How to See Like a Nature Artist with Virginia Greene | Virginia Greene | Skillshare
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How to See Like a Nature Artist with Virginia Greene

teacher avatar Virginia Greene, Nature Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:56

    • 2.

      Project

      2:01

    • 3.

      Making Marks

      2:39

    • 4.

      See-Plan-Mark

      2:49

    • 5.

      Introduction to the "Icon"

      3:28

    • 6.

      Overcoming the Icon

      1:57

    • 7.

      Abstraction Techniques

      4:33

    • 8.

      Still-Life Demonstration

      3:45

    • 9.

      Conclusion

      1:10

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About This Class

Are you ever frustrated by being unable to turn what you see into a drawing? I’m Virginia Greene, a nature artist, biologist, and park ranger—and in this class for beginner and intermediate artists, I’ll go over how to “see” the world around you with the intent to draw it!

In this class, you’ll learn:

  • How your brain, eyes, and hand work together to create drawings
  • How your brain’s innate tendencies can make drawing harder
  • How to overcome those innate tendencies to practice more effective seeing
  • How to approach building a simple still life to practice Seeing and Drawing
  • Specific Seeing and Drawing techniques to level up your drawings from life

Throughout the class we’ll do several drawing and seeing exercises, and finally we’ll apply all we’ve learned to do pencil drawing of a natural still life, assembled from YOUR environment! All you will need is a sketchbook, a pencil, and a few objects from nature to join in!

I have been making nature art professionally for over a decade, and drawing for 30 years (and counting). If you love nature, sketching from life, and want to pick up some ways to get better at drawing accurately, this class is for you! I look forward to “seeing” with you!

