail to those shapes looking at how they can knit, looking at some of the changes that we need to add to them. Before we take the drawing further in the details over top. 5. Planning Your Drawing: I hope you're feeling really to get on with the drawing. Now that we've looked at some of the techniques we are going to be using, and also looked at how to break it down into simple shapes. I'm going to be using a six B pencil. And it's really just so that you can see what I'm drawing. I recommend that you use a to H pencil or whatever lightest pencil you have. And keep these lines are dark enough that you can see them. Because these are just structural lines. We want them to disappear when we start to put our shading over top. The very first thing I'm going to put in is that large oval shape of the body. That's the main shape. And it's also going to help us determine how big the drawing is going to be. And if you wanted to, you could make a little mark at the top. And then thinking about the axis of that oval, it's on a bit of a slant. Put a little mark at the bottom as well. Just keep in mind that the bigger you make your drawing, the more work you're going to have to do, it's going to take longer to do. But you also don't want to make it too small because we want to be able to put in some of those really fine details and have them show up. I'm making mine about the size of let's see, how can I describe this, maybe an oversized eg. And then I'm looking at the photograph and I'm drawing is I look at it and just sketching that oval shape, thinking about how fast it's going to be. You can change this if you need to at anytime. I've got a little bit too far over this side. Not rubbing anything out yet. I'm just making those changes. And I'm going to draw my nice and dark so you can see my process, but keep yours as light as you can. Think about maybe the width versus the height of that oval. The width of it is about three-quarters of the height. So if you're wanting to get a little bit more technical with it, but it's completely fine to just look at the photograph and estimate how wide it is. We can change it later if we need to. Also, if you end up with a robin is a bit skinnier or a little bit fatter than it doesn't matter either. It just adds a bit of character to it. The next simple shape there I'm going to add is the shape of the head. And if you remember, it comes down over the body shape a little bit. And I'm just going to go ahead and sketch it in where I think it is. If you wanted to again, you could put a little mark where you think the top of it should go. To keep flicking your, I bet to that photograph is you look at this simple shape that kind of underlies the photograph. Because as soon as you start just focusing on your page and trying to draw a really perfect circle. You might lose something, you might miss. Calculate the size of it or the angle of it. The body shape and the circle shape. Really simple. And then the next thing I'm going to add is that simple shape of the wing on the side, it's a triangle shape. And what's really important here is to look for the angles. So if we think about the shape of the body and how far down the wing comes in, how far across accounts, I could make it a little dot just here. It's first going to start. In thinking about the angle. I'm looking at the bottom edge of the wing here. Really trying to gauge that angle. Is it 45 degrees? Notes a lot less than 45 degrees under the horizontal axis. And then also looking at this angle coming down the back, the back of their body shape. Then we've got two more angles. We've got this one that comes up here across the body. The net one that comes up towards the back as well. You can see how I've broken the wing down into a really simple shape. But what's important is the angles. And if I have a look at my now my photograph, I think this angle is not quite right, so I'm just gonna go ahead and correct it. Really good way to try and gauge these angles is to actually hold your pencil against it. And then you could hold that angle, try not to move it. And the light it against the photograph and see if you've got the same angle. Another way you could make sure you've got the correct angle is to actually draw it lightly on your photograph. And even sometimes just the movement of doing that over the photograph gives you the sense of what angle it should be it. So we've got 123 simple shapes. The last one I'm going to add is the triangle shape of the tail. And it's a continuation of the wing, but it's slant upwards just ever so slightly from that angle. So you can see it comes down the wing and then if you're looking at the photograph, slant upwards a little bit more rather than coming straight down. While I'm here, I might just add in this triangle shape here. If you have a look at that and the photograph and look at that shape there when you put it into your drawing, you should have a similar shape just by matching that tail with this each of the body. Then the last part of this diagram that I'm going to add before we get into sketching is the angles of the legs. First thing we need to do is decide where they're going to go. Who were they going to start from? If we look at the curve of the body in the photograph and come around, it's just when you come underneath the bottom of that oval shape that the first leak starts and then it comes around. And probably about here. Another way we could check this as we could draw a line straight up on vertical line and think about where it intersects with the wing. And if I look at the photograph, mine might be slightly incorrect. Might need to bring mine a little bit further back here. And it might mean that there's something that I need to change here as well. So all of these things fit together like a puzzle piece. What I just did then was made this triangle a little bit smaller so that I have this gap here. Before I get to that other leagues, I've got that one there. This will maybe about here. Again, if you draw a straight line up from there, one just comes to the side of the head. And then we can put in these angles again, if you've got the photograph next to draw over top of the league, just lightly to get the feel of the angle. We can make corrections to all of these when we go into the next stage. So don't worry if you feel like something's wrong, but you're not quite sure what, what we wanna do is just get something down to start with. It gives us the size that our drawing is going to be. And it helps us figure out the placement of the main parts of the drawing. 