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]