Meet Your Teacher

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Virginia Greene

Nature Illustrator

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Virginia Green, a nature artist, biologist and park ranger. I've worked with scientists and conservation groups across the country to make beautiful nature art, and I am the creator of several personal bird-based fantasy projects. I have been drawing and studying natural subjects all my life, and I want to share with you some of the best tips and tricks that I've learned for drawing nature well, starting with how to see. In this class, we will go over an introduction to the class project, mark-making and a quick exercise to get over the fear of making marks, see-plan-mark, or the process of drawing and how your eyes, brain and hand work together to draw, introducing the icon and how your brain's way of categorizing visual information makes drawing harder, overcoming the icon and how to use your brain to collect the right information from your eyes for drawing, abstraction techniques, aka seeing and drawing exercises to train your brain to actually see what is in front of you and not what it expects to see, and finally, how to tie all of that together to draw a still-life. Each lesson will have a mini exercise to help you explore the concept introduced and to help prepare you for drawing from life. Our class project will be to assemble and draw a simple still-life using natural objects, which we'll discuss more in the next lesson. By the end of this class, you will have a natural still-life pencil drawing informed by your new understanding of how to see like an artist, and you'll be ready to start seeing like an artist everywhere else too. That's it for this introduction. Let's talk about our class project. 2. Project: In order to practice seeing for drawing, we need something to look at. While the whole wide world is out there for you to see, it is best to start with something simple that you can manipulate. The humble still life is a key component of many beginner art classes. But even the greatest artists of all time devoted much energy to drawing and painting still lives. A still life is simply several objects arranged in an appealing way with the explicit intent to draw them. We will be building a simple still life with natural objects from our environments and using it to carry out the exercises for this class, culminating in a final drawing of your unique still life. Materials needed for this project and for the exercises. Sketchbook that lies flat. A pencil with an eraser and three to six natural objects for your still life. You can vary the complexity of your objects to your skill level. For beginners, I recommend leaves, simple wooden blocks, large pebbles, sticks and similar. More challenging items might be skulls and bones, entire plants, desiccated insects, mounted animals or statues and so on. Feel free to mix match for variety, you can set up a still life in all ways. But in general, it is most interesting to have contrasting objects next to each other and overlapping. Varying the sizes of your objects also goes a long way to building visual appeal. That objects like leaves may need to be propped up against other objects to bring them into view. We will be handling our objects a little bit during the exercises before we get to setting up the final still life, but feel free to experiment with different arrangements before we get to that point. That's everything we need for the project. Let's get to our first lesson and exercise on making marks. 3. Making Marks: [MUSIC] Mark making is the act of applying pigment to a surface. This is what comes to mind for most people when they think of drawing, but mark making is actually just one part of drawing. Why am I bringing this up when this is a class about seeing? Because I want you to be comfortable with making marks in general before we get to the point of making them in order to draw. Both brand new artists and artists who have been drawing for decades often feel some anxiety looking at a blank page. There's so much opportunity there and you don't want to mess up, or do you? I am a firm believer that there's no such thing as messing up when it comes to mark making. You may not make the exact mark that you set out to make but every time you try, you get better at matching what your hand is doing to what your brain wants it to do. Before we get into seeing, I want us to do a simple mark making exercise together to get over that initial anxiety about putting marks on a blank page. Even if you're not anxious about it, this exercise will help you warm up your drawing hand. Go to a blank page of your sketchbook and look at it with your pencil in hand. How do you feel about looking at this blank page? Are you perfectly fine and ready to get going? Are you nervous and scared that you're going to make something ugly? See if you can put a name to whatever it is. Then tell yourself with the measure of success for this exercise is whether you did it or not, not the perceived quality of any of the marks that you make. Then right in the middle of the page, I want you to do a scribble of any kind fast without thinking about it. Now fill in the rest of the page with marks of all different kinds. Here are some ideas for marks to make: short, fast, repetitive marks, long slow curbing marks, spirals and squiggles, boxes and circles, using the side of your pencil, using the very tip of your pencil. Noticing how marks change as the pencil gets less sharp and whatever else you can think of, just play. If playing is something you haven't done a whole lot of recently then this may feel a little difficult. But remember, there is no pressure to make marks in any particular way. Every mark that you make for play and practice gets you closer to being able to make marks with intention. This is an exercise I do all the time. Once you have finished filling your page with marks, take a photo and upload it to your class project. In our next lesson, we'll get to the point of the class and discuss the very first step of drawing, how to see. 4. See-Plan-Mark: There are three steps to drawing from life. One, seeing your subject with your eyes, two, planning how to turn what you see into marks with your brain, and three, making those marks with a pencil on a surface using your hand. Each