6. Sketching The Outlines: For this step, we're going to sketch lightly around the outline of the Robin, try to find the correct edge. We're going to be joining up these shapes that we've already got on here, but we're also going to be making changes. It's really important that you keep looking at the photograph as you go around, that you're not just joining the dots between each shape that you have on your page. There's a couple of things that are going to help us find the correct line of the edge. One of those is angles. We're going to look for any straight angles that we can see in the edge. And the other thing is negative spaces. We're going to look for spaces on the outside of the bird. The very first thing I would do is just sketch around the back of the head here, looking at the photograph, you can see it. It comes around and then it starts to straighten out a little bit on that angle and joins up with the shape that we've drawn for the wing. We don't need to worry too much about the wing itself or add in some more details for that soon. Let's go around the other side of the head, not worrying about the beak yet either. But have a look just here. There's an angle that's quite straight that forms part of the edge. Even just putting in that line like that is going to help me get the correct outline. And then it starts to come around, comes out a little bit further than I've got my shape. I need to make him a little bit rounder. Then when you get down to this part here, there's another part of the edge that is actually quite straight. And we don't normally think about that as being the case for circles, but I'm going to put that in nice and dark so you can see it. But remember you want to keep your lines really light the whole time. I'm flicking my eye back and forth to the photograph and to my drawing so that I can try and gauge the correct edge to draw. As we get to this point here, there's another quite straight line and then there's that angle of the bit just underneath the tail there. We can also add in the shape for the eye and the beak. While we're doing this sketching stage, if we have a look at where the eye is, if we think about the cross section of that circle of the head, it's maybe a little bit above the centerpoint and a little bit to the right hand side. I'm just going to sketch something that is about the right size. It might not be the exact correct shape right now, but where I think that eye is going to go, then I can also draw the beak in relation to that. It starts in line with the eye and then it comes down a little bit underneath the eye to about here. Again, you can put those little dots in there if you like. The top of the beak is quite straight across. There's a little bit of a curve on the end, and then a point. And then there's this angle here which is sloped downward slightly. Then it comes inside the shape of the head. It's another little bit to the top edge of the beak. The part that comes inside the head there. I've, I've got the beak. I've the main outline. I'm going to also sketch in the shapes in the wing. I'm going to keep it fairly simple. And breaking this simple shape down into more shapes. There's another shape that comes through here, these are all those quite dull brown feathers. Then there's two more triangle shapes that come over this part of the wing, this one and this one. There's maybe one more little rounded shape here in all of this area. We can round that off, take away some of these hard edges. Maybe put a little bit of a curve in if you can see that curve there. The tail is pretty simple, but you might be able to see a couple of different shapes in there as well. There's one long triangle shape that sits on top of another shape. We're not going to do too much with the legs just now, except to give them some thickness. You're happy with where they are. Then we'll also add in the feet in a moment, just an idea of the feet. But the other thing that can help us with getting the right edge to fit around our shapes is looking at negative spaces. This is a good place to start. Have a look at the shape that is between the two legs. That helps you to gauge the angle of the legs. It helps you to think about how far apart they should be as well. It's like a long rectangle shape, I guess. And then you can apply that same idea to this shape underneath the tail. Like we're looking at the invisible space here as if it's a shape. The negative space is what we call it. Even this shape in here is going to triangle shape. That's created by the side of the body and the front leg there as well. Try to flick your right of that shape in the photograph and then see if you've got the same negative space shape in your drawing as well. I said we're going to put the feet in. All we're going to do is start with just putting in maybe two angles for each of the toes. Then they have a little hook on the end as well. You can put the claw in, saying for this one really paying attention to the angles, this one in the foreground almost comes straight down from the leg. Then this one here slopes down and then up again. And then it has the claw on it. Then there is one, there it is, it's a bit hard to see with the rock, but there's one that comes back here as well, it's almost horizontal. It's got a little claw on it too. Then you could beef those out a little bit too, just by giving them a bit of thickness. But really simple, just finding the correct angles first. What we don't want to do is draw what we think they should look like, like curved talents like this. We want to actually look at the angles that we can see that we're getting something realistic. We're looking at it the way an artist would look at it, rather than the way just a regular person might think about the claws of a bird. 7. Building The Sketch: Step is to rub out all of the lines that we don't need. And if you think eating yours really liked, you might not have to do too much here, but mine is quite dark. So you've been able to see it on the video. I'm going to go through in Rabat the lines that I don't want. And then I'm just gonna do one more check and make sure that I've got the shape that I want. And I can already see that my head is looking a little bit too rounded. So I'm going to have to see if I can find some angles and that curve flattened out a little bit along the top. If you've got really dark lines. And you didn't mean to have dark lines in. This is a good time to just push those back a little bit as well, especially around the top edges because the light is coming down. So we don't want an outline around those light edges at the top. So go through and looking at the photograph