Learn to Draw: 30 Steps to Being A Better Artist

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Everyone can learn to draw, yes, even you. My name is Paul Richmond. I've been an artist my whole life. I was so lucky to have a wonderful art teacher who took me under her wing when I was only four years old and she taught me how to draw, how to paint and ever since then I've been hooked. I've had some wonderful experiences as an artist, sharing my art with people all around the world, making cover illustrations for books, even doing some commissions for celebrities like Dolly Parton. At the root of everything that I do is a strong drawing. I want to teach you some of the skills and techniques that I've learned over the years for capturing my ideas and putting them on paper. This video series contains 30 lessons that are roughly 10 minutes each. You can do one a day if you want to spread it out over 30 days, or you can binge totally up to you. The best way to develop your drawing practice is to make it a habit. That's why I wanted to take these ideas and break them down into bite-size lessons that you could tackle one at a time and I guarantee you will see rapid improvement in your drawings. This class is at a beginner level so if you have absolutely no experience with drawing, you come to the right place. However, if you're a bit more advanced, this class can still be useful because it's always helpful to go back and review the fundamentals. In this class, we'll be doing things like contour line drawing, shading, crosshatching. You will learn how to draw in perspective, and we will work with a variety of subject matter, from still life, to humans, to landscapes. We've got it all. Because once you learn the basics of drawing, you can draw anything. I truly believe that everyone is an artist. I'm so excited to get started, so sharpen your pencils, grab some paper, and let's go. 2. Blind Contour Drawing: Before we get started, I just want to say a few things for any of you who might be feeling a little nervous or anxious about this. Number 1, everyone is an artist and that means everyone can learn to draw. A lot of people say things to me like, I can't even draw a straight line. That's okay. You may draw crooked line [LAUGHTER] or use a ruler. There is always a way. The fact that you signed up for this means that there is something inside of you that wants to let your creativity out. I really want to encourage you to give yourself the space during this time that we have together to create without judgment. If you make a drawing that looks terrible, that's okay too. These are just for practice. These don't have to go hang in an art museum somewhere. This is for you to just get more comfortable taking your ideas or what you see in front of you and replicating it on paper. The more you do that, the better you'll get. Which is why over the course of these 30 lessons, you are going to get experience in a lot of different areas that will help improve your drawing skills immensely. We've broken it down into three different sections, starting with learning to see like an artist, then learning the basics of drawing and finally, putting it into practice. Let's get started with Lesson 1. Sharpen your pencil, get some blank paper and let's go. Today we are going to be doing blind contour drawings. Trust me, anyone can do this. It's a fun way to get your feet wet and get started. Let's go. All that you need is a pencil, no erasing. [LAUGHTER] See there is no eraser here, you don't need any eraser today. We're not going to stop long enough for that. This is a great warm-up exercise to just help you get over the need for perfection. I'm going to put up an image on the screen. I'll give you two minutes. Here are the rules. You are not allowed to look at your paper, the whole time I want you to stare right at the screen and look at the photo of whatever it is and just trust your hand to draw what it sees. The other rule is, you don't lift your pencil up off of the paper. Normally if you're drawing something and you want to come over here, you would lift your pencil up and come do that, but for this you have to keep going. Just work your way over, you're going to end up with a lot of lines. Some of these might look crazy [LAUGHTER] that is okay. This is all about eye, hand coordination and just trusting yourself and studying the shapes that you see. Are you ready? I'm going to pull up the first one. Let's just dive right in and get started. That's the best way to do it. Here is our first image. I'm going to start the clock now. I'll give us two minutes. I'm not going to cheat, I promise. You can't see my face, but I'm not going to look at what I'm drawing either. Let's just hope for the best. Get your pencils in position, ready and go. It's a little scary at first. You can take your time or you can go fast. Just focus on the edges, the lines, the shapes, and if you get drawn in a certain direction like I just did with that shoelace, [LAUGHTER] go for it. It's okay. I have no idea if what I'm drawing even remotely resembles a shoe, that's all right. We have about a minute and a half left to go, so I'm going to just keep drawing. I like to use the whole time that's allotted. [LAUGHTER] I can try to add in some details. A lot of people when they first start drawing, get really nervous and want to make everything perfect. That's why I love to start with a blind contour drawing, because there is just absolutely no way on earth to make it perfect. You can just let go of that expectation and have some fun with it. Drawing is supposed to be fun. Today is all about loosening up, trusting the process. We'll get more technical and more detailed as we go along, but this is a wonderful exercise just to help you loosen up with your pencil. See what happens. We have about 30 seconds left, so keep going. I'm going to come around. I don't even know if I'm on the shoe or not, [LAUGHTER] but I'm going to draw the shadow now of the shoe. You're probably not looking at my drawing anyway. That's okay. You should just look at the photo. But you should know something about me, I like to talk. I'm going to be talking the whole time. You can't shut me up. [LAUGHTER] Time is up for that one. How did that go? My gosh. It's somewhat recognizable as a shoe. [LAUGHTER] I feel good about that. How did yours turn out? Is it a masterpiece? Is it refrigerator worthy? [LAUGHTER] If not, that is all right. Now you can use the same paper if you want. Sometimes just move over and work in another spot. I'm actually going to tear it out and get another piece here, so you'll be able to see better what I'm doing. Let's pull up another image now. I'm going to get something that has totally different shapes. Look at that. Are we ready? I'm going to set the clock. We'll try again. Two minutes and go. This has so many interesting shapes. I'm just going to put my pencil down and start. [LAUGHTER] If you have the ability to draw bigger, I think that's always really fun, but whatever size you want to work at, it's totally okay. By the way, I'm using a 4B pencil for this. You can use any pencil or pen or crayon, whatever tool you happen to have handy is just fine. I like the 4B, anything in the B range for doing quick sketches like this is nice. We will in a future lesson get into what that really means. What do all the numbers and letters on our pencils actually stand for, but for now the B pencils tend to be softer-lead, they draw a little bit darker. That's why I like them. You don't have to work as hard to get a nice line on the paper. I'm drawing a stem to somewhere. [LAUGHTER] I'm not sure where, I'm totally lost. Here's your teacher demonstrating for you that it is okay to fail. I think I'm even out of the range of what you can see. [LAUGHTER] Try to get back somewhere on the page here. This is going to be a winner. This will give you all permission to just mess up. [LAUGHTER] I had a friend who's teaching a writing class this weekend and they were talking about how you have to just give yourself permission to write total garbage sometimes, and I think the same is true for visual artists. We can get all hung up on, thinking we have to make everything perfect and we don't. Who cares? This is just practice, this just for fun. The more you can get out of your own way and give yourself permission to fail, you'll be surprised how you're actually going to end up doing some really cool things. This particular drawing might not be one of those for me. [LAUGHTER] Time's up, by the way. It's interesting in an abstract way. I don't know that I would look at that and know exactly what it was supposed to be, but that's okay. Let's do another one. You're ready? [NOISE] Let me get that little masterpiece out of here. Let's do another one. Look at that. Ready, set, go. Just look at the shapes. Look at the outlines and try not to really think about what it is so much that you're drawing. I think if there is any takeaway from this first lesson, it would be to start trying to get away from overthinking your drawings and just look for shapes, look for lines. The less you can label the objects or the subjects of your art, whatever they happen to be, the more you'll be able to really focus on what you're seeing. I think the ability to learning to draw is so much about learning how to see. Artists say that all the time and I don't know if it's always very clear what we mean, because everyone I'm sure thinks, I can see, [LAUGHTER] what are you talking about? But seeing the overall impression of something and then really looking closer and breaking it down and actually identifying shapes and values which are the lights and the darks, shadows, highlights all of the subtle interesting things that are going on, that's what I mean when I say seeing like an artist. It means you're not thinking, I'm drawing some bowls, you're looking at all the shapes and the positive spaces which are the objects and the negative shapes, which are the spaces in between the objects. Two more seconds and stop. Time's up. That's not too bad. I can start to recognize what that is. How did yours just turn out? I bet it is a masterpiece. [LAUGHTER] Let's do one more and then that'll be it for today. Of course, you can do as many as you want. Nothing is stopping you. You can look for objects in your house. This would be an interesting one to end on. Are you ready? Two minutes and go. If you're my age or older, you might have experienced one of these before. [LAUGHTER] For all of you, young ones out there, this is a telephone. [LAUGHTER] It doesn't have the ability to text, doesn't have the ability to go on social media. It has to be plugged into a wall. You might be asking yourself, what is even the point? [LAUGHTER] I hear you. It's got a really interesting shape. Not today, [LAUGHTER] I'm very confident that I have managed to capture that shape, but that's all right. We're going to come over here and draw the little dial. How many of you were nervous about starting this class by the way? I'm asking you as if I will be able to hear your answers. [LAUGHTER] I'm just going to pretend I hear you. That's not uncommon. People are often very nervous to try new things and do something that they've never done before, especially because I think there is this expectation that we have that we've to be perfect at everything we do. I've mentioned that already, overemphasizing that today, but I really want to stress that this class is all about just letting go of that and having fun. The more you can give yourself permission to enjoy the process, the more you're going to want to do it. Today, even if we've only made a bunch of silly drawings and you don't really like any of them, I hope you've enjoyed it, I hope it's helped you to break the ice. When we come back for our next lesson, we're going to dig in even deeper. In the meantime, time is up for this. Thank you so much for joining me. See, that was pretty painless. [LAUGHTER] I hope you enjoyed that. I'll be back soon to see you for Lesson 2, where we will be drawing upside down. I would do a headstand or something, but I don t think that's a good idea. [LAUGHTER] 3. Drawing Upside Down: Today, we're going to be drawing upside down. This is a tool that can help you separate a bit from thinking so much about what it is that you're drawing. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper, and let's go. Today we are going to draw this adorable parakeet, but we're going to flip it upside down first. [LAUGHTER] That's right, poor little guy is hanging there like a bat. [LAUGHTER] The reason we are doing this is because when you flip your reference upside down and draw it that way, it's another way of separating yourself a little bit from it and being able to just look for the shapes. Let's start by identifying some of the big shapes that we see, that's usually the easiest way to start a drawing. You can use different shapes than me, I always like to point out that what I'm sharing here is my way and that is not the only way. Use it as a guide, take what you can from it, but if you feel drawn to work a different way, do that. I'm starting with an oval shape for the body of the bird, and it has a little bit of a lean to it. See I've drawn it so that instead of being straight up and down, it's angled just a little bit this way. Now, you might have noticed when I'm drawing, I tend to hold my pencil farther back at first, and I draw light and sketchy and I make a lot of lines. That's for me is just a way of not getting too worried about all the details at first. It keeps me loose, lets me get some stuff on the paper, and then I can figure it out and get more detailed and tighter later. Now, I'm going to draw another oval for the head, and I'm going to draw it about right here. So far it doesn't look too much like our bird, but it's a start. You can see where it's going. I might do a little triangular shape for the beak, for now. Obviously, that's not the exact shape and I'm going to look for a place to put the eye and just rough in maybe another oval for not the eye itself, but the white shape around the eye. Somewhere about in there. It's not looking bad, looks like it could be on Angry Birds or something. [LAUGHTER] Sorry, you will have to put up with my sense of humor. Just mute me if it gets to be too much. [LAUGHTER] I won't be offended, I won't even know. Another triangular shape and mine is going to go right off the page, that's okay. Come back in over here. It's always better to let your drawing just go right off the page rather than trying to squeeze something in and make the proportions all wacky. Then we have another little triangular shape about right here, and that's for the wing. Kind of a triangle I guess, but I'm going ahead and giving it a rounded tip. This isn't geometry class so you don't have to make your triangles perfect. Then I see we have a little bit of a claw right here so I'm just going to draw, I don't know what shape you'd call that, just a claw. [LAUGHTER] You don't have to be able to name it either. A lot of people when I say draw the shapes they think that it has to be squares and circles and rectangles, triangles but if you're able to go ahead and give the shape a little bit more of a character that you see like I'm doing here with the claws, go ahead and do that. Then I don't want to get too detailed with the background on this one, especially since we only have 10 minutes for this video. I'm just going to draw a line here at an angle to represent what I see of this top branch, and I'm not really going to draw the bottom part. It looks like it's connecting to another thicker branch or something, but for the purpose of this drawing, we're going to take some artistic license and leave that out because it's really all about the birdy. Now we're in pretty good shape, we're about halfway through so far. If you need a little bit longer to get your drawing to this point, go ahead and pause the video, take your time, keep going. When you're ready, then let's continue. Now that we have things broken down into basic shapes, now we go back and start connecting the shapes first of all. Right here where the head is still floating, I'm going to draw a line to connect it to the body. I see how that line comes over at an angle like this, and then angles over again and then comes down so I'm going to go ahead and draw it accurately so that it will mimic the shape that I'm seeing. Since I am drawing it upside down, I really am looking at the shapes. I'm not thinking, I'm drawing a neck right now or I'm drawing this or that, I'm just looking at the shapes, it truly does help. Now I'm going to come over here, and pretty much right where this beak connects into the face, right here at this connection point and it's good to look for connection points and to see where things align. Right here where that beak touches the bottom of the face is where we see this side of the little birdie neck come down, and then connect over into the body. Because my previous lines were very loose and sketchy and light, see how just going on top of them with darker line makes it very clear which line is the correct one, and then you don't even notice all those others, you can certainly go in and erase them too if you want. Now I'm noticing how this side comes down and leads right into this little wing, can you see that? This is what I mean when I talk about looking at things like an artist. We're not just drawing your standard wing that you might imagine, what your brain thinks a wing looks like. We're looking at the shapes that we see in front of us, and usually, those shapes are very different than what our mental concept of that thing is. You really see that when you get into doing portrait work, drawing figures, or anything like that. We all have a mental concept of what we think things look like, but if you can do little tricks like this, like flipping your reference upside down, it helps you to get away from that. See another little shape, I'm just working my way around. You see all the different shapes that I'm picking up on here from the reference. I get a bit carried away talking and don't always tell you what I'm doing, I guess I should probably focus. I'm just drawing in some hints of some of the feather shapes over here right now so that the body isn't just one big shape. Now, I'm not going to do shading on this, today we're just doing line drawing. But one thing that you can see, at least in mind, is how I am making some lines lighter and some lines are darker. That's because I'm trying to create a sense of what is to be emphasized or what's more important I guess, it's about creating a visual priority for the viewer. When I look at the photo of the bird, I see all these feathers and they're beautiful but they're very subtle compared to the outer edge of the body, for example. That's a much more clear defined contrasting shape so that's why I'm using stronger lines there. Now I'm going to come around here, connect this down. Create our little claw, which we've pretty much already got, but I'm going to sharpen it up a little bit. Of course, you can do a real deep dive on a drawing like this, you could spend all day on it if you want to getting into all the little wonderful textures and shapes, and I encourage you to do that. All of these photo references will be included on the web pages that you'll have access to by purchasing this class, so you can always come back to this, work more on this drawing, or draw it again whenever you would like. Now, let me come up here and let's get the most important part. I'm not even going to say what it is because when you're drawing upside down, you're not really supposed to be thinking about that. [LAUGHTER] You're just looking at shapes. This is my kneaded eraser, by the way, I don't think I've used it yet with you all. You can use any kind of eraser you want, but sometimes I do like to come in and just erase away some of those early lines so that all that's left is the more defined lines now that I know that everything is where it's supposed to be. Let's get this little eye in, I'm going to do this outer shape first. Circle, highlight,then bring this around. Now, this is where we have to get a little more detailed because before I just had a straight line here, but looking at the photo, you can see it actually curves in. It comes over, comes up, and over again. Now, if you were just imagining a beak, would you think to draw a line like that? I wouldn't. This is why looking is key. Now we have this angle here and then it curves. We have a curve here, and then this little cute hook that comes, well, I would say down but actually for us right now, it's hooking up. [LAUGHTER] Come around, connect the back. Let me just define the branch a little more while I'm at it. There we go, there's our bird. Not bad for lesson number 2. Probably looks a little better I would guess than our contour drawings yesterday, although you never know sometimes those end up really awesome too. That's it for today. I would love to see your drawings, be sure to share them with us and keep practicing. Draw other stuff, flip it upside down, and see if that helps you. I hope you enjoyed that, keep practicing, keep drawing. In our next lesson, lesson number 3, we're going to be talking about and practicing, drawing from memory versus drawing from reference. I'll see you then, bye-bye. 4. Using Reference: Today we are going to be learning about the difference between drawing from memory versus drawing from reference. Using a reference is not cheating. In fact, it is something that many, many artists do, and I would say most representational or realistic artists. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. We're going to just draw a picture from our imagination. I want us to try to not look at any reference, and actually it's best if you don't even look at mine although I will be obviously drawing on the screen because [LAUGHTER] this would be a very boring class if I didn't. But I want you to just really look at your paper. I'm only going to give you one minute, and I want you to draw a picture of a sunflower. As you remember it, as you imagine it, what you think a sunflower looks like. We have one minute ready and go. I'm going to do mine over here. When I think of a sunflower, I think of the circle in the middle. There's some other circle I think there's a bunch of stuff happening here [LAUGHTER] I'm just going to scribble for now because that's about all the time we have, and I know that there's petals, I think there's different layers, maybe petals, maybe some like back here. I'm going to draw that, beautiful, and big stem and the leaf. You would recognize, I think, what it was supposed to be, but it definitely does not look like an image of a sunflower that was drawn using a reference. You can tell that it was more of my mental concept of what a sunflower looks like. Now, we're going to contrast that by drawing from a reference image of a sunflower. Let me pull that up. There you go, it's a little different [LAUGHTER] than what I have given us. Now we're going to spend the rest of today's lesson studying this image and drawing what we see and then we will note the differences between our first attempt and our second. Are you with me? Let's go. I'm going to draw mine right next to it because I think that will make it more interesting. You could do it on a new piece of paper too if you want or however you would like. The first thing I notice is that the sunflower I drew from my head was pointing right towards us. The one in the photo is turned, so instead of being a perfect circle, the center part is an oval and it leans like this because the sunflower isn't straight up and down and perfect. It's angled back a little bit. I think that's one really good lesson. Right off the bat, when you draw something from a reference, you notice the little nuances about it that you wouldn't necessarily think of if you were just drawing it from your imagination. Even though most of the elements that I drew are similar it's all those little subtle things. It's the ways that it's imperfect or the character is what makes it. Now I'm drawing this other circle on the inside, and I'm still doing my very loose shapes. I'm not getting too detailed yet. This is how I like to start my drawings. Now I'm going to start by drawing some of these petals and they're little bit more interesting [LAUGHTER] in shape than the ones from my head. Each one is different. When you're drawing something like this, it's very much a stylistic choice. How true you want to be to the photo or to the reference. You could also be drawing from a real sunflower that was sitting in front of you too. I don't want to just say reference photo, but any reference you can be really, really tied to it and try to make everything exact. Or as I'm doing here, I'm using it to get a sense of the shaping and how things work but I'm not trying to make it too perfect. That would take a little bit longer than we have, and I want to encourage you not to give too much to your perfectionistic tendencies if you happen to have those too quickly, because that can get in the way. It's better to start loose, I think, and then work your way towards in more detail and refining your drawings more. One thing that I'm noticing that gives this a lot of depth is that the petals on this side appear longer than the ones on this side, and it's not that they actually are longer, but it's because these are being foreshortened. The ones that are coming towards us, they feel like they're coming right at us actually, so that's why we don't see them at their full length. You'll see when I get around to that part, I started with the easy side [LAUGHTER] I'll pretend I did that for you, but honestly, I did that for me too. Because why not? It's always easier. It's always better to start with the easy side and work your way up., I think. That's actually a really good rule for drawing. If you're struggling in one area you just keep redrawing and redrawing and it's not working. Move on to somewhere else that you feel like you have a better handle on and then come back to it. Some of these over here, we only see little edges of them, we don't really hardly see anything of the petal at all. Then I'm seeing there's a few where we see just little shapes like this. Each one is moving in its own unique direction, so much interesting shapes and movement here. I love this. It's nice feeling when you can get all the way back around to where you started. There are some that we see longer that are coming out behind these up-close one so I'll get those next. I'm just approximating. I'm not trying to make it exact. If you wanted to do scientific illustration, if you're interested in that type of work, that's when you would really take your time and draw every single little shape exact. If that appeals to you, go for it. You can pause this video and take as long as you want. I support that, but still start loose if you can. I think it's easier to compare size and relationships of the different parts when you can just get something on there quickly and then connect the lines to cleaner lines if you are on a sharper edges. Almost done with these petals. How are yours coming? I wish I could see them right now. Be sharing, share them with me. I want to see your work. Now I'm going to just like I did on this one, but maybe a little bit more with a little bit more purpose this time, I'm just going to imply this part. I'm not going to get too detailed with that but I am looking at the direction that I see the lines and the shapes moving, and that does give it a little more depth to a little more purpose than the ones over here. Then it's even darker on the inside so I'm going to go ahead and do that too. Then the stem comes down this way like that. It has a few little interesting lumps and bumps. Give it some character too. You don't want to neglect any area of your drawing if there's possibility of making it more interesting, go for it. This is where I would sharpen my pencil, but I'm just being lazy, I'm grabbing another one. Now I just going to take a couple minutes here and clean up my lines. We're going to keep this as a line drawing for today, and I'm using a lot of variation in the line thickness here. That's something I want to start encouraging you to think about in your drawings when you are doing just a line drawing. One way to really get a lot of interest and also to start suggesting things like shadows and light and depth is by varying the weight or the thickness of the lines that you draw. See how I'm going thicker in some parts, especially where I feel maybe it would be going back into a shadow or where there might be more dark. Or if there's some overlapping, something maybe do a little emphasis. It makes your drawing a lot more interesting than if all the lines are the scene. Then some of these little folds increases in the petal. I'm just doing with a very light. Almost there. See this is the fun part because you know, you've already got everything where it's supposed to be. Pressure is off. Now you just get to make it look pretty [LAUGHTER] [inaudible] Almost there. Hopefully you're feeling confident in your drawing and not stressing out too much if you are newer to drawing. Let me just remind you of a few important things like don't forget to breath [LAUGHTER] I can't tell you how many students I've worked with who when they first started out, they were so nervous they were going to mess up that they just held their breathe the whole time and I was worried they were going to pass out. Keep breathing, take your time, so no pressure. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's all about learning. The more you practice, the better you'll get. Drawing is a skill. You do not have to be born with any magical ability to be able to draw. All that it takes is practice. That's exactly what you're doing. You've made it this far. Congrats. Well, I think we can see a little difference between my two sunflowers [LAUGHTER] I hope you look and compare yours and see if it's almost like a before and after [LAUGHTER] Keep practicing if you want, find some other reference images and see what you can do. In our next lesson, lesson Number 4, we're going to be practicing drawing the silhouettes of complicated objects, so get ready. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 5. Silhouettes of Complicated Objects: Thanks for coming back. [LAUGHTER] That's the biggest challenge, is just hanging in there and keeping going and you're doing it. Today we're going to be practicing drawing the silhouettes of complicated objects. Instead of getting all caught up in all the details that are going on in the inside, we're just going to be looking at the outside lines. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper, let's go. This is very similar to when we did the contour line drawing with Lesson 1, only this time you're allowed to look at your paper. I'm going to give you two-and-a-half minutes for each drawing. Here's the first reference. I'm going to start the clock now, ready and go. Just pick a point. I'm going to start right down here at the bottom on the left side, and work my way up. I'm only looking at the outer line. We're not going to draw any interior lines on this one. Just look at the shapes that are created by the outer edge and how it interacts with the negative space. This is really an exercise in looking at positive and negative space. Negative space is the background, the yellow area in this case. Positive space is the subject matter, so the hand and the ice cream cone, which is making me very hungry right now. Working my way around. It looks very abstract. If you were just looking at this drawing at this point without seeing the reference, I doubt you would have any idea what it even is. I'm trying to pay attention to where things line up, like how this edge, where the ice cream meets the cone on this side lines up with where the first and the second scoop meet over here. Paying attention to alignment can really help you get things in the right direction. It is more challenging to capture proportions when you're only drawing the outline. Having interior lines and shapes, I think it just gives you more information to respond to and compare. That makes it a little easier to get the proportions right. Basically I'm asking you to do something that's very challenging. Do not be discouraged if your proportions look off or if the drawing doesn't look great. This is really more just an exercise I'm giving you to think about how you're seeing those edges. It's about looking. It's not about making a perfect drawing. We have about 15 seconds left. I actually made it all the way around. I'm finished, but you keep on going. Take advantage of every one of those seconds if you need them. Almost done. Three, 2, 1, stop. [LAUGHTER] Let's do another one. Are you ready? Here's our next one. I'm going to start the clock again, two-and-a-half minutes, and go. Once again, I'm going to start at the bottom. I think that just helps anchor things. Lots of little lumps and bumps on this. It should keep us busy. One of the tools for creating a really strong composition in your artwork is thinking about the breakup of the positive and the negative space. The shapes, especially the shapes that are created by the negative spaces, if you look at those as shapes instead of just as emptiness, those can actually really help to create a dynamic image. If you have a good variety of shapes, like look at the negative space in this photo. See how that blue area breaks up the page. Now, if you could look at that and imagine that that was a shape, instead of just being the sky. If you look at that blue as a shape, how interesting is that? It's really tight to the edges in some places. In other areas, there's a lot of room and it's very open. That's part of what makes this composition of this photograph so strong. I isolate it in the way that we're doing with this exercise, you can really see that. Oh my gosh, we only have a minute left. I've been going too slow. [LAUGHTER] Get it on up here, let's see. I'm going off the top of the page, you can't even see. Sorry [LAUGHTER]. I'll get back down here quick. It's okay to go off your paper. Its better to do that than to make something squished in to try to get it to fit. This is not going to be a masterpiece by any means [LAUGHTER] and that's okay. I still have 10 seconds. So I'm going to go in and draw this one negative space right here because I do like that one a lot. My proportions are a little wacky in this drawing, you will have that sometimes. [LAUGHTER] You can have the top is like the arc over here when it should line up with this, but it gets across the idea. That was our second drawing. Time for Number 3. [NOISE] Are you ready? Those were just warmups. [LAUGHTER] This next one is a little more complicated so I'm going to give us three minute for this one. Especially because I did not appreciate how I had to rush the last time. See now you have an advantage here. You can just pause it and take as long as you want. I'll never know. [LAUGHTER] But now we're going to go three minutes. Here is the reference. This time we have several different objects together. Start. I like that there's a mix of some more organic shapes and you have the geometric shapes of the picture. I'm going to start down here. Let's see, and just work my way up and around. We've got a leaf. Look at the positive-negative shape break up in this one. Isn't that interesting? It just gives you a whole new way to look at things. In fact, many of the exercises that we're going to be doing together, that's really what it's about. It's just challenging you to look at the world in new ways. The more that you do that, the more you will see and the more you'll be able to bring out in your drawings, I should say. Then we have these straighter lines here. Comes down, and up. I'm trying to draw with a steady, consistent line. Drawing with confidence. That's a whole skill in itself. It's something you almost have to fake at first [LAUGHTER] because nobody when they're first starting out feel super confident in their drawings. But you've heard the expression, fake it till you make it. I think that really does apply here because if you draw with confidence, it shows. If you're really timid about it and you're afraid to make marks with your drawings it'll have that kind of a feel. But if you draw with confidence and if you mess up, you just fix it. Made my way back around to the beginning. Now I have a few negative spaces on the interior of these objects that I want to go through and bring out. I'm going to start here first. There's a little one right here. One more up here and then up here. Five more seconds. How are you doing? You making a masterpiece? Just in time. [LAUGHTER] Time's up. How did you do? I hope you had fun. I hope it helped you to start to look at things in a different way, so if you want to do more practice, gather some objects or lookup some photos, and just focus on the outline today, the silhouette and pay attention to the relationships between the positive and negative space. Great job. See you did it. I knew you could do it. [LAUGHTER] Thanks for hanging in there with me. In our next lesson, lesson Number 5, we're going to be practicing proportion and measuring by sight. Get ready. [LAUGHTER] See you next time. Bye bye. 6. Proportion and Measuring by Sight: This is lesson number 5, and today we're going to be practicing proportion and measuring by sight. You maybe have seen some artists do this before with a pencil or with a paintbrush. Today you're going to learn what that's all about. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper, let's go. Today we're going to draw this beautiful fox and we're going to spend our whole lesson working on how to figure out the proportions. To start, we will just do the basic shapes, just like I've shown you in other drawings and I like to start with the biggest shapes first. I'm holding my pencil farther back. I'm using a 4B, so you'll be able to see it pretty well. This is one of the softer lead, darker pencils. You could use an HB or a B or a 2B, whatever you want. I'm going to start with a long rounded shape for the body. You can see I'm being very loose, very sketchy. [NOISE] Not sketchy as in shady. [LAUGHTER] Sorry, I can't help myself. [LAUGHTER] There's the big one; jelly bean body. Now I'm going to do a little oval shape for now, for the head. Maybe just a little bit of a suggestion of where the nose snout [LAUGHTER] area is. Then I'm going to draw some little triangles about where I think the ears go. Now, what I want to show you today is how you can actually do some optical measuring to check the proportions in your drawings before you get too committed to the detail. So for anybody who has commitment issues [LAUGHTER] like me, this is your day. What I'd like you to do is take your pencil and you're going to hold it horizontally. If you have the image on your screen right now of the fox, align the point of the pencil with the left edge of the fox's face in the photo and then slide your thumb. I'll do it using my drawing here. You're going to line the point up with the edge and then slide your thumb to the right side of the face. You've basically captured the measurement of the face. Hold your pencil up and do that to the photo. Sorry. I'm doing it but you can't see because I'm off-camera. You're going to just count over how many heads does it take to get to the far side of the body. I'm going to do it to 1, 2, 3, so a little over three, maybe like three-and-a-quarter, and then you come to your drawing and check it and see if you got it right. One, 2, 3, and a quarter. Actually, I had shortened it a little bit, but I think the original line that I had was better, so I'm going to emphasize that one, and that tells me that the proportions are correct between the face and the body. See how easy it is to make changes at this stage. If there was something I didn't like or if the proportions were wrong, I'm not so far along that I feel bad about having to make that adjustment. It's an easy fix. Now I'm going to rough in some legs. I'm also looking at the alignment. I see in the photo that the first leg starts right underneath the mouth area if you just draw a straight line down and then it angles back this way. Optical measuring is one way to make sure that things are the right size. Checking the alignment of things is how you can make sure they're in the right place. [NOISE] Much checking to do. You see artists drawing and especially if they really make it seem easy, you don't realize that they're just doing all of those things in their head as they go. You might not see them actually holding up their pencil and measuring. Every artist has a different way of doing it. But in order to capture what you're seeing in a realistic way if that is your goal, and I shouldn't say that doesn't have to be the goal either. Every artist's style is totally different. But if you're going for realism, you do need to constantly be thinking about are the different parts of this drawing in the right place and are they the right size. That's this leg.That looks pretty good. Then there's a little gap. I'm looking at the shape of that negative space. We talked about that in the last lesson. Look at the shape that that negative space makes. I'm actually drawing that shape. I'm not thinking about drawing legs. I'm just drawing this shape and making it match what I'm seeing. I think I need to bring up the tummy a little. There we go. Here comes the back. You can see I'm still drawing very loose. Would be very easy for me to erase a line if it's not correct at this stage and believe me, I draw many lines [LAUGHTER] that are not correct. If I can do that and still teach you how to draw class, [LAUGHTER] you should not feel bad about making mistakes either. That's all part of it. You have to get something on the paper in order to know if it's right or not. That's how I look at it. Once you get some lines down, then you can start measuring and checking and then you'll know. You can adjust as needed. [NOISE] Get that tail in there. Now, I'm also going to measure the height of the fox. I'm going to turn my pencil vertically and on the photo, I'll do it right now on the drawing but the way that you actually will do this first is to capture the measurement of the head vertically; so from the top of the head to the nose. Then you'll count down on the photo, how many heads does it take to get to maybe where this leg goes behind the snow bank or this one even, whichever. Whatever you want to check, you could do all of it. I'm holding up my pencil right now, and I've captured the size of the head in the photo, and I'm going down one. It's about one and a half. Let's see, two and a half heads to the bottom of that first leg, so 1, 2,1/2. I think I've maybe made this leg as smudge too long. I'm going to bring the snow up further, maybe more like that. Now looks better. Now, instead of checking each individual one, I'm just going to go back here now and check the length of this one. Again, I'm going to measure the head, I'm going to see how many heads it takes to get down to this point. When I hold my pencil up to the photo, it's 1, 2, 1/2, again from here down. It's the head 1, 2 1/2. I got that one pretty good. Maybe raise just this smudge. It's a little extra work. Might seem a little tedious at first, especially if it's something you're not used to doing, but now I know everything's in the right place. I can go in and refine my drawing confidently using more detail, maybe darker lines, because I'm not as worried about having to erase. I know that things are in the right place and I'm confident in the size and the placement. Let's see if we can put some personality on this little fellow. Look at that earing, what a cutie. Always helps when you're drawing something that you think is absolutely adorable. I'm going to come in and draw. I'd like to get this structure things first before I get into the weeds as far as like getting the details of the eyes and nose and stuff. I want to get just the basic facial structure on there. Looks pretty good. I'm going to erase some of my extra lines. Now I'm using my kneaded eraser. If you've never used this before, once it gets dirty, you just squish it around a little bit. It's really fun to do, and then it cleans itself and it's good to go for next time. I'm using a combination of light lines and darker lines, depending on what I want to emphasize. I'm going to get the nose placed, the mouth in there. Now, let's get some eyes, so maybe the most important part. This one angles up this way. Then we have another one starting loose, extra, I like it. If I do, I'll come here. This one angles up this direction. Looks pretty good. Maybe it needs to be a little bigger like that. How's yours coming? If it doesn't look quite right, take a minute and just go back and forth with your eyes between your drawing and the reference, because even without doing any measuring, that's one final way to check proportions. If you very quickly scan your eyes back and forth, between your drawing and the reference, you'll spot the inconsistencies a lot easier that way. I can't tell you how many students I've worked with who will draw or paint from references, and they'll get so focused on their drawing. I understand this because I do it too. Everyone does sometimes. But you get so focused on looking at your drawing that you forget to even look at the reference that's sitting right there in front of you. It's like this poor fox isn't just hanging out there standing there posing for nothing. [LAUGHTER] It wants to be admired. [LAUGHTER] Don't forget to keep checking. The more your eyes go back and forth, the more you're going to spot the inconsistencies. Then if something feels wrong, if you can even narrow it down to an area, like if you think the back part of the body, something doesn't feel right there, that's wonderful. Might not feel wonderful in the moment, but that's a really big step because a lot of times people get frustrated when they're first starting out, they see something that doesn't look right, and then they just think, I just must not be any good at this, I better quit. [LAUGHTER] They don't even stop to evaluate and figure out, well what isn't working. If you can spot an area that doesn't feel right, then use these tricks that I just showed you about measuring and also checking to see what does it align with, either horizontally or vertically somewhere on the image. Then look at your drawing and see if it's doing that. That can be a very good way for diagnosing drawing issues, and then once you know the problem, you can fix it. Drawing is not about getting things perfect the first time, it's just about getting something down on the paper and then refining it until you like it. Now, I'm just erasing some of my earliest sketchy lines, and I think we're going to be finished with this one, least I am. You take all of the time you want though. I hope you enjoyed today's lesson. I hope that this will help you with all of your future drawings. Give you some tools to help you really figure out how to capture what you're seeing. [LAUGHTER] Great job, everyone as always. Thanks for hanging in there with me and I'll see you in our next lesson, Lesson 6, which is all about drawing negative space. See you then, bye bye. 7. Drawing the Negative Space: Today, we are going to be practicing drawing the negative space, which is just another way of saying that instead of drawing the object, you're going to be drawing all of the space around the object or around the subject. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper, [LAUGHTER] let's go. Here's our reference image, and when I say negative space, what I'm talking about is basically the background or the empty areas of the image. So every place that is black in this particular photograph would be the negative space. Then the positive space is the stuff that you're drawing, so the flowers. Today we're going to draw this image by only focusing on the negative space. In order to do that, to begin with, I'm going to draw a rectangle that will represent the picture plane or the border of the image. So go ahead and draw [NOISE] a vertical rectangle to start with. The reason why this is important is because many of the negative spaces in this image go to the edge. So in order to really be able to register it as a space, as a shape, we need to know where it ends. I'm just getting picky here about my rectangles, sorry. [LAUGHTER] Oh, and you might have seen this little globber. [LAUGHTER] This is my kneaded eraser. I don't know if you've used one of these yet. They are wonderful. When they get dirty, you just squish them around like that, and you can erase some more, and they don't leave any annoying pencil shavings. So I highly recommend these and they're great for working out your stress too. [LAUGHTER] Hopefully, not that you are ever stressed during these classes. Would not want that. So there's my rectangle. Let's get started, we have a lot of work to do. I'm going to start right off the bat by drawing the big negative space that's over in the top left corner. I'm going to just estimate where the halfway point is. I'm going to do a little dot here and here, and then on the vertical side also. This is just like acting as an invisible grid. So when I look at the reference, I can imagine those same points and know that this negative space starts a little bit to the right of the center, and it's going to end up right over here somewhere. So giving yourself some little tick marks or some guidelines so that you have an idea of where you need to go. That's always helpful. I'm even going to do just a very light diagonal line right here that helps me to understand where all of those shapes are going. So now I know where I'm headed, let's actually go in and draw that negative space. I'm not thinking at all about flowers. I'm almost imagining that the flowers are the negative space and the black is the object that I'm drawing. It's really about almost playing a mental game with yourself so that you can really learn to see the world differently. The less that you think of labeling the things that you're drawing, the easier you're going to find they are to draw. In that way, I think drawing is a little bit like meditation. Meditation is all about letting go of all the mental labels and mental concepts and just being present. For me, drawing is a lot like that too, especially when I can look at something that you see every day. You see flowers all the time. But trying to appreciate the lines and the shapes along the edge by focusing on the negative spaces helps me to really see them and appreciate them in a new way. So I hope that that's working for you too. Don't worry if your proportions aren't perfect, this is just an exercise. I can just feel that perfectionist energy out there, [LAUGHTER] and some of you thinking, "Oh my goodness, I have to get this perfect." What have we said about perfection? [LAUGHTER] That is not the goal here. We are just practicing, learning, making lots of mistakes along the way. That's what it's all about. But as long as you're understanding the concepts, that's what matters. I've about made my way around this first big negative space. So there it is. So all of this, if I was going to color it in and you could if you wanted to. I'm not going to in this video, I'm just going to do line work today. But in some positive, negative studies artists will fill them in to solid black. You can use a marker, you can use your pencil. But since this is a pretty complicated shape, I think I'm going to use up my whole time just drawing it. So now let me come down here and try and draw the shapes that I see over on this side. This is a really interesting shape here because it comes down. It's much tighter than the previous one. It comes down into this triangle. You see I'm always looking to see where things align. The bottom of the triangle aligns with about right here. The bottom point of this thing that we're not calling a flower because we're not mentally labeling stuff. [LAUGHTER] So that point, and then swings back up like that. Then get some more little roughly lines. Then it comes up here and our end. We're getting somewhere. This is cool. I'm going to jump over here now because I see a very interesting small, narrow, wiggly negative [LAUGHTER] space. When you're thinking about negative spaces, especially if you're setting up your own composition, maybe if you're putting together a still life, or even if you're just looking to frame a photograph that you're planning on using as a reference, really remember this exercise, look at those negative spaces and see how they break up the plane. Because if you have a combination of some really nice large negative spaces and also some really small ones they move around in a very dynamic way, then that creates such a dynamic composition. We're so used to only focusing on the positive spaces, but really challenge you to start looking closer at negative spaces, and that is such a key to creating strong competitions. We're getting there. Look at us. How are you doing? [LAUGHTER] I'm having fun with this, as you can probably tell by all of my bad jokes. [LAUGHTER] I'm having fun just hanging out with all of you in these videos. I'm glad that you are all sticking in there with me and making it at least this far. You're doing great. Drawing is one of those things that it just takes practice. There's no magic wand I can wave that will make you great at drawing. But I can tell you if you practice, the more you do it, the better you'll get. It's not like it's a magical talent that you have to be born with. It's truly just a skill that you can hone by doing it a whole bunch. That's exactly what we're doing. Look at all these negative spaces, it's looking so cool. You really have to look closely. It's really plays with your mind. I like that. I like mind games, I guess. [LAUGHTER] So this comes up here. There's some little ruffles and this little line this way, comes down. Some more little ruffles. [LAUGHTER] Now we've got this. There's a tiny little negative space here, did you see that one? Then we've got one here. It comes over like this, and then it looks like it goes almost all the way to the edge and it's right about at that halfway point. So we're doing good with our little guides that we gave ourselves. Now let's come back up here. This comes around and down, over, up. ruffle. Well, those are fun. Don't try to make every ruffle perfect. Get into the flow of the ruffle. [LAUGHTER] Just let it go. Let it be like a fun little scribbly opportunity. We all need the chance to scribble. What I like about this, I think part of what makes the negative spaces so interesting in this particular piece is that you have some lines that are really organic, the ones that I keep saying are roughly. They lead right into lines because of the stems that are more geometric and more like straight lines and angles. That's a great combo when you can have both of those in a piece. There's a little one here. There's a slightly bigger one here and here. We have all kinds of fun little ones in here. We've got this little guy, we got this. Oh, my gosh. I didn't make it easy on you all, did I [LAUGHTER] when I picked this one? That's because I knew you could handle it. Up and over, down, ruffle, down. It does help if you talk to yourself while you work. [LAUGHTER] I can attest to that. I do that all the time. Course now I'm not talking to myself, I'm talking to all of you. Just much better. I would like for you to just hang out with me all the time while I work, that would be wonderful. Almost there. How are you doing? Hanging in there? Good. There we have it. There's our negative space drawing, and like I said, you could go in and fill in all the negatives with dark if you want to, that really would make it a really cool design. You would need to add any other detail. I would encourage you to practice this more with other objects and other references. Try it with a figure, try it with a still-life or even with a landscape. A big part of learning to draw is learning to see like an artist. That's what all of these exercises so far have really been geared toward. I hope that it's helping you to have some more tools in your tool belt as you look at the world around you and start trying to capture it on paper. In our next lesson, lesson number 7, we're going to be doing some continuous line drawing. So in the meantime, happy drawing everyone, and I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 8. Continuous Line Drawing: We've been doing this together for a week now. Great job. You're hanging in there, you're doing it. I'm so proud of you. Today, we're going to have a lot of fun doing some continuous line drawing. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper. You know the line by now. [LAUGHTER] I love a good catchphrase. Let's go. Here's our reference image for today. I'm really excited about this one. I want to just jump right in. I'll tell you what we're doing as we go. That's how excited I am about it. [LAUGHTER] Today we are doing a continuous line drawing, which is different from the blind contour drawing that we did on the very first lesson because today you're allowed to look at your paper. Are you lucky? [LAUGHTER] You're also allowed to draw lines interior of the form. It doesn't just need to be an outline. But the one rule is that the line in a continuous line drawing has to remain unbroken from the beginning to the end. In other words, we never lift our pencil up. Once you start drawing, the pencil has to stay touching the surface of the paper during the entire length of the time that you're drawing. We're going to spend the whole time today drawing this. Pace yourself and I want to give you the opportunity to really look at this image. There's a lot going on, there a lot of beautiful lines. If you really pay attention to them, you can create a lot of depth and dimension in your drawing. I'm going to start right here on this edge. You start wherever you want. I'm just going to work my way around. Not lifting up my pencil. Now, I'm going to figure out the shape overall first before I come back and do a lot of details. That is not the only way that you might approach this. You might want to get right into drawing some of these interesting textures and lines that are on the interior of the branches or the trunk. You go for it. This is a chance to really have fun. In a lot of our live drawing classes that we've been teaching, we always get requests, people want to draw trees. When I picked out this reference today, I was thinking about all of the tree lovers out there. They are such a wonderful subject to draw. They have such interesting shapes and I think there's just such a sense of that you're really drawing something special, especially in a big old tree that's been there for a long time, probably longer than us. There's a sense of history to it. I especially love big twisty tourney trees like this. I think they're so fun to draw. The beauty of drawing a tree compared to drawing person or something that has to be a little bit more precise, you can just let yourself get carried away with the lines. If you end up going a little different direction or if the proportions aren't quite right, who is going to know? Just use this photo as your starting point. Try to capture the shapes as truly as you can, but don't stress about it. I really want you to have fun with this one. You've been working hard. [LAUGHTER] Now, today is a fun day. It's also a good opportunity to just think back on some of the other things that we have talked about so far, because all of those things this class was really set up so that each step along the way, it builds on what we've done before. Right now as you're drawing this tree, I imagine some of you are remembering other exercises that we've done where we focused on negative shapes and focus on how to think about proportion and [LAUGHTER] don't be afraid to pull from things that we have discussed in previous classes. That's all. Everything just builds on itself. Look at that tall pointy brands up there. This tree has a lot of character. Working my way around. I can't wait to get into the interior and do some of these lines on the trunk, especially. It's like a dancer or something or like fabric blowing in the wind. Doesn't even look like a tree in some parts. Remember no lifting up your pencil. [LAUGHTER] I was just tempted to you and then I remembered, I can't do that. I have to set a good example. [LAUGHTER] Teaching is hard work. [LAUGHTER] There's a lot of accountability when there is camera right here pointing at everything I'm doing. [LAUGHTER] Now let's see, this comes down and does some zigzag thing. Bring down to here. I haven't Quite finished the other side of that tree yet, but that's okay. We'll get there eventually. Sometimes you have to just find ways to get to where you want to go. [LAUGHTER] Since you can't pick up the pencil, draw whatever lines or shapes happened to be between where you are and where you want to go. It's okay to go back over top of lines that you've drawn before. Just like you're working out, you're a little pathway through this image. It's a really interesting challenge not to be able to lift up your pencil. I think sometimes too, it can help you notice things that you might not see otherwise if you're really looking closely for all the lines and connection points between one area and another. That little patch right there. Now what I really want to do is get back over to this side. Let's see. Going to draw this big branch now. There we go. This is too much fun. This would be a fun exercise to do with a pen. Also, if you have the pen set, even just a ballpoint pen or if you have a drawing pen like the microns. Drawing with pen is a great way to avoid the temptation to erase. Because obviously if you can't pick up your pencil, [LAUGHTER] you can erase. Just have to make it work. [LAUGHTER] One way of making it work if you draw a line that you don't really like is to just go next to it and draw another line darker. Because our eye will always gravitate to the strongest contrast. Pretty cool. How's yours coming? Having fun over there. I want to see [LAUGHTER] you have to send me your pictures, so I can see how your tree turned down. I imagined that they are all different. Because everybody sees things a little differently. That's the beauty of art. There's no right or wrong. Have a little bit of time. I'm going to play some more with some of these beautiful lines and textures. That's beautiful. Winds can just help the viewer's eye travel through your drawing. It's like you're giving them a road map for how you want them to experience what you have made. Just like how you had to come up with a road map for yourself in order to be able to draw this. Your lines are also a road map for the viewer, showing them where to look next. In some of our future lessons, we're going to get a little bit more into talking about how you can really control that. How you can almost manipulate the way that the viewer experiences your drawing. Make them look like choosing the focal points where they look next from there. All of that is in your control as the artist and that's pretty cool thing. This little negative space. Some up here. Lots of cool texture. I don't want to stop because I'm having too much fun. Can we just draw all day? [LAUGHTER] You don't have anything else to do today, do you? [LAUGHTER] I promise I'll stop seeing. [LAUGHTER] But you can keep going as long as you want. I really encourage you if you enjoyed this or even if you didn't [LAUGHTER] to try some more of these, it's a really great way of forcing you to look closer at some of the interior lines and the shapes. Thinking about how your pencil can travel around inside of whatever it is you're drawing. I'm lifting up my pencil officially. That means my drawings finished. My pencil is worn out after that. [LAUGHTER] Great job, everyone. In lesson number 8, we're going to be drawing the shadow, shapes, and planes. Get ready. [LAUGHTER] Happy drawing everyone. Bye-bye. 9. Draw the Shadow Shapes/Planes: Today we're continuing with the learning to see an artist portion of this class, and we're going to be looking at another way to construct your drawings. This time by drawing the shadow shapes and planes. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper. Let's go. Here's the reference that we'll be using today. Once again, I have yet another tricky way of making you look at this that will hopefully blow your mind a little, make you break it down into different shapes, then you might look for otherwise. Today is all about drawing the shadows. Instead of focusing on the negative space or the positive space, we are going to look at all of the shadows that helped to create the form of these objects in this still life. Are you ready? Let's go. I'm going to start by drawing the shadow on this picture over here. I see I'm at the top, the front of the lip of the picture and curves around this way. Then it angles down. See where I'm at? I'm just drawing the shadow. I'm not drawing the edge of the picture. I'm actually just drawing the dark shadow that's being cast. As I look at this image, I see that the light is coming from the right. All the shadows on the objects are on the left-hand side. Especially when we get into shading later on in this series, understanding where the light source is coming from is really important and really helpful. For now, don't worry too much about that. Just focus on drawing the sheet that you see the shadows creating within these objects. I come down here and it comes over it like that. So far you would probably have no idea what this was a drawing of [LAUGHTER]. That is okay. That's actually a good thing. That means you're not focusing on drawing what you think a picture looks like you're drawing the shadows like you're supposed to. You get a gold star. Now there's a shadow on the handle that falls along almost at the top, although there's a little sliver of light right up there. If you look really close, see I'm making you guys study this thing in depth. We're still in the segment of this series that's really focusing on learning how to see like an artist. That's such an important part that we made it almost a third of the series. Then we'll be moving soon into the really putting it into practice phase. We're practicing now of course, but we're going to go even more in depth, believe it or not. Then the shadow is narrow up here. Then it may be swing out a little, it gets really narrow. You see where I'm at? I'm not drawing the edge of the handle and just drawing the shadow that's inside of it. That goes right up there like that. I was drawing the other edge, which we will eventually, but I'm going to wait until I get all the shadows on first. But that other edge just so you can see, would be about there. But we're not drawing that yet because that's not a shadow. I see I was serious. [LAUGHTER] Now, this comes down. It comes around a little bit. It curves over this way where it's being overlapped by that bowl, but we're not drawing that yet. There is one complete shadow shape. Now I'm going to come up here and do another shadow that I see inside the top. It comes out like this, hoover up, down then it just fades so I'm going to just stop it. I'm not going to take it all the way over because we're just drawing the shadow. It goes about like that. Now we're getting somewhere. I am going to draw a little bit of the edge of this bowl just so I can place myself. If you look really close, it's more subtle shadow but, there is a lighter shadow that rounds around the very bottom of this picture. I'm going to draw that next. See where it needs to the bowl right here, and then it just comes down in a curve like that. Later on we'll draw the rest of the picture. But for right now, I want to draw this shadow, the cast shadow that is on the table that's coming from the picture. I'm going to draw this little section here of the bowl. Comes down like that. Then goes over and touches the bottom of the picture. Two shadows right next to each other there. Now, let's come up and do a little shadow that we see on the inside of the bowl. This little dark section right here. There's an interesting way to look at something, the way that we're constructing it. It's totally different than what we've done so far. That just goes to show you that in art there are 1 million ways to do everything and part of what your job is, as an artist, is to figure out the ways that work best for you. It's good to try everything and then figure out your own process. I know drawing shadows though is very helpful for me in my art because I like to do very dramatic, contrasting images, usually with a lot of shadows. I definitely use this technique myself. Now I'm drawing the shadow over here. On the left of the, is it a peach? It's a peach. Actually, we're really going to be looking at it just as a shape. Do you notice how you don't really see? Once you get down into the shadow, you can't really see where one peach, maybe it's an apple. I don't know my fruit. [LAUGHTER] You can't really see where, whatever this one fruit is in front, where that bottom edge is because it all the shadow, one on the left and the one on the right blends together. I'm going to just not continue that line because it's all dark. Instead I'm going to bring it over. Then it comes up like this. On the left side of this, I'm just going to call it a peach. It's a peach today. Call artistic license. Then [LAUGHTER] this goes all the way back around and connects there. It's looking abstract as a drawing, but if you look at the reference, you can see where I'm going. There's little shadow on the inside of the bowl here that I'm going to continue over and then I'm going to draw the shadow on the bowl itself. There's like a little edge here at the top. Then it helps to squint your eyes. If you squint your eyes then the details go away and you really just see the big shape. There's a dark shadow shape that comes out from here. It's a real dark shadow that goes like this. Then another one over here. Really dark shadow. Figure out where the bottom of the bowl is, that will help us. There's this dark shadow and this dark shadow. See how it gets just a little bit lighter in-between those two. It's an odd thing, but it's because there's some light that's reflecting around the other side of the bowl. Now I'm going to draw the bottom of the little stand here and the shadow that comes down across that. Then it goes right on off with the cache shadow on the table. There's a little sliver of light right here. Then we have the back part of the cast shadow, which is actually, and you can see that's the shadow of the picture. Because look at this little negative space in the shadow right here for the handle. I'm telling you once you really start looking at your references, you see so much. I think I have now drawn all of the shadow shapes. You guys see them? As a final touch, I'm going to go ahead and draw the edges now. I'm going to come back over here to my picture and draw this part. Then it comes down, comes over. You can see how helpful it is having all of those shadows there because it really it gives me a lot more points to connect everything else into, and confidence that things are in the right place. It's just another tool that you can use in combination with everything else to figure out how to capture what you're seeing to really make you look closely. You can draw the top here. We've got one here, there's another one behind it, peaches, [LAUGHTER] and the back of the bowl. I'm just going to continue the shadow a little bit farther because the photo cuts off. But I'm just going to let it be like that. Let me sketch in where the edge of the table is. That is how you draw a picture using the shadows. I'd encourage you to find some other references that have strong shadow and give it a try. See if you can do it on your own. Great job everyone, I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Keep practicing if you want. Tomorrow in lesson Number 9, we're going be learning a really valuable tool for drawing, which is using a grid. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 10. Using a Grid: Today we're going to be learning a very valuable tool that has helped me a lot. Especially when I'm doing large drawings or even murals or large paintings. That is how to use a grid. Sharpen your pencil, [LAUGHTER] get some paper, let's get started. The first step to using the grid method, is to create the grid. You can see I took our reference image here and I broke it up into nine different sections. Now, when you're doing this with your own images, you can do as many sections as you want. Sometimes if it's a very complicated image, you might want to break it down further so that you'll have smaller sections to draw at a time. This is a relatively simple image and I think we can get the idea across this way. I took the image, divided each side into thirds, since it's a square image and then we have our grid. Now, I need to recreate that on my paper. When you are using the grid method, it's important that you start by figuring out the dimensions that you want your drawing to be. They do not have to be the same dimensions as the reference but they do have to be proportional. That'll be easy in this case since it's a square. I'm going to draw a six-inch square because that will be easy to divide into thirds. One of my goals in life is to make math [LAUGHTER] as easy on myself as possible. I'm going to draw a six-inch horizontal line here at the bottom of my paper. I should have mentioned that you do need a ruler for [LAUGHTER] today. If you need to grab that, hit the pause button and go get your ruler and then come back. I've drawn the first side to the frame basically for my drawing. Now, I'm going to come over and do six inches up this direction [NOISE] and six inches over here, [NOISE] and close it off at the top. [NOISE] There's my square. Now, because each side is six inches long, I know I need to divide it into thirds to match the grid on the photo, so each square will be two inches. I'm going to go through and make little tick marks for myself at the two-inch mark, so two, four [NOISE] and then we'll do that up here at the top. [NOISE] I have a ruler that's way too big [LAUGHTER] for what I'm trying to do here. Apologies if it looks a little awkward as I swing it around trying to do this part. Two inches on this side, four and same thing over here. [LAUGHTER] Those of you that love math are probably in heaven right now. [LAUGHTER] Math was not my specialty, I have to admit but it does come in very handy. As an artist, you do need it quite a bit. [NOISE] Now, I'm going to go through and connect those [NOISE] tick marks so that we can create our grid. [NOISE] That's the horizontal lines and our vertical lines, and one more. [NOISE] Now, I can finally get rid of this massive ruler. Look at this thing [LAUGHTER]. Thank you very much for your service. Now, onto the drawing. Everybody should have a grid that looks about like mine. The way that you use the grid method is very simple. You just take it one section at a time and draw what you see in that section. It's such a helpful way to eliminate all the distraction of everything else going on in the image. I'm going to start in the top-left section, you start wherever you like. I like to look at where the object or the subject, how it interacts with the sides of that section. I see that the top of the sculpture, where it gets cut off is about at the halfway point between the top and the bottom of that square. Then I see over here that little bit of the sculpture, the hair of the sculpture, is also right about at the halfway point. I've given myself some guides so I know where to put my object, at least on the edges. Now I'm going to just start drawing it. You guys jump in too. Try not to even look at anything else. In fact, sometimes when I've taught the grid method before, I'll even cover up all of the other sections of the image. I won't do that to you all today [LAUGHTER]. But it is a good test to see if you're paying attention. Because in theory, if you cover up all the other sections and you draw just what's in that square, and then you do the same thing all the way through, everything should line up. Everything should connect, you'd be surprised, it actually works pretty well. Especially if you take your time and pay attention to what you're seeing. I think that is truly one of the best lessons that you can learn in terms of drawing. It's about slowing down, and looking at what you're seeing. That's enough for that section. I can't even talk. The next square now. I see that it touches right about here on the line. Obviously it continues from this point. It just helps me to have some anchor points like that. That's how I think of it. If I can orient myself within each of the squares, then I feel confident that I'm drawing what needs to go where. Of course I'm drawing light enough that if I need to I can always erase too. That's always an option. While I'm in here, I'm going to go ahead and draw the nose. But don't be overwhelmed, thinking about it as a nose, just draw the shapes. Now, the nose comes to about the halfway point. If I'm dividing this square in half, right about at the halfway point is where that nose touches. There's just a curved line right there. Then it curves around into the nostrils, so it curves the other direction. Then we have these guys. The one on the left is a little bit bigger than the one on the right, if we want to get technical here. Well, do you know why? Because it's closer to us. It's the way that the face is slightly turned, we see a little bit more of this side of the nose than this side. Don't worry if you didn't notice that, that's okay [LAUGHTER]. Now I'm going to draw myself a line to represent the middle of the mouth. Then if you notice it's at a bit of an angle. It's not straight across. The left side is higher than the right side. Then we're just going to break this down into shapes. There's a curve in the middle, like that, curves down. It goes, I would say just a little bit beyond the edge of the nose. If that's the edge of the nose, it goes just a little bit past. Then this side, same thing. Curves down, and then it does curl up just a little bit on the ends. Then I'm going to draw the bottom of the lip. Bottom of the lower lip curves up a bit in the middle. Back up over here. You didn't know I was going to sneak in. You didn't know face drawing lesson today, did you? Surprise. We will have a whole class dedicated to this in the future but you will be so well-prepared because we have already done a little bit of it today. Somehow it feels different when it's a sculpture. I think it makes it a little bit more approachable. But as I've said before in many of our other videos, the real key to drawing anything, and I think especially faces is to try not to think about what it is that you're drawing. Just look at the shapes, don't get worried. I'm going to draw a little bit of the creases that I see in the face, they're pretty subtle. There's shadow underneath the mouth, I'm going to draw that. Sometimes I like to draw the outlines of shadows. I'm not going to be shading this one in today, but we can still sketch the shadows. There's also shadow underneath the nose, so I'm going to draw that too. Because actually if you look double shadow, wow. You'll see how there's one shadow that's a little bit lighter and then there's another one that's darker. That means there were two different light sources hitting the sculpture at that time that the photo was taken. That's all. You get each shadow going in a little bit of a different direction. If that's too complicated, don't worry about it you don't have to draw the shadows. Just get the nose in and the mouth. But if you want to take it to the next level, if you feel like you're ready. Go for it. I know we have a wide range of people taking this class, including some people who've never drawn before and some people who maybe do have some experience and they're coming back for a little bit extra practice, so try to make this work for everybody. Now, we're going to continue. This comes to about here and then a little bit left of center this line curves and swoops, it comes up. We have the side of the face that comes down to here. I'm just putting a suggestion of some of the hair shapes. Totally optional. Now I'm going to draw the jaw, it comes over to here. The very, very bottom of underneath, there's the chin and then there's that second layer where you see the darker shadow, that looks like a bat here. Not quite to the middle just a little bit above and then it comes up here and then connects over into this one. But we'll get to that part in a minute. First, let's just draw that line and then I'm going to draw the actual chin, a little indent there. Connect that on up. Just like putting together a puzzle. I see that where the neck meets the shoulder area over here is about in the middle of that line so I've given myself a little mark. Then it comes down from here. Sweeps out just a little. About three-fourths of the way down, comes over like that. On this side, this side of the neck pretty much comes right out at this intersection point and it curves just a little bit to the right like that. Then we have this little bit over blue it connects back in. We're getting it. Did you think you could do this? I knew you could [LAUGHTER] I do love challenging you all. Congratulations for sticking in this long. I'm so impressed. Let's draw this little piece it comes right through here. Down, up. It's a little bit of a another line there showing that edge so I'll draw there. Connect right on up to there. I'm going to draw the shadow under the chin too. It's good to look at the shadows as shapes. It come all the way down. That way too when we do get to shading, if you do some indications of the shadows just with line to start with you'll be used to identifying where the shadows are and it'll make it easier when you go to do your shading. This darker shadow right here another one right there. Ooh, I almost forgot something. Got to finish off the hair. It's missing the top half of his head but don't want to deprive them of having a good hair day. Now, if you are using this on a piece, what you might do is draw the grid initially very light and then once you get your actual drawing finished then you can go through and erase the grid lines. If you're doing it on a painting like an oil painting or acrylic painting or something like that, then it won't matter because the paint would cover it up anyway. But that is one suggestion when you're using this in the future is to do your grid very lightly so that it's easy to erase. I hope that will help you, especially when you're tackling complicated drawings and when you're scaling from a small reference maybe to a larger piece of paper. This is a really helpful tool. Keep practicing, keep drawing, and be sure to come back for our next lesson. In Lesson 10, we're going to be learning about the value scale. See you then. Bye-bye. 11. Value Scale: Practice is what it's all about, the more you do this the better you'll get. By Day 10, I bet you're already seeing some improvement in your drawings. Congratulations seriously. One of the most important things to understand in order to make a convincing drawing is how to work with value. Today, we're going to make a value scale and talk all about what that means. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper. Let's go. I'm really excited for today's lesson so let's dive right in. Value is one of my very favorite things to work with. To start, let's just draw five squares across the top of the page. They don't need to be perfect. We're just creating a value scale here. I'll make them small, otherwise you'll be shading in for a while [NOISE]. We're going to fill in each of these squares with a different value and I should say when I'm talking about value, I'm talking about the lights and darks and all of the shades in between that exist in your drawing. Beginning on the right, let's fill that square in with the darkest value that you can. For today, I'm going to be using the same pencil for everything. I'm using an 8B pencil, which is a super, super soft lead that goes really dark. You don't have to use 8B. Anything with a B would probably work really well, so B, 2B, 4B, 6B, whatever you have handy, and if your pencil doesn't have numbers on it, [LAUGHTER] whatever you have will be fine, I promise. Start on the right. When you are using just one pencil to shade with, you vary the value by pressing harder or softer with the pencil. In this box I'm pressing really hard, and I'm going back over the section a couple of times so that it will be super dark. [NOISE] That's our darkest value and we're going to go lighter and lighter and lighter as we move to the left. Scoot over one square now and fill that one in with a little bit lighter value than what you used in the first one. This is a test don't get nervous you're not getting a grade, [LAUGHTER] but it's a test to see, first of all, if you can see the different values and if you can bring them out in your drawings. See how that one looks a little bit lighter than the first one. Not a dramatic difference at all. Moving over to the third square, I'm pressing even lighter this time. [NOISE] You want to make sure that you can see a difference in each of the squares. There you go. [NOISE] If you need longer than I'm taking, feel free to pause the video at any time. Now, the final square on the far left, I'm leaving pure white, the white of the paper. The reason is because if you're working on a white piece of paper, that's the lightest value that you can get. We really only have one square left to do, and that's this one, and in that square, I'm going to press very gently so that you can hardly see any shade at all. [NOISE] There we go. See how you can definitely see a difference in all five of the squares. That's the goal. You could draw more squares actually in between each of these probably several, and still designate different values and be able to distinguish different values between all of those squares. The more value that you can bring out in your drawings, the more realistic it will be, because it's the effects of light and shadow that add roundness and volume to what you draw. Today we're going to make a quick drawing because we've used up some of our time on the value scale, but I wanted to give you the chance to make a drawing where you get to use some of these values and actually do some shading. I'm going to switch to let's see. I'm going to grab 4B pencil. Let's get started. Here's our reference, cute little pumpkin, and I'm going to draw just the basic shape of it first, an oval shape. You can see I'm using my usual approach of just loose sketchy lines to get it placed on there. [NOISE] There's my round oval shape and line for the stem which comes right down into the oval to about right here, and then from that point, that's where we get these different segments. I'm going to go ahead and sketch those in now. You don't have to have the exact same number , it doesn't matter, but one thing to note, this is more of a drawing thing than a shading thing, but it's always good to reinforce what you've learned before. Look at how the segments get smaller as they get further away from us, that's a perspective thing. We haven't had our official perspective lessons yet, but this falls under the category of draw what you see, and you can see each one of these little sections gets smaller and smaller as it gets farther towards the back of the pumpkin. [NOISE] I'm just going to clean up my lines a little bit now that I've got everything where I want it. Not even really worrying about erasing what's already there because the darker line is what we'll see. There we go. Now, let's shade it and the first question you want to ask yourself, whenever you're shading something realistic is, where is the light coming from? In this case, it's pretty obvious in the photo that the light is coming from that direction because all of the highlights are on that side, all of the shadows are over here. I like to start shading with the darkest value that there is so that I can see the extremes of the value contrast. Some people like to build up from light to dark. I'm showing you my way, but that definitely is not the only way. I'm going to identify where I see the darkest values and I'm just going to start filling them in there and only where it's that value. There are other areas where it's maybe more in the middle value range. I'm not worrying about those yet I'm only putting value down where I see the darkest. Just like coloring without color. [LAUGHTER] It's nothing like coloring [LAUGHTER]. Now shading tricks. If you're seeing a lot of pencil lines in your shading, it might mean you're going a little too fast so just slow down. One brush not brush stroke one pencil stroke, overlap the one before it so that they just blend together and you don't end up with a lot of like scratchy looking lines. It also does help to have extra paper underneath the piece that you're drawing on for added cushion. If you're working in a sketchbook, that's great or if you're just working on loose paper, it gets some extra paper to put under it. It does make a big difference. I'm still just putting my darkest value for now and then we'll start working our way through the value scale. See maybe there's no real super dark ones there. But there is darkness on the stem. Got some smudges. Not the first time, won't be the last time. [LAUGHTER] One other thing that I like to do when I'm shading in a drawing is to think about the value of the background and that dark background is what makes the highlights pop out. You don't want to have to color in your whole paper be here for awhile. I'm just going to go right along the edge. Just shade, almost like creating a reverse halo around the object so that we can just see the values in the background. Then I just like to let that fade as it gets farther away from the object. By pressing the hardest right next to the pumpkin and then as I move away from the pumpkin, pressing lighter and lighter until it just fade. You're like going through the value scale right there and even on this side, where it's up against the dark value on the inside of the pumpkin I'm still going to do it. Because if you notice in the photo, in those spaces, the pumpkin does just fade into the background. You can't really see a defined edge. If that's what it looks like in the reference, that's what you're trying to replicate. That's a good example of drawing what you see instead of what you know. We know there's an edge of a pumpkin there but at least in a few of these areas, you really can't see it. Just let your background fade as you get away from the object. It's also going to blend in with the dark side of the stem to the dark side. [LAUGHTER] Sounds very ominous, but that's okay. Here we go. You can shade in more of the background if you want, but that's enough to it. It's all about their relationships. Value is very much dependent on understanding the relationships. Value will look one way and then totally different if you put it next to a different value, totally does that too actually. Now I've done everything with the darkest value, and I need to sharpen my pencil before I do anymore. [NOISE] Now I'm going to go through and look for places where I can use this value the second from the right. I see a value like that, that goes all the way up along this edge. You can see how each segment of the pumpkin becomes round because each section has its own light and dark side. Depending on how far away it is from the light that determines whether it's more in this range or in this range or the full range. It's called a value scale, which is very similar to like a piano scale where you're going through all the different keys. In fact, you can even use that term, the keys to refer to value, high key, low key refers to darks and lights. There's a lot of parallels between visual art and music. Even though I have no musical ability at all, I appreciate music. I'm not going to sing for you though, I promise, don't worry. I only do that when I'm drawing completely by myself. This little bit of that value here. Now I'm going to move on to the middle value. That just allows me to continue some of what I have started. You see that another trick that I use sometimes is shading with the edge of the pencil instead of the tip. See how I'm holding it on its side. If you shade with the tip of the pencil, it tends to look a little bit more lining, which can be an interesting look. But if you want it to be softer, putting it on its side a little bit will help with that. We're just about done here. I'm going to do a little bit of my lightest value now that's what I see over here. There you go, you've made your very first shaded drawing in this class. Practice drawing some other objects, put a strong light source on it. Look where you see the shadows and give it a try. There you go. Great job, everybody. Now that you understand value, come back and join us for our next lesson, Lesson Number 11, which is all about finding the light. [LAUGHTER] I'll see you then, bye-bye. 12. Finding the Light: Today is all about finding the light. What I'm talking about really are the highlights and shadows in the images that you draw. Because those can be very helpful in helping to create the illusion that your drawing has volume. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper and let's go. For today's lesson, we'll be drawing this beautiful calla lily. That's hard to say. Calla lily. [LAUGHTER] Say that three times fast. I'm going to convert it to black and white because that makes it a little bit easier to see the values. You're not getting distracted by different shifts in color. Let's start by just doing a sketch of it first and then we'll shade it in. You know how to do this, so just look for the shapes. I'm going to start with very basic triangular shape at the top, a curved triangular shape. Then I'm just looking at the main shape first, the outer shape, the contour. Like that. See how it just gets narrower and narrower towards the bottom. Then a little stem that goes down there. Then the petal comes up from this point. See I'm doing my hold the pencil far back thing. I'm drawing light since we're shading this one because in this drawing, I don't want to have strong lines. I want to really get into seeing the values and letting the values define the shapes. I'm not going to go back and do really dark line work in this. I'm going to refine the drawing, but just keeping it a little bit lighter than usual. That's the far right edge of that petal that's coming forward. Now I want to just draw, see how there's another line right next to it that shows how it's just curling a little bit. Got to get that in there. You can see where it's narrower. Just keep your eye going back-and-forth between your drawing and the reference photo. You can glance up and see what I'm doing too, sometimes that might help, but mostly keep your eye going back-and-forth between your drawing and the reference. That's really how you can spot any inconsistencies. I'm doing that same thing here. You can't see my face, but I have the reference pulled up and I keep looking back and forth. Here's the outer edge. Then see how it sort of just curls in like that, comes down. This little guy hiding out right on the inside. Not there. I'm going to draw a few these lines like that. I think that's about all we need. Just clean up the line a little bit. I might actually erase some of the lines that I don't want. I feel like I want to just sketch this over. Just as much to make it a little more sleek, elegant looking shape. There we go. I like that. It's okay to make leaf edges. That's what your research [inaudible] Everybody does it. [LAUGHTER] Sound like I'm trying to peer pressure you. Everybody's doing it. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to switch to, I was drawing with a 2B pencil. Doesn't really matter whatever pencil you're comfortable with, but I'm going to jump to my HB now. Let's see it here so that I can get really dark in the shadows. Just like I did in the last class, I'm going to start by identifying where I see the darkest values first. For one thing, I see some light here. We're just finding the light. That's the theme of this lesson. Part of finding the light also means finding the shadows. The shadows are what define the light. You can't have one without the other. Sounds very deep and philosophical, doesn't it? [LAUGHTER] Also part of finding the light means identifying where the light source is in the image. When you look at this photo, which side do you think the light is coming from? It's coming from the left or the right? Give you a minute to ponder that. Is coming from the right. A little bit from the back. It's back right. You can tell that because the lights come look at the right edge of the petal right here, see how the lights just wrapping around the back of it and you see a little bit of the light over in here. That's going to be really fun to shade when we get to that part, by the way. I have that. Now I wanted to go in. Just like I did before on the pumpkin, I'm going to put a little bit of dark value all the way around the outer edge. Nobody ever wants to do this part. [LAUGHTER] You might be at home grumbling or you might be thinking, I'm just going to skip that. Paul will never know. You're right. Unless you post it then I know. But trust me, it really is worth it. It's going to make all the highlights pop. Because just like I was saying a minute ago, you really can't have white without shadow. You can appreciate the light like just look at the differences I shade in the background here between how this particular petal looks when it is white against white versus when it's white against the dark. It looks totally different. For one thing, you're no longer dependent on that line to define the edge because you have a shift in value now that's creating the edge. I'm just working my way around. It's also really fun to do drawings on toned paper. We will be doing a lesson that's is like that in the future where I'll have you just put down some pencil lead on the paper and spread it out, smooth it out a little bit, and then do a drawing with your eraser. A little teaser of a lesson to come. But you can also just buy dark paper or toned paper and do drawings with white charcoal or white colored pencils even. You can use dark as well. If you get a middle gray paper, then try doing a drawing where you both are adding the shadows and the highlights. It's a really cool and interesting way to think about light and shadow. We're used to drawing on white paper. We tend to be more focused on adding shadows because the white is already providing you with the highlights when you take away that part than it makes you really look at the light and the shadow differently. Now I've got the background. I have the darkest on the interior. Now I'm going to go one notch lighter and instead of sharpening my pencil, I'm just going to switch [NOISE] back also to the pencil that I was drawing with, the 2B, and shade in this area. Too in the flow of things to stop long enough to sharpen my pencil. Thankfully, I have a big supply here. You can see how on this side, that shadow just gets a little bit lighter right along the very edge. Do you see that? That's called reflected light. That means that a little bit of light is wrapping around the back of that flower and creating that light that's hitting the edge there. I'm going to try and show that now and I can also go back, and this is one of the fun things about the kneaded eraser you can shape it, so I'm going to shape it into a little narrow wedge that I can just get right in there and lift a little bit more of that reflected light out. There we go. See how there's this some line work I guess that creates this movement, this shape. I'm going to try to simulate that a little bit with my pencil. You have a middle value here. It's not as dark as the value that's on the left. If we numbered our value scale from 1-5 that we did in the previous class, this is probably right in the middle. This is the three, this one's the four, this was the five. Now I'm doing a two up here. One thing that's also very helpful when you're working with value is to squint your eyes. Squint your eyes and look at the photo for a minute. When you squint your eyes, it eliminates all the extra details and you just see the big sections of value and the shifts in value, you notice a lot more. You see where it goes from dark to light. It's easier, I think, to identify where is the strongest light, where is the darkest dark. When we look at a reference without squinting our eyes, it's easy to get distracted by all the details. [NOISE] Trying to create a sense of the directional movement of the petals too. By the way, I'm using my pencil, so you see I'm creating some of these lines and shapes as I go that make it feel like it's moving or wrapping around. I'm going now from what was maybe a four up here, just working my way down to like three , two up here. If you're unsure, it's always better to start a little bit lighter and then you can push the value darker if you need to. It's always harder to remove value. It gets a little bit darker here. You see that? [NOISE] Did you think you could do a drawing this cool already after 11 classes? That's pretty great. More than anything, I really hope that this constant practice and giving you different ways of looking at things will just help you to feel more confident and continue practicing, continue drawing. The more that you draw, the better you'll get, and the more that you practice all of these different ideas, the more natural it will become. You won't even have to think about it after a while. It'll just be second nature. Now this one, let's go ahead and do this little fella. It's pretty dark in there. That's like a four, maybe five, maybe four-and-a-half, [LAUGHTER] if we want to get technical. It's a little bit of a light in the edge there so I'm going to go darker back here so that's spins out. Whenever you want to highlight to stand out again, remember, you have to go darker around it and then we have dark value here. [NOISE] Getting lighter, lighter as it comes down. There's a little lip, it goes right around here, that's a darker shadow. See the more you look at something like this, the more you see. We could spend hours on this drawing but we don't have hours. Or I don't [LAUGHTER] I would love to. I might spend hours on this after we finish the video. You can too, if you want. I like to sometimes go back and just clean up the edges a little bit, make sure that where I want it to look really sharp and clean, that it does. Just because you have put down some value doesn't mean that area is finished. You can always go back and adjust, clean things up, add or remove value, push and pull things however, you need to make sure that all the edges standout and are not relying on lines but our shadows, unless you're working in a style where you want to show lines, that's totally valid to you. But if you're going for realism, if you really want to make a realistic drawing, you're not going to see outlines because you don't see outlines when you look at things in the world, it's always value and light and shadow that helps you to see and define the edges. [NOISE] Do a little darker here. I have to admit, I don't want to stop because I'm enjoying this drawing. [LAUGHTER] You couldn't tell? I hope you are too. I try to pick images that will be fun for us and I try to give us a variety of things so that whatever your interests are hopefully we'll get to draw something like that soon. But just know all the ideas that I'm sharing with you here can be used for drawing anything. I think that's probably good for a 10-minute ish drawing. You can definitely sense the light coming through and that's really what I wanted us to think about today and I hope you can see that in yours too. Keep looking for that light no matter what it is you're drawing and it's going to help you so much to make your drawings come to life. Great job, and I'll see you back here for Lesson Number 12. Can you believe we've made it that far already? You're doing so awesome. In the next lesson, we're going to be learning all about the tools, especially the range of pencils and what the different numbers and letters mean. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 13. How To Use the Tools : Let's do some more drawing today. Today we're going to learn all about how to use the tools, which is so important because every pencil does something a little different. Maybe you've wondered what the numbers and letters on the pencils mean, when to you use what? Well, after today, you will know the answer. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. I want to start off by explaining what all of these different numbers, and letters on the back of the pencils actually mean. If you notice some of the pencils have an H Letter, some have a B, and then this one here in the middle has HB. I've written them up here as well, so you can see a little bit better. All of the B pencils are softer lead, and the higher the number, the softer the lead is. That means it's going to make a darker mark because the lead is coming off onto the paper more easily. Then the H means hard, so that set of pencils has a harder lead, and the higher the number, the harder that lead is. You could even go higher than 4H, but that's all I had here in this set. Similar, it's just the reverse of the B pencils, it could go up to 6H, 8H, and the higher the number, the harder the lead. That means the lighter, the mark will be. Not every artist uses all of the pencils in fact, when I'm drawing, I tend to just use a couple of the B pencils myself, and I vary the lightness and darkness by how hard I press. However, it's good to know what the pencils do, so I wanted to start off by just demonstrating. If you have a set like this, go ahead and arrange them in order, and then what I want to encourage you to do is to take each pencil, and just color in a little section, applying the same amount of pressure to each one. Because the concept with using all of the different pencil leads, is that you can achieve different values without altering the amount of pressure that you put on the pencil. I'm using the exact same amount of pressure, for each of these and we'll see if we can see a difference. Might be hard to see on camera, but if you have a set at home try it out. I can definitely see it, can you? Probably not, [LAUGHTER] but I would encourage you to try it. You'll definitely see it, if you do it on paper. I'm not pressing any differently, now we're into the H's and you can even just feel the difference. It feels scratchier, more liny, now, on to the H, look at that. Still pressing just as hard, no difference, 2H, no pressure difference, and 4H. Look at that, you can hardly even see that one. Now, I want to demonstrate a technique that you could use if you wanted to work with the full range of pencils. Let me scoot them out of the way here. I'm going to pull up our reference for today, which is this cute little fish. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to use, let's see, maybe my B pencil to sketch it out. We're going to draw it pretty small, because the one thing about this particular technique is that it is a bit more time-consuming. It can give you some absolutely beautiful results though. Even if you don't end up deciding to work in this technique all the time, when you draw, it's still a very valuable thing to know. It gives you a very rendered smooth look when you shade in a pencil using all of the different leads that are available to you. I'm just drawing the basic shapes, by now, I think you have a pretty good understanding of that. Drawing some jelly bean shape for the body, to triangular shapes back here. Another one up top, little fins in, little eyeball. Now, I'm just going to refine the drawing a smudge before I start shaping it in. Make sure everything is where I want it. Get the shape just right instead of the more generic simple shapes trying to get the true shapes that I see. But I don't want to spend a lot of time on that. But I think I drew my fin a little bit too far forward. Just that, see, everybody makes mistakes. It's all part of the process. Again, I'm just telling myself that so I feel better. [LAUGHTER] Do what you got to do. A little thin, actually, there's another layer here. Comes like that, over like this, there we go. Now, let me get this one in, give our fish a little too much of a double chin, and other fin. Now, if you want to shade something in using this very traditional rendering technique where you use all the different pencil leads. The way that you do that is start with the hardest lead first. That means I'm using my 4H, and you basically color in everything, that is that value or darker. Get rid of my pencil shavings, here are my eraser shavings. I didn't use my kneaded eraser. That's why I have those, since the background is dark is going to be shading on that. There really is nothing that I'm seeing on the fish that is pure white. I'm actually just going to cover everything with the 4H because that's our lightest value. Then we're going to be building up from there. You can see I'm doing all of my strokes in one direction here. I'm going slow enough that one line overlaps the next so that it doesn't look pencil liny. [NOISE] I told you it was a little time-consuming. If you drew a giant fish, you're probably regretting that choice about now. [LAUGHTER] Now, I'm going to jump up to my 2H pencil, which is a little bit darker. I'm going to basically color in everything except for where I want it to remain the 4H value. I see the 4H, the lightest value is here on this part in here, but everywhere else below that is darker. So I'm going to go ahead and do that , definitely the background. Now, if you don't have a full pencil set today, don't worry, you can still do this drawing. Just do it in the more typical way of just using whatever pencil you have, and varying the pressure by how hard you press. If you want darker, press harder, but if you're following along with this technique, you should not have any change in the pressure. It should all be the same, you get the distinctions in value simply by the different pencil leads. This whole thing except for the very front is dark, so I'm going to go ahead and do that. You really get to know a subject when you do it this way because you end up coloring over each part a whole bunch of times. Pretty much everything down here. [NOISE] The background over here, actually this whole thing. You can see I've left just a few areas and actually I need to get in here and do this area right here is dark, so I'm going to shade that in too. Feel free to pause me too if I'm going too fast, if you need to catch up. Take your time. That's everything now with the 2H. [NOISE] Now, I'm going to jump up to the H pencil. I'm going to start with the background because that's a given. [NOISE] You see how with each layer that you add because of the change in the lead, it gets darker. [NOISE] It's a very methodical process oriented way to draw. There are some people that it would suit very well, I think, because it lets you take your time and really build up the values. You're starting with the white of the paper this way and you're just building up to dark. I know a lot of artists who really enjoy that. I'm a little too impatient. I got to be honest with you. [LAUGHTER] This is not my preferred way to do it, like I said, but it is still a very good exercise. I like to jump right to the extremes. When I'm drawing, I'll just go right to a 4B or 6B pencil, and get those dark values in right away to each their own. It's important, I think, when you're taking any art class to know that there's so many different ways to approach this. There is no right or wrong in art. There are so many different techniques. I always try to make sure everybody that I work with knows that what I might be demonstrating is one way; my way, but there are many other ways. A little darkness over here. That was the each. Now, I'm going to [NOISE] skip a few, like I said, getting impatient already. You can go even the next one would be HB if you want to do that. I'm going to jump right to the B. Dark in the background. Some more I see same amount of pressure, but it's getting so much darker now. That background in first. Then let's look where we see those dark values. One of the things is it's nice to not completely go as far as you did with the previous value because then you start to get some really nice subtle transition. That's really the goal of this. You get the blending through what you leave untouched. Darker values here, here. It's starting to look good. How's your drawing coming? I'm going to jump right to the 4B now, taking some big leaps here. [LAUGHTER] Got to be a risk-taker sometimes. [LAUGHTER] Even in the background, I'm not going all the way as far to the outer edge as I did with the previous shade, because I want to allow that fade to happen there too just by the natural transition of the dark to light. It's nice to not totally cover up all your work that you just did. Go around this little thing. By now you can really start to see though, how you can get some beautifully subtle effects with this. You have to be a patient person, there are benefits to that. A little bit shading here and here. [LAUGHTER] Feel like you're just watching me shade the same thing over and over again. [LAUGHTER] Which well, you can all. [LAUGHTER] Now I'm going to go right on up to the 8B. [NOISE] I'm going to let that be my final step here. Like I said, you could go, you could use every pencil. If you have a little bit more time, you want to really feel this out, don't skip any, go use every single one because every layer that you add does contribute something to the drawing. It adds that an extra layer of complexity and value shift. The more values that you have in a drawing, the more realistic it's going to be, the more it mimics all of the effects of light and shadow that exist in reality. You can even see now just in this drawing, this little drawing that I'm doing and in yours I imagine, how the fish is starting to look very luminous. Value really is the key to creating the effects of light and shadow. If you understand how to use the tools, you can achieve that. Get those eyes in good. I'm never pressing any harder. That's the part of it that seems almost magical. There's my little fishy [LAUGHTER] swimming away, swimming along. That's how I felt as I was working on this drawing. We're just swimming along. [LAUGHTER] I hope you enjoyed the drawing. Now that you know what to use when and how the pencils are really designed to work, give them a try. Use the full range and see what happens. In our next lesson, lesson number 13, we're going to be doing some quick gestural studies. Get ready. [LAUGHTER] I'll see you then. Bye bye. 14. Quick Gestural Studies: Today we are going to be doing some quick gestural studies. I don't want to waste any time. Let's get started. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper, and let's go.Gesture drawing is one of my very favorite things to do. I'm so excited that we get to do this today. If you feel a little intimidated about drawing the human figure, my best advice is, don't be easier said than done, but just think of it as a collection of shapes, just like anything else that we've drawn. If you can draw all the other things in this class so far, you can handle this one too. The idea of gesture drawings is really just to capture the essence of the form. We're not trying to draw details. In fact, you're only going to have 3 minutes for each pose. Don't get caught up in tiny little things like eyes, fingers, things like that. We're just trying to get the main sections of the body and an overall impression of the pose. Here's our first model. I'm going to start the clock right now. Okay, so what I like to do first when I'm doing a figure drawing is look at the overall position of the body and draw a line to represent that. You could think of it as the spine if you want. This person is standing pretty straight up and down, so that line isn't too exciting. There's a bit of a tilt to the head, so I'm gonna draw an oval shape for the head. I'm going to go a little bigger here so you can see what I'm doing. There we go. It looks like a weird little lollipop at the moment. Then I like to look at the angle of the shoulders, there's a slight lean and I do a triangular shape sometimes for the torso just to get a shape down. Then maybe sort of a box shape for the pelvis. Then let's just draw simple, simple shapes for the legs and feet. We're not getting detailed. We're not getting all caught up in thinking about who this is? Or trying to make it look exactly like this person. You can see I'm doing my usual trick of holding the pencil pretty far back so that I'm not trying to overly control this too much. You can look at the negative space between his legs that can help you to, if you draw that shape. That's something that we talked about in a previous lesson. Use all the tricks that you've learned so far, that will definitely help. Okay. Then you just start connecting the parts. I think I've made the head a little bit too big. I was trying to up-size him a bit, so let's give him a little bit of a head reduction. I'm liking the body. I think we just need to go a little bit smaller with the head. There we go. That feels better. Like to have a neck and then connect over to the shoulders and you see how I'm just using very simple shapes here, almost just like a lot of rectangles. I'm paying attention to where things align on the body. We have about 25 seconds left. I'm just going to clean up some of my lines. This is all that you really should be aiming for in a gesture drawing. We're not trying to get details. We're not trying to make it look like the person. Just the essence. It's a good way to think of it. Okay, time's up. Here's our next model. Let me reset the clock for us. We're going to have 3 minutes again. Let's see how we do with this one. Ready, set, go. This time is a little bit more of a lean to that line that we're drawing the spine and I'm drawing the shoulders, there's definitely an angle there. The head overlaps the shoulders. Do you see that the chin is actually below that shoulder line. I'm going to draw it a little bit lower like that. Shoulder, shoulder. That triangle shape for the torso. Pelvis, leg. I know, you know body parts. Like teaching a kindergarten class and this is your legs, these are your toes. I have to have something to say. Should be a very difficult pose I would think to hold for any length of time, so it's probably good that we're working from a photograph. I think that doing gesture drawing is one of the quickest ways to really see rapid improvement in your drawing skills. If you want to practice this more, just go online and just look up poses. You can find any image of a person will work. You can also just watch things on TV and pause it. I do that sometimes and just draw the person. Make your friends pose for you. It's harder than it seems, I've posed for some figure drawing classes before and it's very hard to sit still. Not sure how they do the drawing than the posing I have to say. Okay, we have about 45 seconds left. I've got the basics down, so I'm just going to try to refine it a little bit. If you had more time, this would be a great opportunity to do the checking the measurements, measure the head, and then count down how many heads high. I don't think I have quite enough time for that, but if you if you had a little bit longer, if you wanted to pause it and do that, you certainly could. It's always a good thing to make sure that your proportions are good. But also with a gesture drawing, perfection isn't really the goal. If things are exaggerated, that's okay. Sometimes that can make it better if it helps to emphasize the pose or the angle of the body is in. All right, time's up for that one. Here it is. Don't hate me. You can do it, I promise. It's not as hard as it looks. It's just shapes. Remember? All right. Ready, set, go. I'm going to do once again that line. Just showing the movement, the arc of the body. The head's here, tilted way far back, chin is up. I'm even going to make draw it so that there's a little bit of a point to represent that chin. Then the torso in this case it's not so much a triangle a little bit. I'm just going to draw the shape that I see. Because it's the triangle shape, but then it twists. She had to make it hard on this one. Then I'm still going to do the boxy shape, for the pelvis. We've got one leg coming back like this, look at that dramatic swoop. It's a beautiful pose. This would make a great painting. If you want to paint it, you go right ahead. It will also make a great longer drawing too because there's beautiful lighting on the model. One leg down. Next. Have you ever seen those little wooden artist mannequins those are good to practice with too, they can sometimes look a little stiff. They are wooden mannequins. But if you are inventing poses, especially if you're a character designer, if you do like comic, comic book work or anything more illustrative, those can be helpful. Just imagining poses. But honestly the best thing is to just try to get somebody to pose for you or set up that user self timer on your camera. Do some poses yourself, you can be a model. I feel a little silly, but hey, that's all right. Okay, So we have about 45 seconds left again, no pressure. Maybe a little pressure. Little pressure can be motivating. I'm just trying to get some of the contours of the body in there, whatever I can in the amount of time that we have. That's the name of the game with the good drawing, do what you can with the time that you have, make it work. If you ever get the chance to take a live figure drawing class anywhere, I would highly recommend it. So fun and it is so valuable. It really is helpful to have that experience. Got to get her hair in there. She's got some great hair. All right, time's up. Great job everyone, keep practicing. If you do a lot of these, you're going to see rapid, rapid improvement in your drawing skills. I guarantee it. Awesome job. If you enjoyed that, keep practicing. You can do quick gesture studies all the time anywhere. I love carrying around little sketchbooks and doodling. Sketching people that I see or interesting things, it's a great way to practice. In our next class, lesson number 14, we're going to be learning all about drawing with wine. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 15. Drawing With Line: I'm so happy to have you along with me on this journey. The more you practice, the better you'll get. Let's dive right in. Today is all about drawing with line. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper, and let's go. I'm going to start this drawing with an HB pencil, which will be a little bit lighter and then I'm going to come back on top of it with the 4B to do the line work. Today is all about drawing with line and I want to really get into it so that you have plenty of time to see all the fun things you can do with line work in your artwork. Let's get the shapes down first. You know the drill. I see just a rounded shape here on top for now. Then I'm just going to use line, that's the theme of our day, to get the stem placed. It comes like this, then like that, then like that, and the branches off here and here. Then we have, let's see. There's a leaf shape right about here. You can see I'm being very loose. Just getting the essence of it on there, just like with all the other drawings we've done. Probably you're noticing by now some of this is a bit repetitive, [LAUGHTER] but it's good, it reinforces these ideas and it shows you that no matter what it is you're drawing the same rules still apply. Looking at negative spaces, all of it. Then each time I tried to just add one more little thing, [LAUGHTER] make you stretch even further. [NOISE] Now let me just refine the shape of the flower a little bit. I'm going to take my kneaded eraser and just soften some of that so I can get in there and create the true shape of what I see. It comes up, there is layers and layers of petals. Really beautiful, the shaping. Just take it one petal at a time, draw the shapes you see, you can do it. If you can draw all the other things that I've made you draw so far, this will be a piece of cake. [LAUGHTER] Remember, don't think of it as a flower, it's just a collection of shapes you got. A lot of overlapping shapes here, one petal that comes right in front of the other. Think about that as you're drawing then that will help you to place them into a realistic sense of space. Just going to get a few more little details in, some of the veins. This is actually, looks like two leaves over here, a little bit peeking out behind. Figure out the actual thickness of that stem. We have leaves that are going in all different directions, which will be really good for this exercise because today is all about just using line. I know we've been doing a lot with line and we just started introducing shading also, and you were working with value but we're jumping back to line for a minute because there's a little bit more that line can do that I don't know if you realize. I'm just erasing some of the straight lines and basic shapes that I don't need anymore. Getting it down to just what I need. This is what's nice about this eraser T, you can just go through and pat and lift up lightly and a little bit. Now I'm going to jump to my 4B pencil and as I am going over the lines and refining them, I'm going to start thinking about how I can use the thickness of the line to tell a little bit more of the story. Wherever I see a darker shadow, for example, I'm going to use a thicker line and then see right here there's that shadow on the stem, I'm going to let that line gets thinner as it comes down toward the leaf so one line with a variety of different thicknesses. You see that? If you can do that throughout the drawing, even without doing any shading, you will create a sense of how the light is hitting this object. It's pretty amazing what you can do with just line work. On this side, I'm going to get a little bit thicker. Has it come up? There are different strategies that you can use for determining where to put the thicker lines, where to have the lines get thicker and get thinner and it's worth trying all of them. One strategy is what I'm showing you here which is basically just using the thickness of the line to tell about the shadows and the light. Another strategy is if you have a lot of depth in the image, let the lines be thicker on the objects or elements that are in the foreground and then get thinner as it recedes into space. So if you were maybe drawing a landscape, if you had distant mountains, you could do like really, really thin, faint lines, and then the trees in the foreground or whatever might be in that space, use the thicker lines and that'll make them come forward. Same technique, different purposes. Right now this little guy is a little bit more in the light, so I'm going to make those lines thinner. What I like about doing this is that I think it just creates such elegant drawings when you have that transition from the thicker to the thinner line. I just loved the way that looks and it keeps you really engaged in the process. You're not just going over the lines to make them stand out, you have to really think, where is it? Where do I want it to be thicker? Where do I want it to be thinner? This is a pretty advanced, sophisticated idea but I know you all can handle it. [LAUGHTER] It really is helpful, I think that you will be impressed by what a difference it makes in your drawings when you start using this strategically. I'm going to go thinner and then get thicker again as it goes deeper into the shadow here, see that? Deepen the shadows. Let me go thick there. Of course, the more you look, the more you see. That's always true. This one's in the lights. I'm going to do thinner lines on there. Thicker over here because there's a little bit of shadow. Very shadowy here, so I'm going to go really dark. Very shadowy here. Isn't this fun? It's nice once you have everything drawn. I think it takes some of the pressure off and you just get to have fun playing with line. A little bit lighter here, because that's more on the light side. Darker here. Then I'm going to get thinner as I move towards the light. See that? It's all just by the amount of pressure that you put on the pencil. Also, you see that sometimes when I want it really thick, I'll go back and double back and do a second layer to thicken the line even more. Even without any shading, you can look at this drawing and have a sense that the light is coming from over here. Isn't that cool? You're never going to look at line drawings the same. Switch my pencil. It wears out your lead pretty quickly. These leaves are very much in shadows. I'm going to go pretty thick over here, and stem. What do you think of that too? It's definitely in the shadow parts. Same here. Let me get this other leaf on. Now, this leaf is not going to be quite as thick, especially here because the light's hitting it, but on this side, interestingly enough, it gets a little bit darker. Even though that's the direction that the light is coming from, because the leaf is turned up in that part right here, the light can't reach it, it's in shadow. That's why it's really important to always look because you can't always know. I would've guessed that that would have been the lighter area because it's on the light side, but it isn't. Light likes to play tricks on us, sometimes. Darker with the vein here to represent that shadow. Still pretty dark on this side of the stem, but a little bit lighter, and thicker here. There was more to this photo, but I cropped it for you. You should be grateful. This could have been harder. [LAUGHTER] There's a whole vase and reflective situation going on, and I thought, oh man, they would really be mad at me if I made them draw this too on top of everything else. [LAUGHTER] It's thicker here, and then it gets thinner as it comes into the light. Then this leaf, it's the thickest right down here at the point, you can see that's where the shadow is. Then focus right here. This leaf, really thick, very much in shadow. Last but not least, I have this one which is thinner here. Then, as it curves around this way, it starts to get darker all the way up to the point, a little bit of light hitting then dark again , then lighter again. Lighter here, darker here. See what I mean by you really have to look. [LAUGHTER] There is that contrast between the thick and the thin, the dark and the light that really makes it very elegant, I think very beautiful. Just go back and see if there's anything that you want to emphasize more. Clean up. That looks pretty good to me. [NOISE] That is how you can use a line to convey a sense of light and shadow. Lines are everywhere and they're so much fun, so try doing some more line drawings if you have any spare time today. Keep practicing, and I'll see you tomorrow for lesson number 15, which is using cross-hatching. Bye bye. 16. Using Cross Hatching: You've made it to the halfway point, but that makes me sad because I don't want this to end, but I'm having so much fun hanging out with you. Anyhow, let's get started instead of being all sentimental. Today, we're going to be learning a really interesting way of adding some value into your drawings using line, and that is called crosshatching. Grab a pencil, sharpen it, get some paper. [LAUGHTER] I didn't say my usual slogan right, but it's fine. Let's go. Here's our reference for today. I'm going to be showing you a totally different way to add value to a drawing. To start with though, just take your pencil and start sketching it out like always. I'm going to start with the stem, get that shape in there, and then just look for the basic shapes. Drawing very loose, sketchy, you know the drill. You are experts by now. You've been doing this for a while. I can't believe 15 lessons in, it's exciting. I've really enjoyed making these videos. I hope you're enjoying the class too. There's always so much more to learn with drawing. That's part of what makes it so exciting. I keep trying to think of new twists to put on it and different techniques that you can build on. But we're just getting started, honestly. I've been making art. I started taking art lessons when I was four [LAUGHTER] and I'm a little bit older than that now. Art has been a big part of my life pretty much from the beginning. I have to say that it never gets boring because every time I go to make a new piece, I feel like I'm just starting. I really do. There's more to learn. There's new challenges. You're never going to know it all. But hopefully I can help you at least feel a little bit more confident to explore. I have the basic shape now of that leaf. I'm going to go in and draw a few more details and then we'll start our shading process, and I'll tell you all about that. Get it ready. Let me start by getting some of these big vein lines in. That helps to break up the leaf. I always feel like the more interior lines and shapes that you can add, the more that really just helps you to understand how that particular subject is put together. It gives you more anchor points. I'm going through and drawing some of the veins now. Of course, you don't have to draw them exactly, it's just giving the suggestion of it. The nice thing about them is that they do tell you a little bit about the way that section of