of these parts of drawing needs to be practice to get good at drawing overall. This class focuses on the seeing and planning components which are just as important as mark-making to the final drawing. Drawing starts in the eye long before it gets to the hand. Why is it so hard to turn what we see into drawings? It has to do with what your brain and your eyes do best, surviving. Now stay with me here, I promise this is relevant and it will help. Default seeing is survival seeing. Both your eyes and your brain are made to keep you alive. Your eyes notice important survival information and your brain instantly interprets that information in order to translate it into a survival action. If all you're worried about is surviving, that's just fine. However, say your goal is to draw something such as a big red fruit on the table in front of you. With default or survival seeing your eyes can tell you automatically that the object you see is fruit, red, and ripe. And your brain says, if you're hungry, that you should eat it, and then it takes a break, because as far as it's concerned, it has done its job. In order to get it together any other information that might be useful in order to draw the object, we have to train it what to notice and how to notice it. So what should we notice? Proportion is one part of the object, a different size or shape from another. The form, is it long and thin, short and squat? Value, where are the areas of darkness and lightness on the object? Overlap and depth, what parts of the object are in front of other parts? Now that you have an introduction to this concept, let's get our still-life objects together and think about how to really see them. Look at each of your objects, turn them in your hands. What do your eyes and brain tell you about them? Are they round, skinny? Does it have a curved outline or straight lines? Is one part of it bigger than another? Write down everything that comes to mind as you observe your objects. Next lesson, we will introduce the concept of the icon, which will help you recognize when your brain is seeing for survival, its default mode, rather than seeing like an artist. 5. Introduction to the "Icon": [MUSIC] What do these images have in common? They're all birds, right? Well, not exactly. Despite being extremely different, all three of these get the label Bird in our brain when in fact none of them are actually a bird, but are all just 2D images. What's going on here? As we touched on in the last lesson, our brains are very good at categorizing visual information and extracting what is relevant for survival. Our brains use what I call icons to move through the visual world efficiently. This is essentially an oversimplified version of everything you see that your brain uses as a categorization reference point. Some icons come baked in for survival, such as human faces and emotions. That's why your brain instantly categorizes these as faces-conveying emotion despite those actually being a few extremely simple marks. It is important to surviving as a social animal to recognize a face and also recognize the emotional content of that face. It makes sense that we come pre-loaded with some very powerful icons. You can see this in kids drawings of people or new artist's drawings. Their proportions are often off in very consistent ways such as very large eyes or facial features that completely dominate the head even though facial features actually take up a relatively small part of the face. We also build our own internal icons over the course of our lives for everything that we experience and encounter. As we experience and see more and more, our brain refines and expands those icons to match our experience. For example, we learn that birds have feathers and beaks, and so both this cartoon bird and an actual picture of a bird are categorized under the bird icon. However, someone who has never seen a bird would not have an icon for it even though they might have icons for face or animal that would help them perceive what they are looking at. This built-in system lets us adapt to almost any environment in development collecting important information for our survival in that environment, but it gets us into trouble when we want to draw realistically. When we aren't aware of the influence of the icon in our minds, we start trying to draw what we expect to see or our icon instead of what we actually see. If we want to get better at drawing from nature, we need to slow our brains down and recognize when we're looking for an icon instead of seeing what's actually in front of us. For this exercise, let's look at our objects and compare them to our internal icons. Consider your objects. What are the elements of each that help you identify what they are instantly? These same aspects are the important parts of your icon for that object. Try searching for object plus cartoon in a search engine and seeing what comes up. What are the essential elements preserved in the icon that even cartoon versions of it have? As a bonus for fun later, look for icons in the world around you: in advertising, in other cartoons, in packaging, and so on. The concept of the icon was one of the biggest aha moments I had in my artistic journey, and in the next lesson I will give you the tools that I use to overcome it in my work. 6. Overcoming the Icon: [MUSIC] We've observed that our internal icons are at odds with visual information. Luckily, the inherent nature of art helps us with this. Drawing is creating a 2D illusion of a 3D object. When you draw a bird, you are not actually drawing a bird, you are drawing a series of lines with different curves and lengths, that when viewed together are interpreted as bird. That is, all the drawing is. To create a 2D illusion with a pencil, we need to start thinking in terms of lines, not icons, which means we need to practice seeing in terms of lines as well. Thinking about and looking at things like this takes practice. But if you try, you can begin to see the world around you in shapes, forms, and series of lines, all of which are easier to turn into a drawing, than a series of icons. The solution that I've found for this issue, is to abstract the subject or to divorce the visual information from the internal icon. One way to do this, is to look at something from an unusual angle. It forces your brain to take a second, to understand what it's looking at, and it doesn't jump as quickly to your icon. This slowing down gives you a chance to look at lines, shapes, and forms of things, instead of just icons. Don't be discouraged if it seems difficult at first, it's not a natural way of looking at things, and it definitely takes practice. But if you can practice on simple objects, eventually you will be able to break down even complex objects into a series of lines. Take your objects, and turn them all at unusual viewing angles. How does it change their outline? Does it make it harder to see what it is easily? Go look at a few other objects in your surroundings that you haven't been looking at already, and turn them all around. What shapes do they have now? Let's learn some specific abstraction techniques. 