and looking at your drawing and make any corrections, I've got to get this straight line and here I'm straight angle. Sorry. Got to get that correct. Might be a little bit too long. So I'm going to come out a little bit again with the body. This is what drawing is always about. It's about putting something down and then responding to what you've got down there and making some changes. This is where I've got a problem. My head was far too round, so I'm going to try and break that curved down by looking at the angle that it starts it like that. And then kids around a little bit, but then there's almost like a straight line here. The unit joins onto the back and it's quite a straight line. There is a slight curve as it comes around onto the wing. You see that little corner here. The photograph is created by this angle. Now that looks a little bit more natural. Last thing we're going to do for the sketching stage is just add in the rock. Just a very brief outline. The rock isn't going to be the main part of our drawing. Obviously the robin is, so it can be kept quiet light in sketchy. And I'm just going to be looking at the shape as it comes behind the leaks. They're going looking for angles. One angle here is another one comes out. And that's enough. At this point. It doesn't matter too much what the rock is like, but do try to create a few angles in there so that it looks natural. Just realized I got a little bit enthusiastic with my erasing and I've lost this part of the wing up here. That area there is that del brown area, it's all quite similar. And then we've got these two parts of the wing in this third triangle down the bottom. And actually while you're doing that, you could also have a look at the shape of the different colors that you can see. We've got the brown in this gray area, comes around and then we've got the red shape. So let's lightly sketch there as well. And then we've got that white shape. Obviously we can't draw red with the pencil. But we're going to be thinking about how dark and how light these different shapes are. And sometimes it helps to squint your eyes a little bit. Read with oranges, quite a dark color. The gray is lighter, the white is the lightest. And these brown areas will be a bit lighter than the oranges. Well, we'll get to that when we do some shading and some texture. So I've just very lightly put it in the shape of that orange section. And also the gray section here as well. 8. Shading A Base Layer: Let's review where we are at. At the moment, we've put our basic shapes in Indian. We've used lines, sketching lines to refine the shape of the outline. And also add in some of the surface shapes of the wing, of the tail and the different colors. So the orange patch, the white patch, which should actually come down here a little bit as well. The gray feathers. This is really the most important stage of the drawing. If you wanting to get something that's accurate to the photograph, These anything that you want to change now is the time to do it. I mentioned before that it doesn't have to be perfect. We want it to look natural and we'd like it to look like a robin obviously benefits a little bit better or a little bit skinnier, or maybe the body shape is a little bit different, so minus is not quite the same. I could make it the same if I want to by bringing little bit more width out here. But I mean it's not a big deal really. It's still going to look like a robin. It's still going to look natural as long as you've got the basic shapes down there and there were the correct size, then you've really paid attention to this outer edge. And the angles that you can see. Those angles are so important when you're drawing anything because they really help define the pose and the character of what you're drawing. So this angle here, very important. That angle down the BEQ, also really important, dictates the head is facing in the slant of the body. Now we're up to the stage where we're going to add just a little bit of shading. And normally with a drawing at this stage I'd be shading and everything that wasn't white. But we're actually going to be creating a lot of the tonal values in the shading through the use of texture. Because if you look at the photograph, there is a lot of texture or around the heat and the body and the wing. The area where there's not so much texture and also not so much contrast is in here in this orange pitch. And what I mean by contrast is there's no lighter or white areas. If you look at around the top of the head, overall it's brown, but there are some really light little flicks through the air. And so if we shade it over this pattern now, we're going to lose that lightness. Only area we're gonna shade. Flat is this orange area here. I'm just using my pencil on its side. Now would be the time to switch to a to-be pencil. And just very lightly adding a layer of shading the area that's going to create a nice softness to those feathers. Maybe a little bit under here as well. So anywhere where it's nice and soft and he's not a lot of contrast. Also, it's not white. We don't want to shade over the white areas. Obviously. This area here on the fetus or the back. We can add some shading there too, because we're quite a soft brown. There's no really bright highlights or really light lines and the texture. Maybe just a little bit here. Flip your eye back and forth to that photograph. You're looking for any areas that don't have any white in them at all. That includes the little flecks of white. We want to be able to keep those if we need to. We also don't want any really dark outlines and you can see mine is quite dark. That's so that you can see the drawing. But if you do have something, there is a lot darker than what you're starting to put in for the shading. Now's the time to just push that back a little bit with an eraser. Lighten it up. Because if you look at the photograph, these note outlines. The edges are the same as the tonal values that are inside the shapes. This is a little bit above the beaker as well. I'm just using the pencil on its side or maybe you can hold it through the back to get more of the side area of the lead. Once you feel like you've shaded all the areas that are going to be quite flat or soft. If you want to, you can use a tissue or a Q tip just to smooth them out in a large area like this, I find that it's easiest to do with a tissue. You just wrap it around your finger like this. And then three gently smooth it out a little bit. You don't need to do this at all. You can't just use pencil shading. You can keep it as a texture of the pencil. Sometimes it's really nice. But if you want to smooth it out, you can. All of these other areas that are white at the moment, we're going to create tonal values using texture. 