the leaf is moving in space. The way that the veins curve and are affected by the movement of the leaf itself, so do pay attention to the direction of the lines, even if you're not drawing them line for line. I think leaves are a great example of something that when you really start looking closely at them, there's so much more going on than what you would expect, especially when you just see hundreds and hundreds of them up in a tree. When you stop and just look at one and see how complex it is and interesting, really gives you an appreciation for how fascinating nature is. There's our leaf. Now, today's lesson is in crosshatching and so that's a method of shading where you don't actually really shaded in, but you use all wine to create the illusion of shadows. Let me just get my kneaded eraser and I want to clean up a little bit of my sketchy lines. What I like to do is take the eraser and just see how I'm just globbing it on here [LAUGHTER] It's technical term, glob it on. To lift up some of the excess lines. Then I'm just going to clean up my line work a little bit, at least around the edge. Way I know you can all see it too. That might be helpful. I like how this top leaf, it's curling towards us a little. Did you see that? Did you figure out how to draw that? I bet you did. Especially if you're just drawing the shapes, remember you're not thinking of this as a leaf. It's just a collection of shapes. Now, the key to crosshatching is really thinking about the direction of each of the planes and the way that that plane is moving through space. We're going to look for the shadow shapes. I'm going to start right down here at the bottom. I'll just emphasize this one vein since that's in the area where we're working and there's a shadow right here. I'm going to draw parallel lines, that curve following the shape of the leaf. Then it's the shadow just gets narrower along the edge and then it fades. Same thing over here. There's actually some veins that come down this way, so I'm going to draw those. As the shadow approaches that vein, it disappears. When you're doing crosshatching, it's usually a series of parallel lines where they don't have to be parallel. They might curve and distort if they're following the shape of the object. But then when you want to create a darker value, instead of coloring it in, you do more lines that cross the first. Where the shadow is fading I'm just going to leave it like that, but where I want it darker right here, I'm going to come in and I'm going to do another set of parallel lines like that. Then just let those lines fade and then those lines disappear and that's how you get that illusion of a gradient. Let's try it again. There's another one right here. See you're doing it, you're crosshatching. This is a good technique if you're working in pen and ink also because it's very difficult to do shading the traditional way with pen and ink. You can't get all that. You can't get the value shifts by how hard you press the pen. It's always going to look the scene. Also, this is a technique that reproduces really well. A lot of early book illustrations, we're done this way. Even like if you look at a $1 bill, the face of the President and the artwork on there is done like this. Now this section, I'm going to do all the little veins first, and then I'm going to look for where I see the shadows. There's a dark shadow all along this side. You can see I'm making my lines, so they follow the movement of the leaf. That's really important. I wouldn't suggest drawing really straight lines on this one because every part of the leaf is curling a little bit in one direction or another. Draw it as if you were sculpting it. That's a really good way to think about wine work in a drawing. Also, if you paint the brush strokes that you make in your painting should, I don't like to ever suggest that there are rules in art. If you want them to feel like they are really helping to emphasize the planar structure is what you would call this, then even your brushstrokes in a painting can flow in a way that they are following the contour of that part. Let's do some more. This one up here like that, you can also very how dark it looks by how far apart you space the lines. If you want the shadow to feel like it's fading into white, you might start spacing the lines out farther. That's another good technique for this. Let's draw this one. Working our way around. Big old shadow on this side, so I'm going to do some big lines here and a little bit more here. I'm going to curve this way. Try to get some, maybe even connected here. Then it comes right down the middle like that and then in the darkest parts I'm going to cross over it. Crosshatch. There are a lot of different ways to do shading where you're just using lines like this. There's another method called stippling, which we're not going to get to in this particular drawing series, but you can certainly look it up and see examples of that. It would take longer than 10 minutes to make anything that looked good using that technique. But stippling is where you make everything out of a series of dots, so the closer the dots are together, the darker that shadow looks. That's also a great technique, but quite time-consuming. I keep showing you these things that I'm not really patient enough to actually do. [LAUGHTER] I think you're starting to figure me out. We're almost there. Big shadow here and that section of the leaf curves this way. Then it fades if it gets a little spaced out. Spaced out, I get that way sometimes [LAUGHTER] after I've been staring at a drawing or painting too long. I definitely can get spaced out. A little bit of shadow right here. Now, another thing you could do if you wanted to spend a little more time on this is go all around the outside and do some crosshatching in the background as well, and that would make the highlight areas of the leaf really pop. Then I'm just going to look for a few other areas to put some subtle shading because if you notice, the light areas are not necessarily all the same. They're not all pure white. There's little hints of shadow everywhere. Just trying to suggest some of that, some more complexity. Make our leaf as interesting as possible. You could certainly spend a lot more time on this if you wanted to really study each little section and see how much of those details you can bring out. It's a fun technique, I hope you've enjoyed it. Great job everyone. I hope you enjoyed that. In our next class, lesson Number 16, we're going to be doing something called reverse drawing. You'll have to tune in then to see what it is. [LAUGHTER] Until then, bye-bye. 17. Reverse Drawing: Today we're going to be doing something really fun. I first learned this when I was in college myself. It's called reverse drawing. We're basically going to be putting down some value right at the start and then pulling out the highlights with our eraser. So we're drawing kind of backwards. So sharpen your pencil, get an eraser, and some paper. Let's go. I've been looking forward to this one. This is fun. We're going to do a reverse drawing and the first step is figure out the dimensions that you would like for your drawing to be. Here's our reference. We're going to draw these pears. I'm going to make it small because this can take a little while. I'm drawing a rectangle that represents the border of my picture. Then once you have the border to find, take a soft pencil, I'm going to use my 8B, and fill in that whole area. I have the pencil on its side. You don't want to go too dark and you don't want to really press into the paper so that it makes grooves or indentations. You want to keep it light, soft, but evenly fill in this whole section. The idea of a reverse drawing is that we're putting down some value first and we're going to basically be drawing this picture with our eraser by finding all the highlight areas. It's really good challenge. It makes you look at things differently, and you know I love that. You know I love making you think outside the box, so to speak. There are a lot of other ways to do this too. You can actually buy toned papers, so a gray paper or different colors of paper and then just use a white colored pencil or white charcoal. That works well also. You can also buy graphite powder, which is basically your pencil lead but ground up into a powder and you can dump that on and smear it around. Now what I like to do is take a paper towel or a tissue and wrap it around my finger. You might need to pause me to go and grab that since this is the first you are hearing that you might need that today, sorry. Once you have it, take it and just use it to blend everything together, smooth it out a little bit. You could also use your finger, I suppose, if you don't mind getting dirty. [NOISE] Once you have it pretty evenly distributed, then we're going to start our drawing. I'm excited. Now, I like to use my kneaded eraser. I know I've shown you this already. You can just shape it however you want. We're going to look at the shapes of the highlights in this image. I know we've done a class before where we drew the shadow shapes. This time, we're drawing the highlight shapes. I've made my eraser into a little bit of a point. I'm going to start with the pear that's closest to us, right in the front. It has a little bit of light at the top like that. Then the shape of the highlights looks to be about like this. It comes down this way. You see, this is what I love about this eraser. Whatever shape you need it to be, you can configure it as you go. I want it to curve around and create that edge of the pear. Now, if you erase away more than you intend to and you need to put some of the value back, I haven't necessarily done that in this case. But if you need to, you just take your paper towel again and you go in and you just cover it right back up and it'll fill in. There's my first pear. The second one, that highlight shape starts right out of here, right out of the top of the first one. It curves around, it comes up, out like that. Then it comes down. This is a great image for this because it's got some really good shadow shapes. Now what I'm going to try and do is be extra checky, always. I'm going to put in the stem of this front pear first and I might grab a different eraser for that. Let me see. I happen to have just this little white eraser that has a little bit of a harder edge. If you have even an eraser that's on the back of a pencil would work well if you need to just make any little thin lines. I'm going to erase away the highlight that I see on that stem. Now I can work this one around that a little bit better, because this highlight is the brightest here, I would say. Then as it moves to the right, it starts to get a little bit darker, it's not the same all the way. Do you see that? As I erase, I didn't press as hard with the eraser there, so it didn't lift up quite as much of the graphite. It'll take a little bit to get used to this technique. It's very different than anything we've done before, and just know that you can always go back and add more back into it if you need to. We've got one more pear to go. Before I do that pear, what I'm seeing is that the light that's hitting the table is actually brighter than the pear itself. So let me just roughly sketch in about where that pear is going to be. The top is about here. Then it wraps around like that. Instead of erasing inside the pear at first, I'm actually going to come outside the pear. Then right from the top of it, there's a diagonal shadow, goes about like that. All of this is pretty light. Then it comes around this pear, up there. I think I made my pear a little too skinny, so I'm going to actually fill in some of that a little bit. Then let's see, comes down. Then there's the shadow of the pear on the table. So many shapes, so many shadows. [LAUGHTER] It comes down like this. Then it comes over and meets right at the bottom of this pear, which then I take my other eraser and just define that edge a little better. Whenever you need a nice, clean edge, a harder eraser is a little bit better for that. But the downside is you get all those little shavings. [NOISE] There we go. Next shadow comes down like this, and then comes back up, which is drawing shapes. We're not drawing pears, you know that. This diagonal line that we started over here has to continue. You want to make sure that it makes sense where we're picking it back up over here. It's over a little further because there's that other shadow. There you go. Maybe this even comes in a little more, there. Got it. So always look at the shapes of your positive and negative space to figure this stuff out. Now I'm going to lift up all of this down here. Maybe use a little bit bigger section of the eraser for that when you have a larger area to erase. Then I'm going to come in and create the highlights now on this side of this pear. But I'm not erasing. You see how I'm still allowing it to be darker than the table in that part. [NOISE] There is a really nice strong highlight right on the top of that pear, so I'm going to put that in. Just like when you're drawing with a pencil, you can still identify subtle shifts in value where you see really strong lights, more medium values. There's a real strong highlight on this pear, so I'm going to pull that out. [NOISE] Strong highlight up here. [NOISE] If you take a soft pencil, like an 8B, or 6B, you can also go in and add darker value to it, and that's what will really start to make this all pop. When you're working on a white piece of paper, you're starting from that point of having the lightest possible value and working your way towards door. When you do the reverse drawing, you're starting more maybe in the middle or even towards the dark end, depending on how dark you go with that first layer. Little negative space there, little shadow. You see that? Look at you. I'm getting you trained to really look like an artist. You are an artist, it's not like you're impersonating one. You are an artist. A little stem up here, but it's fading into the shadow. You don't see it too well. Now we'll get this side, this side of the stem. Maybe do a little bit of shading on the pear. If you noticed that pear is the darkest right about here, then it gets a little bit lighter towards the edge. That's that reflected light that we talked about in the previous lesson where the light is wrapping around and making that edge of it a little bit lighter. It's still in shadow, but it's making it a little bit wider. I'll darken my shadow here, darken this shadow. There's our reverse drawing. Great work everyone. If you are like me, you probably have pencil lead all over yourself at this point, so you might want to go clean yourselves up. I hope you enjoyed that lesson. It's one of my favorite ways to draw. It really makes me think about the value structure, which is so important. In tomorrow's lesson, lesson number 17, we're going to be learning about one-point perspective. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 18. 1 Point Perspective: I can't believe we've made it this far already. Oh my gosh. Our time is winding down. It feels like we just started. [LAUGHTER] Today we're going to be learning about one-point perspective, which is such a helpful tool for really thinking about space and creating depth in your drawings. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper and let's go. Here's an example of one-point perspective. Now, don't worry, we're not drawing all of that today. [LAUGHTER] But I just wanted to give you an idea of how this is actually used in the real-world. How it helps us to understand where we are in relation to what we're seeing. If you look, everything is pointing toward one point on the horizon line. If you follow the lines on the road, for example, or the rooftops of the buildings. All of those lines intersect at something that's called a vanishing point that lands right on the horizon line. Now let's try it out ourselves. For today you will need a ruler actually for the next three days because we are doing different versions of perspective each day. Fun, fun. [LAUGHTER] It will be I promise, don't be nervous, will make it easy. Take your ruler and about halfway down your page, draw a horizontal line. That is going to be our horizon line. I'll even write it over here. See my bad handwriting. [LAUGHTER] Now, when you're talking about perspective, everything recedes to what's called a vanishing point. In one-point perspective, everything recedes to one vanishing point. I'm going to put a dot right here on the middle of my line. I'm going to erase where I messed up the line over here because that's bugging me and I can't cope. [LAUGHTER] I can't have that staring at me this whole time. Excuse me for a moment. There we go. Perfect. That never happened. [LAUGHTER] Now, if you asked a child who maybe had not any lesson in perspective drawing, how to draw a road that goes back to the horizon. Just imagine that these two pencils are the lines, they might draw something that looks like this, where the lines are parallel. But we know and especially after looking at that last image, that the lines actually need to come together. That's what creates the sense of depth. We're going to draw two sides of the road and have them meet at the vanishing point. You can make it go as wide or as narrow as you want. The wider it goes, the more it's just going to feel like we are right there standing on it. This is what I love about perspective. It really helps you to understand how to create a sense in your drawings that you could walk into it, that you're creating a believable space. I think that's pretty awesome. It's really an optical illusion on this flat piece of paper. Now, let's see what happens if we wanted to draw a building, or in this case, let's aim a little lower at first, let's just make a box. [LAUGHTER] To start with, put your ruler again in a horizontal line, somewhere below the horizon line, let me go far down so that you have some space. We're thinking that this box is maybe somewhere more in the foreground of our little scene here that we're creating. I'm going to make the bottom line about like that. Then the top will be parallel. So far we're not using the vanishing point, we're just drawing the front facing portion of this box we're building or whatever you want to think of it as. Everything is vertical or horizontal line so far. You want something roughly like that. Now, in order to turn this rectangle into a three-dimensional shape, a box, that's where our vanishing point comes in. I'll even write a little VP there, vanishing point. [LAUGHTER] I feel like such a teacher right now. [LAUGHTER] To create the sides of our box, we're going to connect first this corner to that vanishing point. I'm going to draw my line lightly because we don't necessarily want our box to actually go all the way back there. At some point we're going to be cutting it off and then you may want to erase the excess. I think you can still see it though in the video. Yes, you can. Have to double-check there. Now we're going to connect this corner to the vanishing point like this and this corner to the vanishing point. I like that. Now you might be wondering, why don't we connect this corner? The answer is that you could, I mean, if you were inside of this box, or inside of this building, there would be another wall on that side that would recede back to that vanishing point. However, because there is a front, we don't see that, it's behind, it's out of you. There's no need to actually draw that line unless you just want to, if it helps in your understanding. Next, we're going to decide where is the back of our rectangle. You can make it as deep as you want. I'm going to end mine about right here. Just make a little dot along that bottom line showing where you would like to end your box or where you want to have the back wall be. Then once again, that line is going to just be a vertical line parallel to the front corner or side that will go from down here to up here like that. Then one more line to go. We're almost there. We are going to connect from this point over to this corner, so this line is parallel to the frontline, like that. Now if you want, you could erase away the rest of the lines. I'll leave them faintly there so you can still see. You may want to leave them there in your drawing so that you can remember how you did it. Then I'm just going to emphasize this, this and this. Look at that. We drew our first rectangle or a box in perspective. Now, if this was a building, because I'm guessing at some point you would probably like to draw things a little more complex than just rectangles. [LAUGHTER] If it was a building that had maybe doors and windows, if those things were on the front side, which is facing toward us, then they will just be vertical and horizontal line. I'm going to draw a little door right here just using vertical lines and horizontal lines. If that same door was over here, that's when we have to start thinking about perspective because that whole side of the building is receding in space. The vertical lines are still vertical. But because the front of the door is closer to us than the back of the door, it needs to get smaller as it goes back in space. That's really the biggest principle of perspective. Things get smaller as they get farther away from us. We're going to connect the top of this line, to the vanishing point like this. I'll keep it going just so you can see. That's how we determine the top of that door. Same thing if you were to do windows, it would be the top and the bottom. Anything that's parallel to these lines would have to follow the rules of perspective. Now let's do one more rectangle. Let's make a tall building over on this side. Same way as before. One, I'm going to do like a skyscraper, maybe a little out of place in this little town that I'm making. But hey, my town I can do what I want is the bottom and top. Now because this building crosses the horizon line, we're only going to have to connect this corner and this corner. I'll show you why. That might not make sense right now, but hang on. That top one like that. Bottom line, like that. Then wherever I decide I want the back wall to be, maybe right there. Come in and do another vertical line like that. Now let me emphasize the lines of the building and erase a little bit of this. Then you can see why in this case, we didn't need to connect this corner or this corner because they're both behind the visible parts of the building. This one being below the horizon line, we see the roof if it was a building. You can start to see how understanding the placement of the horizon line is really important in helping the viewer understand where they are in relation to what they're seeing. They are standing at a point where they are not able to see the roof of this building. But they are able to see the roof of that one. Look what you created. Now you know one-point perspective. Look around the world, see if you can identify those vanishing points and all the lines that lead up to them and do some practice drawings if you can. Tomorrow, we're going to be practicing two-point perspective. Get ready. [LAUGHTER] I'll see you then. Bye bye. 19. 2 Point Perspective: Today we're going to be learning about two-point perspective. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper, and let's go. Here's an example of two-point perspective. We're building on what we started yesterday. In this case, you can see that there are elements of the building that recede back in two different directions. That requires two different vanishing points, hence the term two-point perspective. [LAUGHTER] Here's my ruler again, which we're going to need again today so go grab yours if you don't have it. Just like yesterday, we're going to start by drawing a horizon line about halfway down the page. There we go. [NOISE] That's our horizon 1. Now in this example, you would use two-point perspective if you are, let's say, looking at the corner of a building or if you're not seeing something that has one side of it facing directly toward us, that's the best way to think about it, I guess. We're going to draw two vanishing points. I'm going to put one over here and one over here. This is Vanishing Point 1, this is Vanishing Point 2. I'm going to draw my building or box, whatever you want so that it's below the horizon line in this example. I'm going to leave a little bit of space, so maybe a little bit lower, maybe about here. I'm drawing the corner that is facing toward us. You're going to want it to be a vertical line like that. Make sure you do leave some space above it [NOISE] because I think that will help to understand really how these vanishing points work. Now, obviously, it could be a taller building, it could cross the horizon line and it could go all the way up here. We'll discuss what do you do in that situation too. But for this first example, do it like that. Now, with one-point perspective, this would be where we would draw a rectangle facing toward us and then take the corners back. But since we don't have a side of this rectangle facing directly toward us, both sides are receding back in space. What we have to do is connect the top and bottom of the line back to the vanishing point. I'm doing a lighter line for right now so that I'll be able to erase the extra once we decide where the back of this building is. Top and bottom, go back to the vanishing point on that side. Then any guess what we do over here? [LAUGHTER] You got it. I'm going to assume you did. If not, that's okay. Connect the bottom and the top to this vanishing point also. [NOISE] Magical. Some people love perspective drawing, some people hate it. I imagine we have a mix of those personality types [LAUGHTER] who are taking this class. For those of you who love it, welcome to your happy place. For [LAUGHTER] those of you who don't, we'll be through it soon, I promise. Now, just like before, we need to decide where the back of our rectangle is and it can be anywhere you want. It just depends how big you want it to feel like it is, how much space is it taking up. I'm going to decide that on the right side, it ends here, and on the left side, it ends here. I just put a little dot on each side where I want the back of my rectangle to be. Then once again, we're going to draw vertical lines using the ruler so the back of the box is parallel to this front corner of the box. We draw up like that and up like that. Can you see it now? This is one wall, this is one wall. That's how do we get the top. Right now we have a [LAUGHTER] very open floor plan here. You can see right down inside and we probably would want to give these people a roof. The way you do that is you take each of the top corners to the opposite vanishing point. I go from Vanishing Point 1 to the corner on the right side. See where we're going here. Then I take Vanishing Point 2 to the corner on the left. Then I'm going to take my kneaded eraser and just soften the lines that go beyond our box so that you can see what's left. There's our box, two-point perspective. Just like I was showing you with one-point perspective, if you wanted to put a door or windows or anything like that, here I'll put a little window. I'm going to draw the front edge, and then the bottom will go back to the vanishing point. The top will go back to the vanishing point. Then the right side will also be a vertical. Maybe we'll make a few windows here. Just keep in mind that they will get a little bit skinnier the farther away from us they get, so each window gets a little bit smaller. [NOISE] Now let me erase my guidelines so you can see the windows. Gorgeous. Well, that one maybe got a little too skinny. [NOISE] There we go. Now I have a challenge for you. Let's draw another vertical line. Do it better than I did, please. [LAUGHTER] Try that again. Draw another vertical line up here in the sky and we're going to make a floating building that's floating up here above the horizon. My challenge for you is to pause this video and try and draw this box yourself before you watch me do it. Go ahead and press pause now if you want, give it a try. Now I'm going to draw it. Some of you did not press pause, did you? [LAUGHTER] It's okay. You do it the same way. You connect the bottom to the vanishing point and the top to the vanishing point. Same thing with vanishing point number two, and here. Now we have the two sides. Now I'm going to decide where I want the back corners to be. Maybe I'll make this one a little bit wider than the other one. They don't have to be the same, you can have one side that's skinny, one side that's long, whatever you want. Then draw vertical lines coming up from both of those points. Then connect the bottoms to the vanishing points on the opposite sides. The right corner goes to vanishing point number one. The left corner goes to vanishing point number two. Then erase away my guidelines. There you have it. In this example now we're seeing the left side, the right side, and the bottom of the building. It's like it's blasting off into the sky. In this building, in this example down here, the first one we drew, we're seeing the left, the right, and the top. Again, it's using that horizon line and an understanding of perspective to help us understand where we are in relation to what we're seeing. Great job everyone, this is a pretty challenging thing to learn. Perspective is not easy, so congratulations for hanging in there. If it was confusing for you at all, if you struggled, be sure to just rewind, watch again, keep practicing. It does get easier the more you do it. Tomorrow, come back and join us for our next class because guess what? Three-point perspective is next. [LAUGHTER] Until then bye-bye. 20. 3 Point Perspective: Hope you're doing well, hope you're ready to dive right back into it because today we are going to be working on three-point perspective. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. Here is an example of three-point perspective. Did you think that we would be adding yet another point? [LAUGHTER] Just could go on and on, no. This is the last day, I promise. In three-point perspective though, what's wonderful about that is that it allows you to get this dramatic sense that not only do objects recede to the horizon line, but they can also receive to a vanishing point that's either way above, as we see in this case that as the building is going up into the sky, or if we wanted the feeling that we were above the building looking down and the building gets smaller and smaller as it moves away from us. You might see in comic book illustrations, a lot of times if superheroes are flying across the sky or jumping from building to building, that's when you really get to use this dramatic perspective. Let's get into it. Are you ready? Get pencil and ruler again. This time, let's draw our horizon line lower on the page so that we have a little bit more sky space up above it. I'm going to put my ruler here and let's see. Just like that. Still leave a little room below it, but mostly skyspace. We're going to draw a rectangle now that will be similar to the photo that I showed you of the building. We're at what's called the worm's eye point of view looking up. Then the opposite, if you wanted to try that would be the bird's eye view looking down. Here's our horizon line and we still need our two vanishing points on the horizon line, so vanishing Point 1, vanishing Point 2. Only now we have a third one to deal with. We're going to come up here up high, somewhere around the middle, doesn't have to be exact, it could be anywhere, and this is vanishing Point 3. Now similar to the two-point perspective, we are starting from the front corner of the rectangle that is facing toward us. We will still see the two sides that are receding off to these two vanishing points. Let's draw a vertical line coming down from vanishing point number 3. I'm going to draw it lightly because you might not end up using all of it. This is feeling very mathy, isn't it? [LAUGHTER]. Math does come into play quite a bit with drawing. Even if you're not always drawing vanishing points and guidelines like this, honestly, I don't most of the time in my work, but I've done it enough that I have an understanding of it and I can use that knowledge to make what I'm drawing look convincing. Don't feel now that you know this, you have to draw every single thing mapped out to a vanishing point. It's more helping you understand why things are distorted the way that they are and then you can bring that out more when you draw them. Now let's decide where the top and the bottom of our building is first. I'm going to call it a building because we don't necessarily want it to go all the way up to the vanishing point. I'm going to decide that the top of the building is here. Do we want our building to be on the ground or do we want it to be floating? I think we might want it to be on the ground. I'm going to put the bottom of the building here. You go ahead and draw your two points for the top and the bottom. Saw in the paper. Yes. Now let's darken the front corner of the building so it's obvious what that is. That's the front of my building. Now, we're going to draw the tube back corners. In two-point perspective, those would have been vertical lines, somewhere over here and here, but not in three-point perspective [LAUGHTER]. Just when you think you have it figured out, we pull the rug out from under you. In three-point perspective, the vertical lines go to vanishing point number 3. I'm going to draw, and you can decide how far out you want it to go. Totally up to you. That's what determines how big or how far back the building goes. I'm drawing a light line for now because I don't know exactly where the building is going to land on that as far as the top and the bottom. Then I'll do the second one over here like this. Doesn't really look like a building yet, does it? Don't worry, have faith. Now we're going to do the tops and the bottoms of each side. The way that we do that, just like in two-point perspective, is to connect each of these two points to both of the vanishing points on the horizon line. I'm going to start with vanishing point number 1 and connect it to the top of the building like this. Now you see where we're going maybe, maybe not. It's okay if you don't. Just keep drawing anyway, you'll see it eventually. This is a pretty advanced concept by the way. If you are finding it challenging, don't feel bad. This may take a few tries before it makes sense. But now can you see this left side of the building right there? Now we're going to connect the bottom and the top to vanishing point number 2 like this. Gorgeous. There's our building. You see it? Let me emphasize just the edges of the building and then I'm going to erase or soften some of the other lines. There's the back edge on the left. Here's the top on the left, top on the right, and the back right edge. There's our building. See how it looks like it's towering up above us. Three-point perspective really comes into play when you want that dramatic sense of height. I'll erase because you wouldn't see the horizon line inside of the building unless it was transparent. Here we go. Beautiful. Now, in some of the previous examples, I showed you how to draw doors and windows. I want to do that same thing with this because I think that will help to reinforce the idea. Let's imagine there's a door on this side. Let's say I want the door to be about right here. The bottom connect this dot to vanishing point number 3 because all the vertical lines have to go up there. Connect this side to vanishing point number 3 also. See that? Now any idea how we draw the top? Is it just a straight line across? No, it couldn't be that easy. [LAUGHTER] We're going to decide where we want the top to be and then we need to connect it over here to vanishing point number 2. Our door looks like this. Beautiful. Now let's try a window over on this side. You want to try it first without me? If you want to pause it, try it on your own, if not, let's keep going. I'm going to decide where I want to start the window. I'm going to say right here. I'm going to connect that dot to vanishing point number 3 our good friend in the sky up here and then to decide where I want the back of the window to be, the back corner. Let's say over here. Well, actually, let's go ahead and connect this to vanishing point number 1 because that's the bottom of the window and then decide where we want the back. Connect it up to vanishing point number 3. How do we get the top? We connect it to a vanishing point number 1. Here's our window. Do you see it? Here. It's a lot of erasing involved with perspective drawing. You made it through all of the perspective drawing lessons. [APPLAUSE] Next, we get to do something totally different. Keep practicing and tomorrow we're going to be learning about drawing from life. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 21. Drawing From Life: Today marks the beginning of the third segment of this class, which is all about putting it into practice. The first chunk was learning how to see like an artist then we learned some of the basics of drawing, and now it's time to get to work. In today's class, we're going to be working on drawing from life. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper, and let's go. I'd like to ask everybody to pause this video and go find a simple object laying somewhere around your house. It does not matter what it is, but something that's three-dimensional and somewhat simple that you can draw. Here is mine, a little birdy. Go ahead and press pause, go find something, because today is all about drawing from life. Are you back? Are you ready? [LAUGHTER] Now I'll be drawing mine. If you don't feel like going and getting something of your own right now, you could certainly draw the bird along with me too. However, part of what I really wanted to talk about with you today is the difference between drawing something that's three-dimensional right in front of you versus drawing something from a photograph or form a screen. This is really a good opportunity to try your hand at drawing something that's sitting right in front of you. Now I adjusted my lighting a little bit so that there is a little bit more lighting coming from one direction here. You can see how there's more shadow on this side, more light over here that makes your still life drawing more interesting. If you have any ability to manipulate the lighting, you might want to try something like that also. I'm going to start by just lightly sketching out the shapes just like I would with anything else. When you're drawing from a still-life, the way I'm doing it here is not ideal. [LAUGHTER] You wouldn't normally lay it down flat on your paper. You would stand it up probably somewhere in front of you. It's good to set up your objects far enough away from you so that every slight movement that you make doesn't cause the perspective on the object to change. If you're really right up on it, you might turn your head a little bit one way or the other and it'll suddenly look like a totally different thing. You can see I'm starting it the same way that I would any other sketch. Just very loose, laying in the shapes, trying to get the right proportions, the right basic shapes laid out first. Starting with my very non-committal approach. [LAUGHTER] Holding the pencil far back towards the back. In my case, got to get little birdies beak in there. The more directional lighting you can have, the better. I couldn't do too dramatic of a lighting here for you in this example because well, I wouldn't be able to see [LAUGHTER] my drawing and neither would you but what you don't want is frontal lighting where there's no shadows because drawing something three-dimensional, the advantage is that you can really see the volume and the way that you manipulate the lighting can really help with that, it can help to bring that out. Whatever it is that you chose to draw today as you're sketching it, especially once you get to the shading, really look for how the light and the shadow affects it. You can draw a little stand. This is a little different than our other lessons we've done so far. It's a little more individualized, so hopefully everybody is drawing. It's maybe something that is meaningful or interesting to you. I think that that's a really cool, valuable thing to do. Also as an artist, it keeps it interesting for you. It makes you start thinking a little bit too about using your art as a tool for self-expression. It's not just about trying to draw things the right way. It's about drawing, because it's representing something, it's communicating something that's meaningful to you. There is no right way. I've just about got the essence of it on there so now I'm going to clean up my lines a little bit and then start doing some shading. Some of you, I bet are going to get really into this drawing and want to spend longer on it. I hope you do. Take all the time you need. Still life drawing is so valuable. Really being able to study something that's right in front of you. One of the advantages of that is that photography often doesn't fully capture all of the effects of the light and shadow. It can make, especially in the extremes, they can get washed out. Shadows can all go black, highlights can all go white. When you have something in front of you, you can see the subtle nuances is a lot better. What you are likely discovering is that even though you may have thought you picked a simple object, it's probably a little bit more complex than you realized when you really stop and look at it. Just like for me, looking at this bird, I'm noticing all the little carved marks all throughout its body. I could spend a lot of time on this drawing. I might too. I know we've only got 10 minutes right now and we're getting close to the end already jeez, [LAUGHTER] but once you really start looking at things, boy, you realize how interesting the world is. That's what I love so much about drawing in general. It just makes you appreciate things so much more. I'm a very fast paced person. I'm always on the go and when I'm drawing or painting just makes me slow down and really appreciate whatever it is that I am painting or drawing, makes me think about it and see it in ways that I never would have otherwise. Now I'm going to start shading and I'm going to try in my case and bring out some of the different planes. We've talked about those before. Those are just the different sections that I've been seeing of the object. I see darker values so I'm going to go ahead and start laying this in. I'm using a softer lead pencil for everything. You could also use the full range of pencils like we showed in a previous lesson where you start with the harder lids and work your way through to the softer to build up those values more. This is the quicker method though, just press harder when you want it dark. Usually when you're working from life, you do have to take into account timing. I know especially plain air landscape artists, those are the artists who go outside and paint landscapes from nature. They have to use a lot of quick shortcuts in order to be able to effectively capture what they're seeing before the light changes. If you're sitting inside, probably have a little bit more control over that thing. Just get lost working on a drawing like this. Now I want to draw every single little carving mark. If you're getting too caught up in the little details which can happen sometimes, especially when you are working from life because, I think you noticed them more you see them right there in front of you, squint your eyes. Squinting your eyes causes all of the tiny details to go away and it allows you to focus on the bigger picture at first. Then you can always go back if you have more time and bring out all those little details to you. Cute little guy. Even the little platform it's on has different values on each plane. See that? Sometimes it shifts. Over here is quite a bit darker than the top. The sides are quite a bit lighter. How are your drawings coming? Are you having fun? You better be. [LAUGHTER] Don't forget this is supposed to be fun now. Don't get stress. Sometimes when you're used to drawing from photos, drawing from life can feel a little challenging at first, but I would encourage you to keep trying it. It really is a very valuable exercise. There's mine. I'd love to see yours too. Hope you had fun. Drawing from life is wonderful because life is all around you. You can do it anywhere, you can find something to draw no matter where you're at. Even if you only have a minute or a few minutes, you can get out your pencil and sketch and get some practice in. I encourage you to do that as much as you can and I'll see you tomorrow for our next class where we're going to be learning about ink drawing. See you then. Bye bye. 22. Ink Drawing: I'm very excited to be drawing with you all every day. It's so fun knowing that there's people all over taking this class and drawing with us. You're not alone. There's probably other people out there who might be fighting some perfectionistic tendencies too, if you find yourself in that boat, you're not alone they're either owe boat. See, I'm really into this sailor analogy today for some reason. [LAUGHTER] Anyhow, let's get started today because we're going to be doing something a little different. We're going to be doing ink drawing. Normally I say sharpen your pencils, but today, get your ink pen and some paper and let's go. Today we're going to be drawing this beautiful landscape and I'll be using micron pens. You can use any pen that you have handy. Even a ballpoint pen works well. But the goal today is to have to commit to ink so no erasing. [LAUGHTER] I have three different sizes of micron pens here. You can see the numbers are on the side. I have an 8, a 10, and a 12. The tips are just a little bit larger the higher the numbers. The eight has a 0.5 millimeter, 10 is 0.6 and 12 is 0.7. That can be helpful if you want to vary your line weight a little bit, which I'm going to do today since I have three of them. But if you only have one pen, that's okay, just make it work with whatever you have. I'm going to start with the eight and then I'll get a little bit thicker with the lines as I go. To start with, I just want to get the scene sketched out. I'm going to draw the horizon line to begin. Can't go wrong there. [LAUGHTER] Then we're going to place this really cool tree right in the middle. I'm not drawing a border around the image in this case because I think I just want to let it fade along the edges. Instead of a four-corner piece, it's going to be what's called a vignette, just an irregular shape. You can draw a border if you would like, totally up to you. I'm just sketching in some of the big branches on this tree. This tree is definitely the focal point of the image. I want to make sure I get that in there looking good. The nice thing about trees, I think we've talked about this before, you don't have to get it exact. Nobody's going to know. The one thing I would suggest is that you make the branches get thinner as they move away from the center of the tree. They start to taper as they move away. Then also, there's just a lot more of the little small ones too. I start off with a few big branches, then just fill in with a bunch of little ones until, see I'm just even making some that are floating here because I know I'll connect them in eventually. There we go, see. Lots of little lines. I'm paying attention also to the overall shape of the tree. You can even give yourself some little guides, see how I'm drawing just some little dots around here to help me to know about how far out I want to go with the branches. Then you can just disguise those by covering them up with branches as you go. When you're working in ink, you can't do quite as many guidelines and things for yourself unless you were to go in and do it with a pencil and then erase those, which is totally fine too. But in this case, I'm just giving myself a few little indicators with those dots of where I want the branches to go. I think it can be very freeing to work in ink. It can be a little scary, but it can also just be a lot of fun. It helps to let go of our perfectionistic tendencies a little bit, hopefully. [LAUGHTER] Either that or it just drives you crazy. [LAUGHTER] Hopefully not bad. I've got my branches. Now I'm just going to sketch in the distant mountains there and over here. There's a few smaller trees that are way back in the background. I'm just going to sketch those in really quickly here too. I'm just going to fill them in with lines. I'm just using parallel diagonal lines for my shading. You remember we talked about cross-hatching before. That's another good option when you're working with ink. Stippling is also an option, stippling where you do it with dots. But it takes a little too long for our 10-minute video but could be a great technique to play with also. Getting some distant trees in there. There's also just some really faint ones that are all clustered together along the horizon so I'm just going to suggest those. You don't have to draw every detail and I'm just using my diagonal lines to fill them in. Now I have a good sense of the overall landscape. Now I want to go in and indicate some of the clouds in the sky because I think that the clouds are just beautiful in this. I'm going to sketch a few shapes of clouds. I might simplify a bit. See there's a big cloud over here. Another one. What I like is the way that it just breaks up that sky into more interesting shapes. I'm just going to do a few lines where I see the tops of clouds like that. Then I'm going to come in below those lines with some shading. I'm just using diagonal lines and letting them fade towards the bottom. This is a nice way to indicate cheating without getting too detailed. Just gives it a really nice sense of where you see some value. I'm going to do a little bit more here because I see another little road clouds. It's like having variety. Having some bigger cloud shapes, some smaller ones. Come over here and do it. I'm still using my smallest pen for right now. I'm going to switch up to a bigger one here when I moved down to work on the ground. But I want to have thinner lines in the sky so that it feels a little bit farther away. When I am doing a landscape, whether it's a drawing or a painting, I tend to like to work from the back to the front. That just helps me to really think about the depth of the space. It makes me feel like I can reach into the paper and imagine how far back that scene goes. Almost done with my clouds here. You can see it's a very abstracted version of what's in the photo, but that's okay. Now if you want to, like I said, you could do cross-hatching on these also. I might do that in a few spots. Cross-hatching is just where you go back over top of a section and you do another row of lines that go the opposite way. If I maybe want the clouds to appear a little bit darker towards the top, then I'll just come up here and do some shorter lines that go to the right. I'll do that in a few spots. I think it adds a little bit more interest and complexity. There we go. Gorgeous. Now I'm going to go all the way up to my size 12,10 it has a, as you can see a thicker tip and that's going to let me color in my tree trunk here pretty quickly. I don't think anybody needs any help learning how to color. [LAUGHTER] But it's a good thing for us all to do sometimes, it's very stress relieving. If you get out of the lines, it's okay, I won't tell on you. Remember, it's art. You can do anything you want. There are no rules. [LAUGHTER] I might even go back and fill in some of these because they are pretty dark too. I'm going to go to my size 10 pen now, which is the medium-sized one. I want to start with the mountains. I'm going to do darker shading at the top and then let it fade as it goes down. You can see the difference in the line thickness between what I'm doing here and what I had up in the sky. The reason why I'm doing this is because as you can see in the photo, the value of the mountains fades as it goes down because it looks like mist or fog or something, you don't want that dark value to go all the way down. Just going back and reinforcing my line. I might do a little bit of cross-hatching here too. Take it on over a little bit back here. Now some grass. When you work with pen, it's always good to think about the texture. When you're doing grass, you want to make your marks go up and down or not perfectly, but you just want it to feel grassy. Think about the depth of the scene also. As you are moving more into the foreground, as you're drawing those blades of grass that are up here, you want to go a little bit, maybe bigger with your marks. When you go back into the background, you want to go smaller. That'll make it feel like they're moving farther back in space, create more of a sense of depth in your piece. I'll do some that are smaller back here. The ground also is a little bit lighter in the back, so I'm going to be a little more sparing with my marks back there. Use more up in the front so I get that sense of the value structure also. To keep going on this for a long time, but this is a really good start. I encourage you if you're enjoying it to just keep going and see where this drawing takes you. You could really get lost and all that beautiful detail. Don't be afraid to use your pens. You don't always need that security blanket of the eraser. I hope you enjoyed that lesson. Keep practicing. Take your ink pens with you. Draw everything you see whenever you get a chance. I'll be back tomorrow for our next lesson. Charcoal drawing. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 23. Charcoal Drawing: Today we're going to be learning about charcoal drawing so get your charcoal pencils and some paper and let's go. Here's our inspiration today. Hopefully, that'll give us a little caffeine jump start, especially those of you who are early birds and doing this class first thing in the morning. Today we're working with charcoal, if you have charcoal pencils or charcoal sticks, any charcoal will work. If you don't, you can also always just use your pencils too. But I wanted to show you a few different drawing techniques, and charcoal is a very popular one. It's great for getting really dark values, really smooth shading. I have three different charcoal pencils here. They work the same way as the graphite pencils so that you can see the numbers on the end here 2B, 4B, 6B. The Bs are the softer ones. The higher the number, the softer the pencil. I'll probably sketch it with the 2B and then jump right up to the 6B for the shading. Let's get started. I wanted to pick something simple for the drawing so that we can really have fun with shading this today. Let's start off by drawing that ellipse on top. You can already see the difference between how the charcoal looks compared to the pencil. It just has a little bit of a grittier rougher look it brings out the texture of the paper more. You can really get some beautiful effects with it. I'm still drawing very loose. I'm keeping a lighter grip on the pencil, holding it farther back so I don't get too caught up in details. Got to open up that ellipse a little more. There we go. Just like with pencil, you can still erase charcoal too. Let me get my eraser here so you can see. Just lift it right up. The kneaded eraser works great with charcoal. Now I'm going to draw the bottom of my cup. Probably like that. This makes me want some coffee. I don't know about you. Feel free to pause me if you need to go and refill your cup. It takes a lot of caffeine to keep up with my energy level. I can tell you that everybody in my life would verify that one. I'm sketching out the shape of the shadow. Remember, you just look at everything as a shape. Don't have to really think too much about it. A little loop over here for the handle. It comes around this way. Then it comes up and over like that and down. Now I'm going to draw inside the cup parallel to the back, showing where the coffee is. There's a little bit of an edge there so I'm going to sketch that in. It's funny how even the simplest subject matter, once you start looking at it closely, you see so much happening. I'm going to sketch in. There's a shadow over here. I actually think it's a shadow but it also appears to be the reflection of this shadow. It's interesting. Shadow on top of shadow. That shadow needs to scooch-down a smidge. Almost shading time. Let me just sketch in the back of the tabletop. Don't know why it took me five lines to get there, but [LAUGHTER] that's where we're at. Now, I'm going to start by filling in some of the darkest areas that I see. When I look at it, there's actually a shadow inside on the coffee. If you look closely at the coffee itself, it's not all the same value. There's a shadow over here from the edge of the mug. It's making this section super-duper dark. Super-duper dark is a very technical term. [LAUGHTER] Now I'm going to start shading and look at how dark you can go with that charcoal. It's awesome. I'm still using the 2B actually. Hold on. Wait a minute, 6B. You don't have to work as hard to get dark with that. I like anything that lets you not have to work as hard. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] Charcoal will getting a bit messy. But that's okay, being messy is part of the fun. If you are working in an area where you want to keep things neat, before you go too far with this, you might want to pause the video and put down some scrap paper or a cheap tablecloth or something because you get all these little shavings of the charcoal and the only way to really get rid of it as just a blow them off [NOISE] like that. Now, if you want to smooth it out, you can just use a paper towel. I'm going to wrap it around my finger like this. You can just go over top of it and you get a nice even smooth feel that way. Then it just goes on here which you could take that value and scooch it over somewhere else where you want maybe like a lighter tone. I'll just go ahead and throw that here on the front because I know I don't want that to be too dark there. Now I'm going to fill in the rest of the coffee and I'm going to not make it as dark as the other side. I'm going to go about like this value at first because when you start to fill it in, with the paper towel, it tends to go just a little bit darker. It's always better to go lighter than you think you might need at first and then you can backtrack. Let's see how that looks. Wrap the paper towel around my finger, smooth it out. That looks nice. Charcoal's super fun. Now, there's a dark shadow on this side that meets right where this dark shadow on the coffee ends so basically everything on the inside of the back of the mug, it's going to go pretty dark. It actually looks like it's a smidge darker than the coffee. It's a good idea when you're looking at values and when you're doing your shading to always try to think about how the values relate to other values. It's easy to just think, this area is dark, this area is light. But is it darker or lighter than what's around it? Because there can be so many different variations within each of those sections of the value scale. Let's see how that looks, smooth it out. Nice. I may even just go a smidge darker now. After you've blended with the paper towel, you can always go back on top, push the value farther, or if you need to lighten it, you can lift with your eraser. We're getting there. Now I'm going to go super light on the handle. Then I see a little bit of value coming up here and here and blend. They do make this tool called a blending stump, which is just paper that's wrapped up really tight and you can blend with that in the same way that I'm using the paper towel. It is nice for getting into tight spaces. I didn't want to put it on the list and make you all have to buy a ton of stuff for this class. That's why I'm using the paper towel method here, but they are very inexpensive. If you want to add another tool to your collection, you might want to try those out. There's a dark line on the mug that comes down around here. Right around this side and fades over this way. Then I'm going to fill in this whole reflected shadow. It's a little bit darker on the right. Blend that in. There we go. Smooth out a bit. Last but not least, a super dark shadow. That is pretty dark all throughout except it does get a little bit lighter right here. This just looks like a little bit of white from the light source. It's coming from the left. Did you think about that by the way? Did you think about where is the light coming from? A plus, I know you did. It's always a good question to ask yourself when you're doing any a realistic image, where is the light coming from? But what I was starting to say, there's light that's coming from the left and it's just wrapping around and hitting a little bit inside that shadow, which is why the shadow gets a little bit lighter there. [NOISE] Then I'm just going to let it fade, instead of having a hard edge to my drawing. It's going to let that shadow fade to the right. Got to find a clean spot on my paper towel here, blend that in. Here we go. There's our mug. Let me clean up the edge here. Actually I want to lighten that shadow a little bit on the front. You can go right in and lift with the eraser if you need to. There we go. I like that. Now, if we had more time, I might also go in and fill in that back area dark, but I'm trying to do my best to keep this to close to 10 minutes so I won't take up your whole day, but feel free to keep going. You can put some more value in the background. You can even find more subtle shading going on inside the mug. Let yourself get carried away if you want to and most importantly, have fun. I love drawing with charcoal. You can get such great value range with it, especially in these deep dark areas. I hope you enjoyed it too, and be sure to come back tomorrow for our next video lesson, technical drawing versus expressive drawing. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 24. Technical vs. Expressive Drawing: You have already done three weeks of drawing, congratulations. I bet you're seeing some rapid improvement in your work. Maybe you don't see it. Sometimes it's hard for artists to appreciate their own improvements, wait until they get a little space from their work. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I bet you're improving even if you can't tell it yet. Today we're going to be learning about technical drawing versus expressive drawing. I love this because it shows that there are so many different ways to approach drawing. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. Here's our reference for today. Before you start, I'd like for you to draw a vertical line down the middle of your paper because we are going to be doing basically two different styles of drawing here. Just divide your paper in half. Let me go a little farther just in case. [LAUGHTER] We'll be doing a technical drawing on the left and a more expressive drawing on the right. Instead of drawing the whole thing twice, I figured we could just do half of the image one way and half the other. Technical drawing is basically what we have been doing all along, where you are pretty much accurately trying to represent what you see, so that you should be used to by now. I'm just very lightly sketching in the shapes. I'm excited for this lesson actually because it really lets me get into one of the things that I believe is so important and so wonderful about art, and that is finding your own voice. Every artist when they're first starting out, is really focusing on learning the techniques. I guess you could say the rules. Even though I've said here many times, art doesn't have rules, but you're learning some skills. You're building your technical skills. How do you represent what you see? But then after a while, you get to decide if you want to break the rules, or if you want to try something different, or how will your artwork be an expression of you? That's obviously a very personal thing, so I can't necessarily answer that for you. But I can just show you some ideas about how you can start that exploration when you want to. Now that's not to say that realistic drawing isn't a perfectly valid place to leave it. If you are a very realistic artist, you might prefer sticking with a more technical approach to drawing, but even still you'll have your own personal touch, your own style to them. I'm going to do a little bit of shading on this side just so it starts to feel realistic, and then we'll move on over to the expressive side. I'm just squinting my eyes and looking for where I see the areas of the darkest shadows. I'm laying those in, a lot of subtle shading. Usually in a very technical, realistic drawing, you don't want to have a lot of dependence on line. That is if you're going for realism. Wherever you have a line defining an edge, you might just see if you could turn that into a value. Look to see, is it lighter on the inside of that line or in the background? In this case, the value is just a little bit darker on the pedal. Not much though, it's very subtle, but you can see that the background is pretty light. The pedal has just a tiny tinge of pink in it, except for in the shadows where it gets darker. This one is a little bit deeper in the back, so it has some darker shading on it. Working with value is really one of my favorite things about drawing. You just make things start to come to life so quickly just by throwing a little bit of shading in there. It's pretty magical. This one here is pretty dark too. I can't believe we're already on the 23rd video. [LAUGHTER] I hope everybody has been enjoying these as much as I have. It's really been good for me to practice all of this stuff too. That's another important thing about drawing. You have to keep practicing all of these skills. Even if you are more experienced artists, hopefully, you've still gotten a lot of value out of returning back to some of these fundamental ideas. A little bit of light shading on this one. I just do a few little folds just to try to give a sense of the way that each pedal is moving. There's a little dark when back here that I missed. Darkness here, but then overall, this petal is not too dark. Last little piece of one here, pretty ones. This up here has some interesting shaping. It gets a little bit wider towards the outside. Also, it's a little bit more irregular than I had it drawn, and then as it goes down, so I'm just going to sort of pull that value down first. Then I'll start from here with my darker value and work my way up with that. You get a little bit of a transition from the dark to the light. Then the stem is pretty dark. It's a little bit lighter towards the bottom, like that. That is a pretty realistic technical drawing on this side. Now I'm going to switch over and continue the drawing on the right side, but in a more expressive way. I want you to think about what that could mean for you too. Are you somebody that likes really straight lines because you could draw it in a very geometric way? Do you like curved lines? Do you want to emphasize the thick and thinness of the line? You could do continuous line drawing, you could do blind contour, so many different ways you can approach it. I'm just going to start by very organically sketching over here, not worrying too much about being particular and using multiple lines. I'm just really getting into the movement, the shape. You can already see such a difference between the two sides of my drawing. I just sometimes like letting my pencil do what it wants basically. [LAUGHTER] That's fine. Sometimes you just have to start, see what happens. I'm definitely using more line on this side and more value on the other. That doesn't mean that expressive drawing has to all be about wine. It could definitely be about value too. In fact, I probably will if there's some value in there also. [NOISE] What I'm going do is start by putting my pencil on its side. I'm going to do some more expressive shading on this side. I'm just going to do along the edge, pull some shading down, not really fill in the whole petal. Even the shading, I'm going to allow it to be a little bit more wine oriented on this side. Well, there's some expressive marks I didn't want. [LAUGHTER] Apparently, it smudges on my fingers. Anyway, as I was saying, when you do expressive drawing or painting, it's more about capturing the feeling of the subject than it is about capturing the photo-realistic, all the details, and shapes, and stuff. I'm just thinking about how soft and organic those petals are and I'm trying to make some marks that would represent that, and really letting the pencil vary its thickness. You can see I put it on its side, then turn it around so it goes from really thick to really thin. It gets some really cool expressive marks that way. It's a lot more fluid, I guess. I can do more cleanup. I hope that you had fun with that. Try out lots of different ways to be expressive with your drawing. A sketch book is a great place to experiment with that. There's no right or wrong. Most important thing is that you have fun. Great job, everyone. Be sure to come back for our next video lesson, which is going to be drawing a landscape. [NOISE] I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 25. Draw a Landscape: I am having a blast drawing with you. I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am. [LAUGHTER] Today we are going to be drawing a landscape, so sharpen your pencil, get some paper, and let's go. Today we're going to be drawing this mountain landscape with some beautiful reflections in the water. We have all kinds of stuff going on. [LAUGHTER] Let's dive in and get started. I went ahead and drew a rectangle on my paper because I want to be able to draw it quite a bit smaller so that I'll actually be able to get this finished in 10 minutes. If you want to draw yourself a smaller border, you can. Then I'm going to start with the horizon line, which looks like it is a little bit below the halfway point. I find the halfway point, scooch down a little bit and sketch it in. Usually, it's a good idea to place the horizon line a little bit above or below the midpoint. Usually, we don't want to have things right at that midpoint. But as I often say, rules are made to be broken so if you want to have a very balanced, symmetrical piece, you go for it. Right now I'm just going to lightly sketch in the mountains. You don't have to get the shapes exactly right, just make them look mountainy. They definitely taper down. It gets smaller and smaller because the ones toward the middle are much farther away. You can see that they're a bit lighter, they're a bit more faint. They feel like they're really receding back into that background. The one on the left doesn't go up quite as far as the one on the right, I notice, so it's about right there. There's another layer that comes in front that's darker, ends in trees. I'm going to draw that, goes to about there. Same thing on this side. Starts about here. Sweeps up the side. Those cliffs come over like that. Now when you're drawing a landscape that has reflections, what you have to think about is the fact that those reflections are basically just the reversal of what's happening up above. You're going to draw all those same shapes but in reverse like that. Now I'm going to look for a few spots in the sky to pull out a couple of cloud shades, and then it will be time to start shading this. Not bad. You might even be able to finish this after all. What do you know? [LAUGHTER] I'm going to start by putting just a little bit of value, very faint in the sky. Now, I'm using one pencil for everything. Of course, I might switch when this one gets dull. But I'm not using the full range of pencils like I demonstrated in a previous video where you can go from the harder leads to the softer. You could definitely use that technique though if you enjoyed that. If you want to start with the H's and work your way up to the B's, you go for it. That just tends to take a little bit longer so I'm just using the approach where I use one pencil and vary how much pressure I'm putting on it to create the different values. For this first part, I'm pressing very light so that I can get all of those light values that I see in the sky. I like to start from the background and work my way towards the front. It makes me feel like I'm just walking up through the space, really makes me aware of the depth of that scene. As I'm doing the clouds, I'm trying not to have any edges feel super sharp. I'm going to have just a little bit more of a softness to the sky. I might go back and add a little bit more shadow and a few spots. You do see some variation in there. Now I'm going to do the back range of mountains. Overall, they're kind of medium dark, I would say. I'm just going to go in and begin by laying that value over the whole thing. As long as you're not going too dark, you can erase away highlights and things. I like to work that way. You could also go in and draw where you want the little snow cap peaks to be and wherever you see any little highlights and you can shade around those and basically just leave the white of the paper. But if you're more of a dive-in person like myself, [LAUGHTER] just shade in the whole thing. As long as you're not going too dark, you can erase those back out. I like to do that way. Now I'm taking my eraser and I'm using a different eraser, not my kneaded eraser this time, but this is just like a white block eraser. I'm just going to go in and erase some of the little snow patches here, here, and put them wherever you want to. Now I'm just going to go aside them. If you look closely at the picture, you see there are some variations in the value back there. Everything isn't the same so you can go in and just pull out where you want some darker shadows. I'm still not going super dark because you want to keep in mind that these mountains are supposed to appear farther into the distance. When you're working on a landscape, the way that you make something feel distant is by having it take on the characteristics of the sky. In this case, the sky is very light so the mountains as they recede in space, are going to get lighter. A little ledge of a mountain here that's overlapping the others so I'm going to make that a bit darker. Same as everything we've drawn in here, the closer you look, the more you see. That's the fun and the beauty of drawing. See all kinds of interesting shapes in these rocks. Boy, you could spend a lot of time on that and I encourage you to definitely take as long as you want with this. Now I'm going to get down here into, let's see, I'm using a 4D. Let me just jump up to an 8B because this whole area is pretty dark. Just pay attention to the shaping that you see because as it moves to the right, it ends in these tree lines so you can create just the illusion of that by making the top more irregular vertical lines breaking it up into vertical lines at the end, like that. There we go. Same over here. Let's plant some more trees. [LAUGHTER] This would be the kind of sketch that you could actually do on-site. Everybody could take 10 minutes if you were visiting somewhere beautiful and pull out a little sketchbook and make a drawing of it. I would encourage you next time you go on a trip somewhere, even if you're just going on a hike around where you live, take a sketchbook and challenge yourself to do a 10-minute drawing while you're out. You'd be amazed at how much more you will see and appreciate the environment around you when you take the time to stop and draw it even if it's just 10 minutes. You're probably noticing a lot more about this photo as you're drawing today. It just happens when you're drawing, you have to zero in on some of that stuff. Now I'm going to come down here and I'm going to go darker along the top in my reflection because, first, it's reflecting that chunk of trees. I'm leaving a little sliver of light though along the edge so you get that separation. Then there are some vertical lines here too to simulate the trees, but then as it moves to the left, it just blends in. I'm going to put my pencil on its side for that. You'll notice as you get down towards the bottom of the reflection, it really breaks up into a lot of ripples, so instead of having a clearly defined edge like you see up at the top as you shade in the reflected mountains, you're going to make that edge a little more irregular and just break it up into little lines like I'm doing here. You'll see that it still echoes the shaping that's up above, but it will feel so much more like water. Just like that. Same over here. It's darker along the edge. Lighter as it comes down and then breaking it up into little ripples. Then the center part of the water, it's definitely lighter than the reflections, but it looks to me like it gets a bit darker toward the front. Looks like it's reflecting some of those clouds. I'm doing all of that in very horizontal strokes so that it's still just curious through that feeling of the ripples. Then as I move back toward the horizon, getting a little bit lighter and then my little separating line here. I'm going to shade it in a little bit more on the sides I see because still it is lighter there, but it's still in the shadow of the mountain. You want to have some separation, but you really see the strength of that highlight is more towards the middle so just letting it fade in like that. There is our landscape drawing. You did it again. Great job. Be sure to come back tomorrow for our next class. Tomorrow we're going to be practicing drawing figures, so get ready. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 26. Draw Figures: Today, we're going to be doing one of my very favorite things, drawing figures. Don't worry, anyone can do it, I'm going to show you some tricks. We'll get through this together, and you're going to have fun, I promise. So sharpen your pencil, get some paper, let's go. Here's our model for today, and unlike when we did the gesture drawing lesson, we're going to spend the whole 10 minutes drawing this one. Go ahead and settle in. Let's go. We still want to approach it like we are doing a gesture drawing. I think if I can impart one big suggestion to you as you go forward to do figure drawing, you always want to begin with that same feeling of urgency that you have when you only have maybe two minutes to make a drawing. Because otherwise, it's very easy and very tempting to just start to go very slow and get caught up in details too quickly. Now I'm just getting the basic shapes down. I'm looking at the angles. She has some great angles in her body, starting with the way that her shoulders are leaning, with that shoulder being up, the other one being down. Then her whole torso is angling a little bit this direction. Pelvis is tilting this way. You see that? Then we have one leg coming forward like this and back. The weight is on the other leg. That's a good thing to think about when you're doing figure drawing too. Which leg is holding the most weight or is it perfectly balanced, evenly distributed? In this case, this is the leg that has the weight on it, the maturity of the weight. It's a little bit straighter. Just have a little bit more tension there. I'm just very roughly sketching in all of the parts and then we'll go back and get all detailed. I love figure drawing because my favorite class in college and still one of my favorite things to do to this day. Start loose and light but keep it simple. Then once you get confident that your proportions are looking good, everything's where it's supposed to be, then you can start to do all of the details that you want to. It's very different experience when you have a longer amount of time to do a drawing versus when you have a gesture. This might be all the farther we would have gotten if it was just a gesture drawing. But now we can go in and really bring out details. This would be also a good time where you could stop and measure their proportions. You could check measured in the photo the size of her head, and then count down and see if everything is lining up where it's supposed to. I'm just going to go in and start refining my drawing now. Then I'll do some shading. So much timeless still, this is awesome. Did you do a quick gesture drawing like I did? Where are you getting all caught up in details too soon? I need to lower this hand a bit. I'm looking at this negative space and there's just too much up there. There we go. That feels better. You can also draw some of the shadow shapes. That was an earlier lesson that we did, but that comes back to help us now to the shadows are a great way to construct anything that you're drawing. It just gets you thinking a little bit more about the interior shapes, the contours of the body, and just thinking about it in more three-dimensional way, which is always a good thing. This arm in. Usually, when I start, you saw that my lines, my sketchy lines were more geometric straighter lines. Then when I go back to refine it, that's when I use curvier lines and actually try to get more of the true, organic shaping of the body. But it helps me to start from a more geometric place. Just makes me think more about the structure of the body, which is important. I'm not going to get too detailed with her face, but instead I'm actually focusing on the shadow shapes that I see in building her face out of the shadows to this really nice lighting in this photograph. You can see the whole right side of her face is in shadow. That helps me to get a sense of structure. I'm on the face and have it feel like a face without getting too detailed. Because this drawing, it's more about the overall pose. It's not about like a portrait trying to get the exact likeness. We will do that soon though in our future class, so get ready. [LAUGHTER] Now, get this arm in. Sense of this hand. Just draw the shapes. Don't get caught up thinking, Oh my gosh, it's a hand. I don't know how to draw hands. Don't even think about it. It's not a hand. [LAUGHTER] It's just some shapes. It's easier to do in some ways with this one because your hand is in a pretty unusual position. Wouldn't be like might go to hand if I was [LAUGHTER] drawing a hand out of my imagination. Really don't even think about it. Love to have time to draw the beautiful patterns on her skirt. I don't think there's going to be time for that for me. But you certainly could. See I always like making you work harder than me. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to do some of the shadows though in the folds in the fabric because that's actually a really great way to indicate some of the different plane shifts of the body, just by the way the fabric is folding. Really pay attention to that if you're looking to create a feeling of volume in your figure drawing. If you're drawing a clothed model, look at the folds increases in the clothing, that can be a great starting point. Feet are disappearing down into the sand so I'm going to draw a little bit of sand here just to explain that so it doesn't seem like I got lazy. Got to move her leg over right now. Notice the negative space there between the two legs at the bottom was a lot skinnier [NOISE] than what I had. That means there's more of an angle here. There we go. Drawing is always a constant act of just editing and revising what you've already done. It's cheating on me. I should have asked this at the beginning, but better late than never. Which side is the light coming from? Over here. You need that. This whole bottom leg is pretty much all in shadow, with the exception of just the little sliver along the left. This whole side of her top is in shadow. Shadow on the neck area. I'm just going back and looking for where I can hit a few more spots but some shadows that will make an impact here. If you want to take more time, keep going because you can certainly add more detail to this drawing. But even now, you can see there's a really good sense of the different planes of the body, a lot of movement, a lot of angles, and some shadows that start to give us a sense of the contour. If you have 10 minutes, this is a really good strategy for figure drawing. See, I told you, you can do it. Now keep practicing. There are figures all around you every day. You can pause the TV and probably find some great models. You can look things up online. You can draw yourself in the mirror and be sure to come back tomorrow for our next video lesson, I'll be waiting for you. Tomorrow, we are going to draw a still life. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 27. Draw a Still Life: Congratulations for sticking in there this long. All of this practice is going to improve your drawing so much and I hope this is just the beginning. Hopefully even after the series is finished, you will continue pulling out that sketchbook and your pencil and keep going because now it's starting to become a habit. I draw every day, I encourage you to do that too. Today we're going to be drawing a still life. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper, let's go. Here's our still life for today and I went ahead and drew a rectangle on the paper to represent the frame of my drawing. If you're working on a larger paper and you want to scale down a bit, you could do the same thing. Then I'm going to start by placing the table, like when you do a landscape, I like to start with the horizon lines, it helps me to anchor everything else. I see that on the right, the table begins a little bit below the halfway point. It angles up about right here. Then there's a corner and it angles down like that. It's settled back there, but you can see it if you look closely. There's my table. Now I want to draw the picture. If I look at the center of the picture, I like to draw the line of symmetry when I'm drawing something that is even somewhat symmetrical like that picture is, of course, it's not symmetrical on the top, but the bottom part of it is. It sits about right here. I'm going to draw this side first. Then I can measure with my pencil and make sure that this side is the same distance from the center line. Comes up to about here, connects at the bottom. Then we get the top, where on the left goes up and over like that. On the right you get that handle that sweeps up. You can actually draw the shape of the negative space. See how I'm just pulling back all those things that [LAUGHTER] we talked about before. I love to do that. [LAUGHTER] There's a very loose, sketchy drawing of the picture. I'm going to go ahead and draw the little segments that I see here breaking it up the planes of the picture because it's not perfectly round, it's segmented off. You can see that through the shadows. Then on this side we have one pair leaning this way and another pair that's toppled over like that. Bottom of the picture. Then there's some fabric that comes down. We actually have the front of the table which is going to be parallel to the back so it should be like this and you've got that fabric that comes down and over the edge. It comes up and wraps around this little vase over here. I'm going to draw the line of symmetry for that as well so I can match up the two sides. Let's share from the center, comes over. Make sure both sides are the same. The top of the vase looks like it aligns right around where this handle meets the picture so about right here. There we go. Comes in at the bottom, gets wrapped up in that fabric. Scoops over this way. Just that, there we go, and connects here at the bottom. There are the basic shapes in our still-life. Just cleaning up a few things. Now I'm ready to start shading it in. One thing that you can do when you're shading something that has a lot of darkness in it, especially if you have limited time is just shade along the edges, especially I'm talking about the background. Get rid of my line of symmetry here and then I'll show you what I mean. I like to see how the values of the background effect the object, but you might not have time to shade in the whole background. You can just go right along the edge and just shade in enough so that you get that interaction between the positive space and the negative. Then you can just let that value fade. If you end up having time, you can go back and shade in the whole background dark. But if you don't have time, that's okay. At least it's there and it's doing its job in relation to the objects. Now, any of the techniques that we used during these videos, you're welcome to incorporate into these drawings. In fact, if you really enjoyed working with charcoal, try doing this with that, or if you really liked the pen and ink, try doing one of these drawings with that. I'm using pencil because I want to just demonstrate the most basic foundational approach, but I encourage you to definitely explore. A lot of these would be really worthwhile to even draw more than once. You could keep coming back and try do an expressive drawing of one of these or do a more stylized drawing, or contour line drawing. Every time that you do it in, and especially when you do it in a different way, you're training your eyes to look at the subject in a different way. That's always a good thing. Almost done with our negative space. Let me grab a different pencil here, not because I needed it, it's just because that one was getting dull. Same number 6B is what I'm using. Now, this darkness just comes right on in and turns into the first fold of the fabric so I'm just going to let that happen. There's also a dark area down here. There is two shadows of the little vase, so get that in. You see, I'm working my way up to the objects. That's one approach. Now, you might want to jump right in, and start shading in the pears or the picture. That's totally valid too. For me, it helps to just have a sense of the environment around what I am doing, so I usually do a little bit of this stuff first, and then I'll work my way in. I see the darker values are on the left, which means the light is coming from the right. We already knew that too because of the cast shadows heading off to the left. There's nothing on that little vase that's pure white except for one little highlight right here. Then on the bottom part, there's a shadow that's shaped like that. A little shading here. On our picture, we have darkest value on the left. There's a little bit of that reflected light coming around so you see that little sliver of light on the edge, so I'm going to leave that. Then on the next section, you just want to follow it with your eyes, see how the values shift. I see a little bit of darker value at the bottom, then it gets a little bit lighter in the middle, then gets a little darker up here. Those shifts and value are helping us to understand the way that that picture is curving. This one, a little bit darker on the right. Gets a little bit lighter on the left. Then at bottom here. We have shadow of the pears. Did you see that? We also have some more shading going on on the fabric here too. I'm going to get that in now. We've got this section like this. Then we have big shadow of the pears that fall over this way. Got to the bottom in. There we go. Almost forgot you. [LAUGHTER] There's also a really cool shadow of the handle that's falling along that picture there. Get that in. We've got a shadow down inside the picture. That will help open that section up. A little bit of a shadow back here. Now, our pears are darker on the left, lighter on the right. Little dark stem and little highlight right here. Shadow on the table. Looks more fun. Smudges from my fingers so I'm going to erase myself here for a minute. [LAUGHTER] Let's see. More shading on the pears. Dark little stem and dark shadow underneath. A little bit of light shading on the table so it doesn't feel like it's just white. Feel free to keep going if you wanted. You could fill in the background, you can add more detail, but this is a really good sketch of our still-life. Still-life drawing is one of the most fundamental tools for artists. Every student in art school has probably done hundreds of these. [LAUGHTER] Grab some objects around your house, set up some more still-life drawings , and keep practicing. Be sure to come back tomorrow also for the next lesson in our series where we're going to be drawing a self-portrait because you're gorgeous and you deserve to be captured on paper. [LAUGHTER] I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 28. Draw a Self Portrait: I love hanging out with you every day, I'm going to miss this. [LAUGHTER] I hope you're having a blast too. I want to dive right into today's project because we're going to be drawing a self portrait, so get ready. You might need a few minutes to primp, make yourself ready, sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. To start with, we need a photo of you, so you can take a selfie or you could pull up a photo of yourself that you really like, or you could grab a mirror and work from life, whatever you feel like, pause this video, go get that, and then we'll get started, here's my goofy selfie. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to jump right in and get started now, so just like anything else that we draw, I'm going to start by focusing on the basic shapes. I'm not really thinking of it as a self portrait or a face because that's where we start to get all hung up and worried about, I don't know how to draw faces, faces are so hard. Don't think like that. If you can draw all the other stuff that we have drawn together, you can draw a face, just don't label it as that, it's just a collection of shapes that's all. I started with an oval shape and the head is leaning a little bit this way, so I've leaned the oval that same direction. Then I like to draw a line down the center of the face or where the line of symmetry is what I would call, where that falls on the face. In this case, it's not right in the middle, there's more room on this side, because I am turned a little bit this direction. Whichever way you're turning, if you're looking straight at the camera or straight at the mirror, your line might be right in the middle, so just pay attention to that. That can really help you make the face feel like it's looking in the right direction. Then I'll go in and draw guide lines for the eyes, and it's just a horizontal line, but it's slanted because the face is tilting and usually that line is about halfway between the forehead and the chin. Then I'm going to do another guide line for the nose, which tends to be about halfway between here and here, I have a long nose, so it might even be a little on the lower side of that, but we'll see. Then the mouth is usually a smudge closer to the nose than it is to the chin, but in the middle of there, between here and here somewhere. Just look at your reference and try to estimate that the best you can, you can always adjust it as you go. Then I like to go in and draw, I guess the best way I can describe it as thinking about the structure of the face, so right now, I'm not drawing eyes obviously because it would be a humongous eye [LAUGHTER] I am drawing what I imagined the eye socket would look like. Imagine if you were sculpting this face, where would you start? You wouldn't just make an oval and then start putting eyes on it, you'd have to give it a little bit more structure than that. Think about the structure of the face as you go and you can feel your face. [LAUGHTER] If there are people in the room with you, they might think you're a little strange, but that's all right. Artists are supposed to be a little strange. [LAUGHTER] That's what I say any way to make myself feel better. [LAUGHTER] Go in and I like to just sketch everything out in a very geometric way, that's my approach to drawing most things, but especially faces, it's almost like I call it the soccer ball technique. If you imagine a soccer ball which is a sphere, but it's made up of geometric shapes, I think pentagons or hexagon or something. It's been a while since geometry class, sorry to my high school geometry teacher. It's also been a while since I've played soccer, so I've double excuses. But anyway, back to what I was saying. If you imagine that soccer ball, how all of the shapes come together to form the sphere, that's what we're doing here as we build this face, I'm drawing very geometric shapes that help me construct the face. Then I'll go back and smooth them out and round them out and make it feel more like an organic face. But at first, my portraits tend to be very almost robotic looking because I'm just really thinking about the planes of the face and how it all fits together. I would encourage you if you've never drawn that way, to give it a try, it really helps me and I think it's another tool also to assist with not getting so caught up in what it is that you're drawing. It helps you to break it down in a very different way, that's the best way I can describe it. See how I'm just drawing very straight lines everywhere I see a plane shift. Get my big mouth in there, [LAUGHTER] now some of you might be drawing me instead of drawing yourself, that's okay too. Although I would encourage you to do a self portrait sometime, it's very good practice. Whenever you need a model, you can always count on yourself, and if you are taking a reference photo for a portrait, especially something that you were intending to work on longer than 10 minutes. If you were maybe doing a more detailed drawing or painting or something like that, then I would also encourage you to be really thoughtful about how you light it also because lighting can help to bring out those planes, my photo here, my selfie is not lit the best, it's just a frontal lighting situations, so you don't really see as dramatic shadows as you could if there was more of directional light source coming from one side. That is something that I do look for when I'm choosing reference photos for longer pieces. Really, I doubt I will get to do much shading on this drawing today because we only have 10 minutes. But if I had longer and if I was planning to go into more detail, I would have chosen a photo with better lighting, so just something to think about as you're working on portraits. Could do a whole 30-day class just on portraits I think, maybe we will sometime. I get my little spiky here in there, which gets a little bit higher and higher on my forehead every year. [LAUGHTER] Pretty soon it's going to be off forehead. [LAUGHTER] Now that I've got the basic structure of the face, you see I've spent the majority of the time just doing that. Now I'll go in and draw some of the little details, and the first thing I'm going to do is draw my eyes and I'm going to position them so they are sitting right on that guide line that I created for myself. Each corner should hit the guideline, draw the little eyelid, and then the eyebrow sits right at the top of the eye socket. This is where doing that step of thinking about the structure can really help, it helps you to, again, just feel more confident that you know when you do go into more detail that you're in the right spot. If you do portraits for a while, you will start to realize what your natural tendencies are, we all tend to do certain things in our drawings that we have to watch for, I tend to draw eyes too big, and so I'm just very thoughtful when I'm drawing the eyes, I'm trying to make sure that I don't do that. Another thing to think about, since we're talking about eyes right now, is that the eye in my photo, the eye on the left is a little bit smaller than the one on the right. Any idea why? Well, that is a little thing called perspective, which you might remember from a few videos back, I have to adjust the side of my face here. Perspective is not just horizon lines and drawing with a ruler and making boxes it also really affects everything that you draw. In this case, this eye is a little bit farther away from us because the head is turned so that eye becomes a little bit smaller and the shape of it is also affected. You see on the left side it gets a little bit more, I guess, squared off at the end, so really think about perspective when you're making your drawing. It doesn't mean I'm drawing vanishing points and drawing guide lines back to it, but it is that idea. If you were to connect the eyebrows and the bottoms of the eyes, they would go back to a vanishing point all the way over here somewhere, so think about where are we, where is the viewer in relation to the