7. Abstraction Techniques: We've been talking a lot about how to see, and now we're finally ready to start making marks. The step that links seeing with mark-making is planning and using our brains to decide how we will transform the lines that we see around us into lines on paper. Rough shapes. Roughly sketch the general shape of your object to use as a reference for the rest of the drawing. Don't worry if it's not exact, you just need something to start building off of. Pick your starting point. Sometimes it is tough to know where to begin when drawing an object. Your brain is especially attuned to notice patterns and disruption to patterns. If you see a circle with a dent in it, your eyes zero-in on the dent without you thinking about it. Use this innate tendency to start drawing your object. Where is a change point along the silhouette of your object? Triangulation. Triangulation is using two reference points to find a third point and helps define proportions. We already have our first reference point and we can place a second one along the edge of our object in relation to that first one. Then we use the first two reference points we found to find a third point along our outline. Remembering that natural tendency to notice differences, and imagining a triangle on top of our object connecting all three. Imagining this triangle gives us a sense of where to place our third point on our drawing, and to continue to build our outline. You can use this concept to continue to place reference points throughout your drawing. Line proportions, longer or shorter. A simple way to increase the accuracy of proportions is to ask yourself whether a line you are about to draw is longer or shorter than a line you have already drawn. Angle proportions, wider or narrower than 90 degrees. This is similar to our last step in that it helps with proportions. It's the angle of the line that you need to draw greater or narrower than 90 degrees throughout. Constant size-up and comparison. As you add lines and points to your drawing, constantly look back and forth between your page and your object to see if they match up. If they don't, instead of being disappointed or frustrated, use it as another opportunity to practice seeing. Zero-in on each part of the drawing and ask yourself, where are the differences? What is it that is making things different? Maybe you will realize that you made a line too long compared to another, and it's thrown off the proportion of one of your objects. That's fine. Erase it and do it a new armed with the knowledge that you just gleaned. This is part of the process and I do it all the time. Value. Light, mid-tone, or dark. Once you have built a good outline of your subject, the next level to consider is value. Value is what gives drawing step or the illusion of three-dimensions. The classic example of this is a sphere showing that the value of an object is lightest where light strikes the object and darker where light is not able to reach. There is no one size fits all approach to value because it is completely light-dependent. However, we can simplify it down to three options if you are a beginner, light, midtone, and dark. As you look at your object, imagine it's a black and white photo. Where is the lightest light? Where is the darkest dark? You can change this by shining a light directly on your object, which will increase the contrast and drama. In standard lighting, the lightest areas should have no shading, and the darkest areas should have the most shading. Middletone areas are receiving a middle amount of light and have an intermediate amount of shading. You may see more than three tones when you look at the value, but for beginners, categorize all of your values as one of the three. Choose one of your objects and practice each technique using just that object several times if you want from different angles. Share your sketches to your project. You can do another object this way, or even all of them before moving on to the next step. Now, you have some basic abstraction tools to help you turn what you see into marks. It's time for our final still-life. 8. Still-Life Demonstration: [MUSIC] It's time to use everything we've discussed to draw your final still life. In this lesson, you'll watch me do a quick still life using the same techniques. [MUSIC] Now that you've watched me do it, it's your turn. Setup your still life, and using your eyes, brain, and hand, draw it. Take as many shots as you like at drawing it. Share your favorite on your project page. 9. Conclusion: [MUSIC] You did it. You looked at your objects, you really saw them and overcame their icons, and you reproduced them on paper. In this class, we have covered mark-making, see-plan-mark, the process of drawing, introducing the icon, overcoming the icon, abstraction techniques, and pulling it all together. Now that you're done with the class and you've practiced your new seeing skills on your still-life, I encourage you to take those skills and apply them in the rest of your life. As you go about your day, pause to notice things. Think to yourself, if I were going to draw that, how would I start? What lines and angles and proportions would I need to consider? By doing this, you can practice seeing like an artist all the time, even without a pencil and paper. Thank you so much for taking this course with me. I hope you find it useful in your journey as an artist. If you would like to learn more about my work or just say hi, you can find me on Instagram, Patreon, or via my website. Happy seeing. [MUSIC]