9. Adding The Eye & Beak: Before we get into adding texture to the body and the wing and the tail, we're going to define the eye and the beak and keep those in there. I think it's really nice to get those in there fairly early so that you can kind of see what the character of the drawings going to be like. I'm just switching to a mechanical pencil here. It says a tube in. It. Just means I can work with a final line for the eye and the beak. You are still using a regular pencil. The United, give it a good sharpen. Use a pencil or maybe an HB pencil. Make sure it's nice and sharp. Let's start with the beak. Really light along that top edge, so I don't want to add too much more to that. But the bottom of it here comes towards the body and then it comes inside the body, going over it again and making sure I've got it exactly where I want it. Looking at the shape of the bakers, it comes inside the section of the heat. You can also see an angle here. I wanted to get that done so I can make sure that I've got the eye and the beak in the right place in relation to each other. This is little dark patch of shading here. I'll just say it didn't. And it's going to help fill that space in the eye. And I think I've got the I in the right space. Put the I in. We're looking for any angles again, across the top of the eye is actually quite straight. Might just think that it's a black circle, but there's a straight line across there. So I've created the top of the eye with 123 angles. And that 123. And in the bottom of the eye is more of a curve, like a half circle within the eye. There at T2 small highlights. And I'm going to draw those in S shapes. I'm going to leave those, if not wiped in only some lights, but I think I'll probably leave them white for this drawing. Then everything else is going to get colored in nice and dark. So to VPN or even a sharp pencil. These are light, the line around the whole eye. If you've got a putty eraser or even a pin eraser, one with the eraser nibs and them, something like this. Then you could erase that line. Now. Just molded my potty eraser into a point in the end I can go around it. I am bring the lightness bit. For the beak, we can find the darkest area. Draw the n is a shape, so it's just a bit on the bottom half. And in shaded in just a little bit of shading on the top half is the nostril. Maybe just a little bit of shading here. Really light along the top edge. I'm going to erase my, but I know there is no outlines, but we need to have something to show the top edge. So I'm just going to create a really fine line. Another way of creating the top huge would be if you shaded in all of the background. And then this white of the beak would show up, show up really clearly. In a moment. We're going to go ahead and start adding texture and tonal values to the rest of the bird. We'll start with the head, then we'll move on to the body and the wing. And then we'll do some detail on the feet. Before we do that, I'm going to show you exactly how we're going to add the texture to the heat in the body. 10. How To Create Feather Texture: When we add in the texture to the head, we're going to be following the contours or the shape of the head. If I draw a circle over here, you might like to do the same. If you've got a piece of paper. Have a little bit of a practice of this. Imagine this is a top of the head. We're going to use that flicking motion that we practiced at the beginning to work our way around. We following the shape of the head. If you want finer maps, then this pencil here, this mechanical pencil which has got a 0.5 liter in it. Really good job, but you have to spin a little bit more time filling in some of the spaces. We're looking at the direction that the fetus go around the back part of the head. He sort of go this way. Some lighter parts and then there's some darker spots. So we can go over top to create a little bit more tonal value. In front here there's a little bit of a darker part as well before it goes down onto the orange area. And the great thing about using this texture is that if you need to darken something up later, you can just shade over top very lightly in the textures to show through. So we could go over a little part here, and it goes up to the top of the head. There's no little white flakes in there. So it could be shaded in, but then we can leave these lighter areas showing through where we need to do the body will be doing something similar but being able to look at the photograph, you can see these more clumps of feathers, especially in the gray area around here. We'd be looking at the direction that they go and also looking for the clumps or shapes that we can add or any dark areas in this kind of a dark jagged line that comes down. Sort of like these different tiers of feathers. We could put that in first and then thinking about how light or how dark those feathery max adjust the pressure of your PIN So the whole time and flicking my back to the photograph so I can look at what direction those features are moving in. And we're creating an illusion of the surface texture. So it doesn't have to be perfect. If you were doing a hyper-realistic growing, then you'd be zooming in on that photograph and you'd be looking at every single one of those feelers. But we don't need to do that for this one. As I come around the bottom of the body here, there are a lot softer. So might just be using your pencil on its side, getting some very, very light textural marks there. Again, if something needs to be darkened up, you can just shade over top. These sorts of textures. Take a little bit of patience because it takes until you've got quite a large covering for it to look realistic. Try to stick with the process and not forces, but just stick with looking at the direction of those lines in it should all come together. 