subject and how does that affect the way that we're actually perceiving the subject, it's pretty awesome when you really think about it. Now I've got most of the basic shapes on there and I'm going to take the time that we have left just to refine some things and commit to stronger lines, now that I'm happy with where everything is located in my drawing, I'd like to start with the eyes because I know if I run out of time on some other stuff, if I have the eyes looking good in a portrait, that's the important thing, that's what people look at first, they're a little shading in there. Got the eyelid. Now I just want to look at how things relate to each other, I think I made my nose a little too skinny, so I'm going to widen it on this side a little bit because I'm looking at where it hits the eye. Looking at the relationships between one part of the face and the next can really help you also. Just the subtle shaping, this nose, for example, if you were to draw a nose from your imagination, remember when we did that with the sunflower, I bet your imaginary nose would look very, very different than the nose that you are drawing when you're looking at a reference and paying attention to the shapes. It's just so interesting how we label things and then we tend to want to draw what we imagine that label to look like instead of what we see right in front of us. Really try to fight that really focus on the shapes, and don't think about the labels. Unless you want to label yourself as super cute [LAUGHTER] that's allowed [LAUGHTER] But no negative labels, I don't want to hear anybody saying how terrible they look or anything like that, that is not what this is about, I'm a big goof ball, but [LAUGHTER] I'm not going to trash my face, I think it looks just fine. That can be an interesting temptation when you're drawing a self-portrait, not just to criticize your appearance but to also want to try to maybe make some tweaks [LAUGHTER] to flatter yourself or not even just when you're drawing yourself, but when you're drawing other people. That's totally your prerogative as the artist. You can make whatever adjustments you want, but do it on purpose, if you're making that choice you want to deliberately say, I'm going to tweak this for this reason or that reason. Since everybody watching this video is seeing the photo reference in all its glory, I'm not really going to be making any cosmetic enhancements to myself because that would just be silly. One suggestion I'll make too, if you're drawing an open mouth, like I am, my mouth's always open and chatting [LAUGHTER] I would suggest any way not over-emphasizing the teeth. It's very easy to do, especially if you draw the lines all the way up on each tooth so I tend to stop a little bit short and just put a suggestion of the teeth in there without going too far with it because they can just easily take over the whole drawing if you draw too many lines, or too heavy lines on the teeth, they can start to look like there's braces unless you're drawing somebody who's wearing braces or grill or something. Otherwise, you might just want to downplay that area just to smidge. Got my basic facial features on there let me get the outline on my face and then do a little bit of facial here and we'll call it a day. You keep going as long as you want with yours. Can be fun, I think. I like drawing portraits. I really get into it. In this case it's not hard because I'm drawing myself, but I imagine if I'm drawing somebody else, what are they thinking about? What is their life like? I look for things that help me relate to that person. I've heard it said that no matter who an artist is drawing, there's always an element of it, that is a self portrait. I think there's some truth in that because it's almost about finding that universal thing that makes us all human feel connected to each other. It's good to start with drawing yourself and then move on and try drawing some other people, maybe some people who you don't know [LAUGHTER] who won't be offended because they won't see it, if it doesn't turn out perfectly. It takes a little bit of the pressure off [LAUGHTER] I'm not over it. I'm not drawing every single hair, that's another suggestion I make with portraits. That can make the hair look very stringy, so just draw the main clumps, the main shapes. Think about the structure of that too, just like you do with the face really. Get some ear shapes in there. Now if I had more time, I could definitely go in and shade this, which would be a lot of fun, but I'm not going to have time for that today, you certainly could and all those lines that you drew for the planes can really help with that. Because the shapes of the planes are basically there to tell you where there are value shifts, that's how we see those planes because there's a shadow or a highlight on them, so if I was shading it I could use those lines now to really help me make that face look more realistic in three-dimensional. I'm just going to leave mine a line drawing, I give my whiskers though that's important. Not all of you will have to deal with that in your drawings, but some of you might. Maybe a little bit of a neck. Then sometimes when I'm doing portraits, I just let things fade, so I'll maybe even put a little bit of the color my jacket, then just let the line trail off. Now I'm going to erase some of my guidelines, I drew them light intentionally, I need my little forehead wrinkle though can't erase that one [LAUGHTER] But any lines you don't want as long as you kept them pretty light in your initial drawing, then now you can go in and erase them. I'm leaving a few though, because I like just having that sense of the structure of the face, maybe a little bit here on the cheek. There's me looking at you [LAUGHTER] Hope you had fun drawing your portraits and keep practicing, the more you do, as always, the better you'll get. See, I told you you're gorgeous you made a beautiful drawing [LAUGHTER] I hope you enjoyed this. Self portraits are a wonderful way to practice drawing the human face because you always can look in a mirror or take a selfie, try it from different angles and get a completely different picture to draw. The more you do, the better you'll get. As always, tomorrow we're going to tackle something that a lot of artists find rather complicated and we're going to break it down and make it very simple for you. We're going to draw hands, so get ready. Bye-bye. 29. Drawing Hands: We only have a few days left, so it's time to tackle one of those subjects that a lot of artists say, gives them some challenges. I think that hands are really fun to draw. They're very expressive. You've probably noticed by now I talk a lot with my hands [LAUGHTER] so I'm all about using the hands to help add personality to a drawing and I think once you know some basics about how to break it down into simple shapes, you're going to be fine. Sharpen your pencil, get some paper. Let's go. Just like with everything else, I know I'm like a broken record sometimes, but we're just breaking it down into shapes. That's the good and the bad thing. There's no secret magic mystery to this but every subject that we choose does have some nuances and some different things we can talk about. For hands, I usually like to start by drawing a rectangular-ish shape for the palm. I say ish, because it doesn't have to be a perfect rectangle. I try to go ahead and incorporate any shaping things that I see so it gets narrower toward the wrist so I'm going to go ahead and draw it like that. It's a little bit rounded on top. Now, I'm going to draw basically just a frame, as you can see, for where the fingers stop. The pointer finger we're actually seeing all the way to the tip of the finger but then the other fingers, the highest point is at a bend at one of the digits. That's why it gets drastically lower over here on the left side. Come up here like that. Be a little higher here. There we go. Look at that. That's what that hand would look like if it was in a big mitten [LAUGHTER] so you can always just call it done but let's keep going [LAUGHTER] I'm going to go ahead and draw a little bit of the arm and then just let that fade down there. Now let's get to the fingers. That's where people run into issues sometimes. I want to really encourage you just like we did with the face yesterday, when you're drawing fingers, I'll use my hand as an example, to think about each digit as being a separate plane into draw all of those structural things instead of just drawing one big long wobbly finger, you're constructing it out of these more geometric shapes and it'll make it feel a lot more believable. I'm just going to take one finger at a time and I'm drawing rectangular shapes for each of the digits. One thing I like to do also before I get too far, is just go through and, I can't talk, make little dots [LAUGHTER] for where the fingers actually will go. There's four fingers obviously. You can go right in the middle and then divide each of those in half. Now you can start to construct the hand with some confidence that the fingers are in the right place. There is a little bit of a gap especially between the pointer finger and the middle finger. You can't really see it because the thumb is blocking it, but you can tell on the way down. I'm not going to have those two connect. They probably meet a little bit to the side of that dot. The second digit looks a lot smaller. That's because it is being foreshortened a little bit. It is angling toward us. It's only about to there and then last digit. Close up to there. Now I'm not getting too detailed with all the little shaping yet. I'm keeping it pretty simple, pretty geometric, and then we'll go back and add those other details in a bit. Now I'm looking at the middle finger and where how far up does that first digit go compared to here. As you can see, it's just a little bit above it. Always looking to see how things relate to each other, the alignment can really help you too. It's just like you're creating a roadmap for yourself through the subject so that you can figure out how to translate it. Part of that becomes intuitive. The more you draw, you don't even have to really think about it as deliberately as I just did, but I'm trying to point it out so that you can start out really thinking about that stuff. Now, this one is very foreshortened and you can also draw the shape of the negative space. We just see a little bit of that section and then we're already into the top digit right there. I didn't give you an easy one, did I? [LAUGHTER] Well, this is Week 28. [LAUGHTER] I can't take it too easy on you. You're drawing pros by now [LAUGHTER] Right there and it wraps around here. We'll go in and draw the fingernails and all that good stuff in a bit. Let's get everything on there first. Next we have this little guy and we don't really see the digits or the first digit because the finger comes right around and overlaps itself. I think I might've made my guideline a little too high, so I'm going to lower that. I'm just looking at the negative space between this finger and the middle finger so that I can draw it based on that too. Negative space is so helpful. Comes forward and it comes down right about to that line. You were just drawing shapes not fingers. Last but not least, so I think this side of the hand needs to come in just a little, and then I'm going to come up to here so it's right about aligned with that digit. Then you can see how that finger bins at an angle, and it comes in like this and it comes below that line. Let's get the thumb in there and then we'll backtrack and do some more details. We're getting it. See, I told you you could do it. [LAUGHTER] Now we know the tip of the thumb lands right in there, and then it comes over like this, down, like that, and then it comes right down and meets that angle line. Then up here, the thumb gets a little bit wider. It's the skinniest at the tip and then it gets wider as it comes down. This curves in right here where that point is, and then we have it coming straight down, and then curving towards that point. Then there's one more little crease right here. Then we can see how there's a fold there. I'm going to draw some of the lines on the palm too. That'll just help to make that feel a little bit more structural. Now, let's go back to the fingers and start to work out some of those details. I'm going to take my eraser now and erase some of the lines that I don't need anymore, including anything that's a guideline that's inside of another area. Get rid of these. Then nobody will know and they'll think, wow, they just drew that hand totally without any assistance. [LAUGHTER] Now I'm going to come back to this finger and really pay attention to the shaping. It's nice to have that simpler sketch on there. But then when you really take your time and look, you can see just more subtle curves, bins, creases, the direction of the creases. Look to see how it curves. As I've said a few times before, the biggest part of drawing is just taking the time to really look and see, and this is no exception. Curves outward here a little bit more than I had it and then it comes in, then it goes out again. Oh my gosh, it's busy. [LAUGHTER] Little bolds there. This curves more like that, then there's another one here, like that. Up, like that. Then I'm going to draw that fingernail on there now. That's actually really going to help us to understand the position of that finger. It curves up. Oh, nice, see what a difference that makes? Now let's come over here and do this one. I like the detail phase. Like a lot of people, I'm always tempted to try to go to it too quickly, so I have to remind myself, slowdown Paul. No rush. Come down. I'm going to go ahead and sketch in this fingernail next. Curves out a little bit more like that. This one. I remember I was figure drawing class in college one time, I got all caught up in the details of drawing the hand and I was very proud of it [LAUGHTER] that I stepped back and looked at it and I realized that I gave the hand one-too-many fingers. [LAUGHTER] It's those kind of things when you get a little too hung up in the details and don't stop to look at the big picture that can lead to problems, so I was definitely in the back of my head counting those fingers as I was going to make sure I didn't do that [LAUGHTER] in our video today. Don't want to lead you all down a bad path. [LAUGHTER] I do like drawing hands, I have to say because I think hands can be so expressive when I draw, I do a lot of portraits and a lot of figures, but whenever possible I try to include the hand because the hand can also reveal a lot about a person's personality, what they do with their hands when they're talking. I'm very expressive when I talk, I've let my hands around all the time. [LAUGHTER] But some people hide their hands in their pockets or behind their back or like to play with their hair. It's just another tool for helping to show a little bit more about that person's personality. Here we go. Now there are some beautiful shadows in this photo, and if you have time and want to keep going, I would encourage you to do some shading on this one also especially like see those shadows that are underneath these fingers and the shadows up here, I won't have time in today's video, but that is definitely something you could continue working on if you wanted to bring out even more detail in the drawing and also putting that dark value in the background behind it would make the hand really pop out as well. See, I told you you could do it. [LAUGHTER] Great job. Keep practicing. Use your own hand. Put it into different positions, sketch it real quick, look for the shapes. You can do this. Tomorrow in lesson number 29, we're going to have some fun drawing animals. I can't wait. Have a wonderful day and I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 30. Drawing Animals: I can't believe we're so close to the end. Can we just keep going forever? [LAUGHTER] Well, I suppose you could, you could just keep re-watching these videos, but you might get sick of me after a while. Anyway, today we're going to have a lot of fun drawing animals, so I don't want to waste too much time talking. Let's dive right into it. Sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. Here's our model for today, this beautiful buck. [LAUGHTER] Let's get started. I'm going to break it down into basic shapes like always. Start with a little shape for the head, a triangular shape, I suppose. I'm going to try to get this down quickly enough so that there's some time to do some shading today. I love the way the light is falling across him. There's the neck. Big sheet for the body. Keep it nice and loose. I know we've drawn animals before in this class, but we thought it would be good to do one more round. Now that you have learned so many different techniques, you can incorporate all of those into this drawing and see how it turns out. Feel free if you would prefer to do it as a pen and ink drawing or if you want to try charcoal or any of the other techniques that we've done together, go for it. This ear is bigger because it's a little bit closer to us, so there's some perspective coming into it. We got the shape of this negative space. That ear needs to point up a little more. It's always okay to make adjustments, remember. Just because we're on Lesson 29, doesn't mean that now you are magically going to be perfect. [LAUGHTER] I've been drawing for a long time and I'm far from perfect myself. But you might be better at spotting what's wrong and figuring out how to adjust it. That is the thing that improves over time. It's not that you're always going to draw everything perfectly, but I think you do get better with more practice at being able to identify the issues or not being afraid of the issues too. That's a big part of it also. Looking to see where that leg aligns, the front leg. It's a little bit to the left of here. That looks about right. In this photo we don't get to see the bottoms of the legs, so I'm just going to let it fade at the bottom here. I'm just angling back. Look at the shape of the negative space in between the legs, that can help. A little bump in the back. It's about right here. This leg needs to be right under that, so I think I need to scotch you over just a smidge. There we go. See when your drawing is so loose and sketchy like this, it's so easy to make those tweaks. You don't feel locked into anything. I know it's very tempting to jump right to details. I fight that temptation too but does tend to work out better if you start loose. Looking at the negative space down here below the body in-between the legs. Here we go. This comes down over. The legs definitely taper as they go down. The little deer butt in there. [LAUGHTER] There we go. Down. Looking at the overall shapes, I think they look pretty good. I'm going to just draw a few lines on the inside where the shadows are. Remember when we did the drawings, where we drew the shadow shapes. That is always a helpful way to just double-check, make sure things are in the right spot. Gives you more interior lines to draw to help with the construction of the form. Plus, then it becomes very helpful when it is time to shade it because you've already given yourself an indication of where the shadows go. This is all in shadow. Eyes. Really on the sides of the head like here and here. Big nose. Not in an insulting way just [LAUGHTER] it's bigger than the eyes. It's all I mean. Sorry deer. Then I'm just going to draw lines right now for the antlers until I know like I'm drawing almost a skeleton sheep and then off flush them out. It's beautiful. I used to live up in the forest and we saw a deer all the time. That looks pretty good. Let me just refine a few things and then I'm going to start shading. Get that ear shape in better. Actually draw in the antlers. Now, if you're already at the shading stage, take a look at the photo and ask yourself, where is the light coming from? It's coming from the left. You knew that. I've got to get in on my review questions now because we are almost at the end of this video series. Can you believe it? Thirty classes, sounded like a lot when we first started and now you've almost made it to the end. I have very much enjoyed spending this time with all of you drawing together. I hope you've enjoyed it too. I hope it's lit a spark in you that will make you want to keep drawing. By now it's become like a habit. You don't want to break a habit. [LAUGHTER] Maybe give yourself one day off if you feel like you need it and then get right back to it. [LAUGHTER] Just doodle, sketch, doesn't have to be for any specific length of time but just keeping in practice makes such a difference. I'm pretty happy with this. Let's do a little shading. See I was using [inaudible], I guess, that's going to be good for shading too. Let me just start by filling in the shadow areas. Just doing that little bit, see how it just starts to make it feel more three-dimensional. Pretty much this whole top of the face is dark. I have to go pop out the eyes. Well, that sounded terrible. I have to make the eyes the standout better. But for now, the whole ear is pretty much in shadow, this part of the antler, this part. A little sliver of white on the left side here, you can see that, so make sure you leave room for that in there. Remember to occasionally squint your eyes so that you can see the bigger chunks of value and not get too caught up in all the little details. Now I'm going in with a white to middle value for some of those patches of where he gets a little bit darker but still within the highlights. It's actually just like a change in color of the fur. Let me pop up the eye. [LAUGHTER] [inaudible] did it back way again. You know what I mean. Do a little bit more shaping. Once you suggest where the overall shadow areas are, then you can go in and pull out more varieties within those areas. With whatever tiny half, push the darks even darker, push the lights even lighter. If you have a lot of time, you could actually cycle through and use all the different pencils like we demonstrated in one of the classes, starting with the hard leads and then working your way to the softer. I'm just doing everything with this softer lead today so that I can get something done in 10 minutes. But if I had longer this would be a good one to approach with all the pencils because there are a lot of great values in here. I know I'm going a little bit over the 10 minutes with some of these final videos here, but it's just because I don't want to give up hanging out with you guys. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to keep you here as long as I can. There you go. You can also put some value in the background if you wanted to. I'm not going to be able to do that right now, but that would make the highlight areas pop even more. Little eyelash. What a cutie. They are just so gentle, so beautiful. They remind me of our dog. We have a whip it, similar. I don't know, similar vibe. Long neck, very sweet, skittish. I think he is just about finished. How is yours coming? You don't have to stop just because I am, if you're in the zone, keep on going but here's mine. I love drawing animals. I hope you enjoyed it too. Keep practicing. Tomorrow and our final class, oh my gosh, I can't believe it, we're going to be talking about keeping a sketchbook. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 31. Keeping a Sketchbook: We've come to the end of this particular class, and I have so enjoyed getting to spend this time with you. I hope that it has been helpful, inspiring, and creative time for everybody out there. I know I've enjoyed it and I hope it's just the beginning of your drawing journey. To that end, today I wanted to focus on keeping a sketchbook and show you some fun ways that you might approach that, so grab some paper, sharpen your pencil, let's go. Today I'm going to be sharing a whole bunch of different sketchbook prompts with you that'll give you tons of ideas of what you can draw in your sketchbook because I really want to encourage you to keep drawing even though we've come to the end of this video series. Get a sketchbook and try and draw in it every day. You're looking at my sketchbook right now. In fact, you've been looking at it this whole time. I'm going to dive right into drawing the first prompt that I wrote down on my list, which is a perspective drawing, looking down a road. I found a reference for that. You could also just draw from your imagination too for any of these prompts. But I'm going to dive right into drawing this. You can draw right along with me, or if you want to wait and listen to all the prompts and find one that really speaks to you, you can do that too. Totally up to you. My hope is that this video will be one that you can come back to whenever you just feel like you need an idea. I think sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves to come up with the perfect idea before we start drawing and that's exhausting and it's also not necessary. Every drawing that you make does not need to be an earth-shattering masterpiece. Sometimes it's just about sitting down and doing something, moving your hand, trying to capture an idea or an inspiration. Anyhow, as I draw this road, to me symbolizes all of you heading out on your little artistic journeys, and me as well but here are some sketchbook prompts that I would encourage you to try. Draw the inside of your closet. If yours is anything like mine, that could take a while. [LAUGHTER] Draw a bunched-up paper towel or piece of paper. Draw your pet. I've done that a lot. Draw each of your hands, but using the opposite hand. That could be interesting. Especially to see what you're drawing would look like from the non-dominant hand. I like that one. I have to try that. Draw the contents of your desk drawer. Don't organize it first. [LAUGHTER] Draw the inside of your refrigerator. Draw the inside of your garage. Cover a page in pencil and erase a plant like we did in the class where we did the reverse drawing. If you wear glasses, take them off, set them down on the table, and draw those or draw a pair of sunglasses, maybe put a light on it so that they also create an interesting shadow on the table that you have to draw too. Draw your face, but from looking at it upside down photo of you, that would be a fun challenge. Draw a scene from your favorite book. In this class, we have focused a lot on drawing pictures from reference because that's a really great way to learn technical skills. I use a lot of reference for my artwork, so don't ever feel bad about using reference. But a sketchbook is a great place to also just doodle and make drawings from your imagination too. Even if you don't think you're any good at that, that's okay. Sketchbook is a safe place because guess what? You don't have to show it to anybody. You can just explore and have fun in there. I have a sketchbook in every room of my house, believe it or not because I never know when I'm going to get a good idea or see something or think of something that I'm going to want to write down. Draw an egg. [LAUGHTER] Sounds boring but, that was one of the very first assignments that we had in college. Actually, we had to do a painting of a white egg against a white wall. I thought, well, this is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. [LAUGHTER] But then when I started, I realized, it's actually a lot more going on here than I thought. It's that idea that we've talked about quite a bit where the more you look at something, the more you see, and I started to see all the different subtle tones and reflections in the eggs, so just pick out an egg, draw that. Draw the dishes before you wash them. I got a big pile down in the kitchen right now. You can come and draw if you want. [LAUGHTER] Draw a pile of laundry waiting to get washed. I've got that too. Boy, I'm all set for these. [LAUGHTER] Illustrate a dream that you've had. That's a good one. That's the whole premise of the surrealist art movement was about tapping into the subconscious. Draw a video game or cartoon character. You're never too old for that, by the way. Draw the contents of a backpack or a bag or purse. Draw a page of overlapping quick sketches of people moving. See, I'm just full of ideas here, aren't I? I'm going to keep you very busy. But you know that is my secret goal here. We've been drawing together now for 30 days. That's plenty of time for this to become a real habit for you. I certainly hope that you will continue long after these classes are over. If you've hung in there this long, then that means that you are an artist. That means you love creating. It has nothing to do with the quality of your work. I know people can get very judgmental about how their own artwork looks. I do want to encourage you to try to cut yourself some slack there because it's very normal. I don't know any artist who just love everything that they make, so no matter how long you do this, you're going to have those types of feelings. But the fact that you're still drawing after 30 days tells me that you like this, so don't stop, keep going. Here are some more ideas. Draw what is in the rearview mirror of your car. Preferably not while you are driving it. [LAUGHTER] Draw your hand holding an object that's important to you. Draw a piece of cake and make it look delicious then you can eat it afterwards as a reward, I think that would be a good incentive for me. [LAUGHTER] Got to have to reward yourself sometimes. Draw a UFO. Probably won't be able to get one to pose for you, but you could draw from your imagination, what do you think of UFO would look like. Draw a feather. Design a playing card. I like these ones that would make you use your imaginations too. I think that's such an important thing to get comfortable with or to at least maybe not get comfortable, but to not be afraid of. Draw a hoodie hanging from a hook or from the back of a chair. Draw your reflection in a window at night. Draw one popcorn kernel popping, or draw an open bag of popcorn. Draw a clear glass full of ice cubes. Draw an object when looking through a tube or a microscope. Draw something floating like a boat or a beach ball. Draw many quick sketches of birds on one page. Draw a forest, but using only straight lines. Got to keep it interesting here guys. Draw a corner of your home. Draw balloons. Draw the view out one of your windows. See the opportunities and the options are endless if you don't overthink it. Just pick a prompt and go for it. It does not have to be an earth-shattering concept. [LAUGHTER] Draw a page of robots. That sounds fun. Illustrate your favorite song. Draw a plate of tacos. Back to food. You can tell I must have been hungry when I made this list. [LAUGHTER] Find a quiet place in a crowd and draw the crowd. Find a quiet place and draw the quiet. Find a noisy place, and draw the noise. Draw a house as simple or detailed as you want. Design a tattoo. Draw flowers either from observation or from memory. Draw a page full of a pattern. Draw your cell phone. Draw the cover art from an album that you love. Draw an object that is lit by a candle. Draw a scoop of ice cream. Pay attention to the texture and the highlights. Draw an undiscovered sea creature. [NOISE] Copy a painting or a drawing by one of your favorite artists. Stack objects from your home into a tower and draw it, the taller the better. Fill an entire page with one long slow scribble. Draw a celebrity portrait. Draw your grocery list. [LAUGHTER] Watch a show and every once in a while, pause it to do a quick sketch of a scene. Draw vegetables. See that will make up for the drawing of the cake and ice cream. You have to have a well-balanced diet. [LAUGHTER] Draw your favorite toy from childhood. Draw tree branches. Draw a lamp or a hanging light. Slice an apple in half and draw it by only shading with the edge of a pencil. No actual lines. Combine two animals. That could be interesting. Draw vines taking over a tree or another object. Draw an object with a distinctive shape that's tightly wrapped in aluminum foil. Create a fantastical underground world that you might see if you could lift a slice out of the Earth. Well, I certainly hope that you have enjoyed this series. I have had a blast hanging out with all of you. I thank you so much for allowing me to spend this time with you, and for being open to all of my suggestions and ideas, hanging in there with me this whole time. I really encourage you to keep drawing. Always make some time in your schedule to nurture your creativity. You won't regret it. Every single person deserves that and needs that in their own way, so off you go down your little path. Keep drawing my friends. Well, we've come to the end of this class. Again, I want to thank all of you so much for being a part of this. I have really enjoyed spending this time with you and I hope that you will continue drawing for many years to come. Keep sharpening those pencils, keep drawing, and I hope to see you again really soon. Thanks, everyone. Bye bye. 32. Closing Thoughts: Well, congratulations, you have finished our learn to draw in 30 days course. I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope you've learned a lot, and mostly I hope that you keep drawing. Drawing becomes a habit when you do it constantly, and if you've made it this far, then I would say you are on your way, so don't stop now, this is just the beginning of your artistic life and I can't wait to see what you do next. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.