11. Applying Texture To The Head & Body: I'm going to start with my mechanical pencil. You can use a mechanical pencil or a really sharp pencil. And I'm starting at this point and then I'm gonna move around trying to leave light areas where I can see little light areas showing through and around the top of the heat here. Paying attention to the direction that those feathers and moving and when you get to the back of the head is pointing to the left. Not too dark. There's not too much contrast. These a little light area through here. I'm going to leave some spaces. The inner rounder, I'm going to darken it up a little bit, still using the same flicking motion. See that light area starting to show up now because I'm shading either side of it. When we get to this area here, this do some texture, but it's quite fine. We can just use a pencil really lightly. There's not a lot of contrast there. Even over top of our shading area, this gray area, some texture. All of these ones are moving on a diagonal. Yeah, these ones seem really short. I'm just making my max a lot shorter as well. There's another light area above the eye as well. And if you don't have that in there, you could use an eraser just to bring it out and use some of your texture marks around it again. Little bit softer this time. So I'm using my pencil more on its side, or the shading Mac then a flicking Mac. And within the soft area, this slightly darker areas, this is where you could use that shading technique. We're just kind of moving around, leaving some lighter areas to show through. The shaded line that curves around like a snake. You can do that on a really small scale. And here to add some texture. Few little flicks coming up here. Carry on with the body. Since we're in this flicking mode. Looking at these light parts here, they actually come across into the brown part. So I need to get rid of this outline around the wing because that's going to disrupt those. What I'm doing is I'm really creating the light area, the light gray area through the negative space. This space is that I'm not flicking spaces it on, leaving white. Again, looking at the direction of them. Quite light around here, but there are a few darker lines. Then as we come through the down the body, it gets a bit darker and we can see some more defined shapes. And all I'm doing is I'm picking out the main ones I can see putting those in, but I'm not really making sure everything is perfect. The most important thing is to follow the direction. Put in just a few of those dark and max, then you can just fill in the rest with flux, changing the direction as you go so it looks natural. Still flicking my eye back and forth. I'm not just acting like I'm coloring in my page that I'm looking all the time. The area that I'm working on quite dark here and they change direction a little bit and it dark area. This is probably the most time-consuming part of the drawing. You can spend as much time on it as you want if you want to get really particular about the angles and the light and the dark, you can. You might decide to just create a pattern like I'm doing. That's going to create the illusion of those feeders. As we get around here. Very, very soft. In under here, It's very soft as well. So I'm going to switch to a different paints and just use it very lightly. Using that textured shading technique, which is where your shading from side-to-side and then you moving up and around and in a kind of a nice shape. I find works really well to leave some lighter areas or to add some dark areas. You'll see there's some nice fluffy textures right underneath here. And again, my outline is getting in the way. Fuels is really light, then you shouldn't have a problem, but we can just bring a few of those down. Over the years, our body shape, fluffy edge. When you get around to this side, there's not really a fluffy edge, it's just nice and soft. And these note outline there. Once you've got the texture and for the body, we can do a little bit of balancing of the tonal values, which is where you can squint at the photograph in. Just check that you don't have light areas where you don't want them around here. When I squint at the photograph is it's like a mid gray or dark gray so that you've got a shade over top of my textures. And I'm using a really light touch so I didn't lose the texture. So I'm just pushing them back a little bit and giving, taking away some of the contrast. Again, squint at the photograph. Have a look for with the light and the dark areas are, and then squint at your drawing and check that you've got the light and the dark areas in the same place. This is 3123, actually four tiers levels of physis that HIV a darker line here. We will make sure that it's in there. Once you've done that, you might find that you actually need to go in and put in some of those darker parts again. So this strong dark map just they're quite strong one through here. 12. Adding Soft Texture On The Chest: Let's work on the breast of the Robins. Lovely bright orange color. We're going to treat it as a tonal value or a gray tonal value. And if you squint at the photograph, you might be able to see that this is darker than this is here. Obviously this has light patch down here. I need to make sure that stays white. So you've lost the white just to raise it, to bring it back again. So this area is very soft. There's a few little feature maps we can see, but there's a bit of a shape or a bit of a shadow that comes around here underneath the head. So we can shade that with just a click shading line. Almost like you're putting a color on the bird. Maybe use your pencil on its side. And moving from one side to another with that short stroke. And then if you need to, you can also move that line around to create some gaps. And that's what we're going to do is we come down here. Our aim here is to create a darker tonal value for the red breast of the robin. Then this area around the back of the head. And you can either do that before or after. You add the soft shaded detail. And it really depends on how much dark you need to go in. I think I'm going to add well, I am going to add a darker layer shading now because I can see that if I do it afterwards, I'm gonna have to add so much that I actually lose some of my texture. I'm going to just very quickly darken it up a little bit, starting to become darker than this area now. And if you want to, you could soften off again with the tissue. Nina over top to be pencil. You can add in those textures with it soft shading Mac. So putting in this area here in Nian, I can see there's a little bit of darker tone coming down around this white area. Look for any darker tones that you can see in, put those in. And then if you want to, you could also just add a bit of extra texture in there. But trying to keep the lightest areas light, little bit lighter just here underneath that color. We've got some flux coming into that area. And so got some coming down here from underneath the beak. Like a shaded, soft shaded line. There's two of them actually. Look for anywhere else. You can see dark areas. Can see I can see a lighter area here. And I'm just going to need to bring that back a little bit with my eraser and then underneath it into the side of it, it's a little bit darker in this influx in there as well. And pay attention to how dark you are making these flux or how dark they should be by looking at the photograph. Unless you see some really new black lines, then just keep that pressure really, really light so that you're getting the right kind of effect. We don't want to add too much contrast. If we can't see the contrast in the photograph. I'm just going to add a few little flicks, soft shaded flux coming through around here. There's also a few lighter areas. And here if you look closely and if you've got a putty eraser, you could just bring those back a little bit. Like tufts of feathers with a lightest hitting them a few over the side as well. In a moment we're going to move over to the wing, but I'm just going to finish off this area under here. It's part of the white area, but it's in shadow, so it's gray. Just adding a really light layer of shading and you can keep that texture if you want. So keep the shaded lines showing or you could soften it off a little bit. I'm just going to add a little bit more definition to that white area or to the edge of the white area. You can see the shapes coming down from the red area. There's a couple of triangle shapes here. On the last thing I'm going to add in this area is this, these tuffs that are coming out from underneath the eye and it's like there's quite a light streak coming across. So I'm gonna do is shade underneath it. To give it some definition. In the end, I can add a few little flicks and they're not too dark. It as you go, you might notice some things that are missing from your drawing. So I've just noticed that this little bit of shading in here, it's like a brown patch within the gray patch or on the edge of the orange patch, actually animating Nitin. Now we can move on to adding some detail to the wing. What we've done in this stage as we've added some texture shading using a flicking motion that follows the form. And we've also added some soft shading using this kind of motion with our pencil and moving back and forth. We don't have too many hard edges and it creates the illusion of nice soft, downy feathers. 13. Detailing The Wing: Let's work on this top area of the wing. It's quite soft and it doesn't have a lot of contrast. And then we'll move on to these bottom areas of the wings which have a lot of contrast. I'm going to build up my shading just a little bit. Then I'm going to look for any shapes that I can see within this larger shape. So I've got something that curves down and around here. And then there's some long shapes that have a rounded a curve along the bottom of them. There's a series of those. 1234, there's about five of them. And if you have a look closely, each one of those has a dark shaded line along the lower side of it, the side to the right in the bottom of it. And it's shaded line blends into the field of that's underneath it. So I'm just going to listen the pressure off after we put that dark line and in blended and the rest of the field. So putting in the dark line and then fading it out underneath. You've also got some slightly darker tonal values around here. This is really just a matter of looking to see what you can see. You might be able to see some shapes. You might be able to see some lines where you might just be able to see some software changes and tonal value. And we can put those in just with some light shading and adjusting the pressure as you go. This one down here is really cool, quite dark. It gets a little bit lighter at the top, so we can start dark in here and then faded out. And isn't quite a dark line underneath it as well, where it's casting a shadow. It's going to add in a few more little shapes up here. Looking for any fevers that I can define. But again, it can be quite loose. Following the direction of the, so the texture of the fetus, it, I can see. It gets a little bit tricky in this area. There's some shapes, but it's quite hard to define. Just going to put a couple of lines in there. I think it's just more layers of feathers will move down the wing. And as we do that or find that there's a lot more contrast. And we've got a different type of pattern. We've got these long streaks that fill up the shape. Show the fetus as a folded together. There's a small shape down here, and I'm just going to add in some feelers only. Again, each one has a dark line that fades out into the field of beneath it. Let's maybe a little bit hard to see. I'll just do a quick demo up here for you. So we've got this shape here. And it has these feathers that are folded up within it. And each one of these, we're going to shade underneath the line and then just soften our shading in blended in the dark line in his soften it, dark line underneath, and then soften it off. Then you get there to that effect or the illusion that each feathers sitting on top of the other in it's casting a shadow on the one beneath it. This one also has some darker tips on it. So I'm just going to shade around their mean we can get onto these long feathers. My shapes are maybe not quite correct. I think probably the whole wing needs to be a little bit longer, but I'm just gonna go with what I've got here. And if you want to get particular, you could count how many streaks, 01234, I think there's six on this 1123. You get a little bit center as they come up 456. And then on this one here we've got 12345, probably six again, and they get thinner and thinner as they come up towards the top of this one. So most obvious, 2345. This might be where you use your mechanical pencil if you want to bring in a little bit more detail there. Nice sharp line. And then we've got this shape down here and it's got 123 with three main ones. I can see there's one under here. Then two, it's quite a light one. And then there's one that curves over there. There's a few really thin ones. Okay, So each one of these is going to be treated exactly the same way that this one was. Might have to have a nice sharp pencil when he's going to darken up the line in, faded out underneath each one of those feelers. Just gives it a little bit of depth and makes it look like it's casting a shadow on the one beneath it. Now this one here, the whole thing is a little bit darker. She can move around a little bit, which I haven't quite got mine. Same with these ones. Just go through and add a little bit of a shadow to each one on the lower side of each one. Also look at the comparison between them. So these ones here are darker than these ones, so there needs to be shaded in a little bit. That's part of the wing is casting a shadow on this part of the wing here. I'm mostly using this big maxi pencil and it's not so easy to get these really fine details if you are wanting this to be really delicate, they know definitely get mechanical pencil and treat all of these paths with your mechanical pencil instead. Whatever pencil you using, you should still be able to get a nice textures. If you are creating the particular type of pattern that you can see. Setting a little bit of light in here. It's going to make them appear like it's on top of this part. And maybe a lightened up these lines too because they're just looking a little bit too dark compared to the photograph. We're going to add in the tail in Nin. We really just need to do the feet in the rock and we can balance things out a little bit, bring in some darker tonal Belize where we think that we need them. 14. Finishing The Tail: Let's go ahead and put this tail and it's pretty simple. It's really only 123 feathers. Maybe. We've got this one along the top here, which is quite, quite prominent. Is it dark age along the bottom edge of it, which fades upwards this time. They put in the Dark Age in the news, softening off that line as you come up across the feather. And then we've got another thin tail feather there with a soft dark line at the bottom of it. It comes right out to the tip here. And then we've just got some shading on what might be another few that are underneath. Sort of counted this as 12. And then underneath here is a bit of a shape. There might be number three. In this area isn't white in the photograph. So what I'm doing is just pushing that back a little bit with my shading. And here it gets really dark. Probably one of the darkest areas. And it fades out into the tail. In under here isn't really white either. It's just a nice soft gray. Maybe just a touch of white lifting it. 15. Finishing The Feet: It's moving to the feet. This would be a good place to use a mechanical pencil as well. And we can refine the shape. Make sure they're nice and thin. And curve off those shapes that we put in initially for the claws, talons. And as I do that, I'm also just putting the floor on the end. It's black so it's easy to just shade and quickly. Got this one at the back here, which has a little bit of a wider end to it, stuck into it and in the claw. He never stop looking at your photograph. You're always reassessing, even though you've put down some building blocks or really it's important to keep looking. Otherwise we're basically just coloring in or we're, we're making things up. And it may look like a nice illustration and it's fine. That's what you're aiming for. If you wanting something that's a bit more quirky or a character, then sure, go ahead in just modify a tissue like if we're trying to get a realistic likeness to the photograph, then we've got to keep looking at the photograph. So if refine the shape of the feet, and now I'm just going to go through and adding some shading in. What I'm looking for is the light lines that you can see with the lightest hitting the watch. That's what I'm going to leave. Everything else is going to be shaded and its need to erase a few little lines here. Very dark here. And then this side is like a middle tonal value in these light streaks that goes down the foot. I'm going to leave that. And then on this one, it's all shaded at close to the body. And then there's a light line that starts closer to the foot down here. As we get to the feet, you can see this almost like scales they come across and they all have a light reflection on them as well. The bottom edge of each one of these clause is darker. It depends on how much detail you want to get into here. You could, again spend a huge amount of time on it. Or you can just look for the main vectors. So the light and the dark, we've got the shapes already in, in the light and the dark. And then these scaly parts that come across the top of the foot. And if someone this one as well, really just drawing them the bottom line of each one of those. If we look at this foot here, each one of those cause here's a light API edge and a dark low age. And that's all we really need to do, is just to create a light topic in a darker bottom edge. And that will give them a little bit of form. 16. Adding The Rock: Before we finish up this drawing, I'm just going to go here and add in some textures for this rock. And I'm going to use something kind of like what we did up here, but we could make it a little bit more jagged. Depends on what kind of style you like. If you want it to be a bit smoother, you can keep these nice and tight. I'm just looking for where there's any shadow areas on the rock. Or you could really have it quite loose if you want to like this. It doesn't, doesn't really matter because it's not the main part of the drawing. You're creating a pattern that is going to represent the texture on the surface of the rock. The most important thing really is just making sure you've got the light areas around here and the darker areas. That's what's going to give it form. You can see how loosely I'm doing this and how messy it is. But it doesn't make it look really natural as well. And then if it's a bit too much and just soften off some of those lines with your tissue. Maybe get rid of some of the white unless you can really see some white and those rocks. And if you need to bring any lightness back, then you can just use it, erase. Erase. You get something that looks natural. The rock, the top surface of the rock is also very light. I'm going to also erase that dark outline. I have. 17. Creating Impact With Contrast: Wrapped in the final stages, I hope you're feeling happy with the drawing that you've got so far. Now is the time to really give it some impact and make it stand out. And the way we do that is with texture, which we've already put a lot in with contrast. And so we're going to focus on contrast. And also just making sure that we do have the correct tonal values in the correct places. Let's start with contrast because quite satisfying to get these really strong blacks in your drawing. And I'm going to just put those in the eye. If you've got a six B pencil that will be really useful here. Keep looking at the photograph again. No, you're not just coloring and the dark parts. You're looking again to make sure you haven't missed anything and to make sure you are not going over something that you shouldn't be going over. Even just putting that and gives it some impact. Anywhere that were there as black in the photograph. We want to add that into our drawing. We've got the beak here, black underneath in the nostrils, it's black. If you squint at the photograph and look for the darkest parts, we've got the eye, we've got the beak. Also under here is quite dark. That's probably the next darkest part that I see. This one here has a really dark line under it and it's maybe a bit darker itself. Another feeder and neither I didn't notice before. Long see that it's quite dark. And then right in here with a tail, goes into the body. Who goes underneath the wing. It's actually black in there. So we've got to make sure we've got that. And in underneath this wing, you put the darken and then fade it out and to the layer of shading It's underneath it. You see how much impact that has now even just with those three points. The last thing I want you to do is just check your tonal values and see if you need to balance them out anywhere. And the way you're going to do is go into the photograph. And I keep telling you to squint, squint at the photograph as much as you need to, to try and break it down into lights and darks and pick out with the lightest areas are. So when I squint at the photograph that lightest areas are Here, in here. And then the next ones would be here and here. So you need to make sure you've got those in your drawing. This one isn't as light as this one in the photograph, so I need to bring a bit more shading in here. And then look for the darkest parts. We've already done the black parts, but the darkest parts of the shading. So me is these parts and here we don't look at the photograph around the orange part or the red part. And a few parts around the head. Around the wing. On this part of the wing, There's a few parts that are in shadow that I haven't quite captured in my drawing. So I'm just going to add those in this pad on the wing here. It's a little bit darker. There's a section here on the head. It's very subtle, but Stephanie bit darker. It's kinda above where this gray part fades into the brown part. This pattern here bring a little bit more darkness to this color area. In this pattern here by the eye. It's really quite dark. And it goes up above the eye, creates a bit of an eyebrow. It takes practice to learn how to notice these things. And maybe patients as well, some repeat observations. So you're going back and forth and you're looking again and again in a little bit like spot the difference you're trying to pick out what is different, what needs to be modified to match the photograph. In terms of tonal values into me, the tonal values are probably the most important thing in a drawing. Because this guy could be a bit wonky and it could be kind of funny looking either too thin or too fat. But you could still get something that looks like a finished drawing and his impact by putting these darker tonal values and making sure you have light, middle and dark tonal values. And a quite clear division between them. So if you feel like you're drawing is really great, then you need to exaggerate those, make the lights lighter and the darks darker than your mid tones. 18. Refining With An Eraser: A couple more areas I'm refining, lightening up this tail area here because it doesn't have as much contrast as a photograph yet. And also, if I can, I'm going to lighten up the each of these feet with a lighter setting. That top edge. Might have to redo them again a little bit. I actually just remembered that I've got this neat Tombow Mono Zero Eraser pin. And this would be perfect for just bringing out a highlight along each one of those talents. And it'll also be good for areas like the wing here. If you needed to bring out a few highlights around the eye, would be good as well. But this is just one of these extra tools that make life a little bit easier. You definitely don't need those sorts of things. You could do this whole drawing with an HB pencil, as long as you can get a range of tonal values, light and dark. If you're refining the feet, remember, it's about the light areas and the dark area. So the light age in the dark. And then having a little bit of texture. On the other scales, you can see even across the top of the talents a few little wrinkles, I guess they are. But it texture along the ITU. Don't want to add too much contrast into the rock. You could add a little bit, but contrast is really eye-catching. And if you have extreme contrast down the bottom here, white and black and really sharp textures, then it's going to detract from your main drawing, so keep it quite soft and loose. But you can still have some lights and some darks. And rather than have an outline around the top of the rockets bidder to just have a bit of texture to define the shape because otherwise it looks flat. Anything that has an outline, and this has an outline in your source material and your photograph. And then it's going to look flat. The light is coming from above. So this ij at the back is actually quite a light edge. Again, if you really wanted to take this drawing further than you could put on a background and putting it a dark background here. I'll rub this out in a moment. But just to show you That's going to define the edge of the light edge of the rock thing. But it's also going to detract a bit from our subject matter. So I'm not gonna do that for this one. Right? I think there's enough missing around with it and I'm pretty happy with it. I hope you're happy with your one. Just going to tidy up some of the edges, get rid of some of the lines that I hit remaining from my sketch stage. Thinking if we're not to erase any of my hard work, bring this back again. And he just got this. So it's still quite a novelty to use it. Danger in erasing is sometimes you go too far. Be really good idea to take a break from this, go away from the drawing or close your sketchbook and then maybe even like leave it till the next day and come back the next day and just see in your drawing if there's anything that feels like it's unfinished. For me, the CRA here is a little bit too loose. So probably what I'd do coming back to it with fresh eyes as really look at the shapes that are coming through from this dark area into the lighter area and create a bit of contrast there in tidy up some of these textures in here with a fine pencil, fine sharp pencil. And even just doing that much now, it's made a bit of a difference to it. But you really need to have a break before you can do that sort of stuff. Because otherwise, what can happen is you just end up fiddling around in missing things up and you're not seeing things so clearly anymore. In saying that I am going to stop there and just call it Dan. And I hope to see you in the next sketch club class.