Transcripts
1. Introduction: I truly believe that anyone can learn to draw if they put in the time and the effort. Hi. I'm Emily from the Pencil Room. I'm an artist and I teach drawing and painting classes for adults. Drawing is one of those things that people who don't draw often wish that they could, but they usually feel like it's a skill that you either have or you don't have. I've been teaching drawing for over 10 years and I'm a firm believer that you can learn how to draw. A lot of learning to draw comes from understanding why it's so difficult, and overriding some of those blocks that we have. This course was designed to introduce you to practical drawing techniques, but also to help you understand the reason behind doing them. A lot of it comes down to changing the way that we see. We need to learn how to see like an artist sees. I've taken what I've learned from many years of teaching adults to learn to draw in person, and I've put it together in this five part learn to draw course. Now, there are no quick tricks to learning how to draw, so practice over time is really important. I suggest you take this course over five weeks. Each part contains explanations, exercises, demos, and projects for you to work on in your own time. You start by learning about drawing materials and how to use them, and then move into how to sketch and how to shade three-dimensional object. Once we've got you up and drawing, we'll go over the all important proportion techniques and then I'll take you through the demo for a drawing project to bring all of these skills together, so you can then take those skills and work on any kind of drawing that you want to in the future. People come to my drawing classes for different reasons Some have always wanted to learn how to draw, but never had the time, others used to draw when they were younger and they want to get back into it. Whatever your reason is, if you're willing to put in the time and the practice, then I can teach you how to draw.
2. Materials: There are lots of different types and brands of pencils, there are mechanical pencils like this, or like this. There are big pencils, small pencils, student pencils, and professional pencils. Pencils we will use in this course are student level pencils in grades 2H, 2B, and 6B, and I'll talk more about pencil grades shortly. Like pencils, erasers also come in many forms. There are mechanical erasers, battery-powered erasers, rubber erasers, and kneadable putty erasers. For this course, I'll be using a kneadable eraser. These come in different colors, the standard is a gray putty eraser, and they can be shaped to suit your needs. For example, if you want to erase a very thin area, you can shape the eraser into a fine point. Avoid cheap hard plastic erasers as these can make a mess of your paper. It would be a good idea to use a sketchbook for this course so you can keep a record of the exercises that we do and you can measure your progress. I'll be using a sketchbook using 110 gsm paper. That's the white of the paper in grams per square meter. Regular printer paper is 80 gsm, so this sketchbook paper is a bit thicker and it has a slight texture to it. I recommend getting a cheap art sketchbook with reasonable quality paper. This sketchbook has paper that's a bit thinner and a lot smoother and you'll get different effects depending on the type of paper that you use. We'll be doing lots of experimentation and testing in this, so don't go buying something expensive that you'll be too afraid to get messy, save that for after the course. At some point you're going to need to sharpen your pencil. There's nothing worse than trying to draw with thick, heavy lines of a blunt pencil. A simple pencil sharpener like this is fine, I prefer the durability of a metal sharpener. Alternately, you can sharpen pencils using a craft knife, but be careful, and I'll give you some tips on how to do this later in the course. Remember when as a kid you used your finger to smudge your drawing to make it look smoother and better. Later on in the course, we'll use paper blending stumps to do essentially the same thing, but with much more control. Paper blending stumps are thin layers of paper rolled into a bean shape and used in a similar manner to a pencil, but we use them to smooth and blend our shading marks. You could also use a tissue or a paper towel to blend your shading or even a cotton bud. Later on in the course, we will also be using some charcoal and some chalk pencils. Charcoal comes in different forms. Willow charcoal comes in stick form. It's very soft and easily rubs away. Charcoal also comes compressed in pencil form, and this is much darker, much denser charcoal. White chalk pencils are like soft pastels in pencil form, and they'll be used to create highlights on toned paper. So at some stage you might also like to get some gray paper or some brown craft paper. It doesn't have to be expensive, but something that you can use a white pencil over top of.
3. About Pencil Grades: The one thing you can't do without when learning to draw is a pencil. But there are many different brands and grades of pencils. What ones do you need and why? Let's look at pencil grades and what they mean. All pencil leads are graded using a letter and a number system that tells us what sort of mark we're likely to get. The grading system uses numbers and two letters, H and B. H stands for hard, and the higher the number next to the H, the harder the lead is, giving you a sharper and a lighter mark. The H pencils go up in grade from H to 2H, to 3H, and so on up to 9H, getting lighter with each higher number. H pencils are good for laying down the foundations of a sketch because it's easy to keep them light and they become visible in the final drawing. B stands for black, and the higher the number, the darker and softer its mark will be. The B pencils also go up in grade from B to 2B to 3B up to 9B, getting darker the higher the number. B pencils are good for shading. The higher the number, the darker and softer shading you can get. An HB pencil is right in the middle and is a standard school pencil, good for writing and some basic drawing. In this course I'll be using three pencils, a 2H pencil for the beginning of any sketching we do, a 2B pencil for adding darker layers of shading, and a 6B pencil for adding small details of very dark areas, for example, for drawing in the pupil of an eye.
4. Part One: Testing Your Pencils: In this very first exercise, we're simply going to try out different pencils and techniques to get a feel for our materials. Consider this exercise as having a play or an experimentation with your pencils, experimenting with how each one feels and what it can do. If you don't have the pencils that I'm using, the 2H, the 2B, and the 6B, still go ahead and perform this exercise with whatever pencils you can find. Starting with a 2H pencil, begin to just make some short lines. Test out the capacity of this pencil by drawing the lightest possible line you can and the darkest possible line you can. Now try using the pencil on more of an angle on its side to create an area shading, moving your pencil back and forth. Pencil control is key to drawing well, and like anything, it takes time for the body, and in this case, the hand and the arm to get used to moving in a certain way. There are two ways we can practice pencil control. One is the movement of the pencil and the other is the pressure of the pencil. Stay with the 2H pencil, and this time try moving the pencil in a different way, loosely, and starting the action from the shoulder so the hand isn't stuck to the page. Instead, it lightly moves across the page. Now adjust the pressure pressing harder, then light or lighter, then hard as you move through the mark. Finally, practice applying pressure to shading. See how light you can start the shading. Try to make this invisible, starting from the white of the page and then getting darker as you move across the page, increasing the pressure until you get the darkest possible shading you can with a 2H pencil. Practice this a few times. You're aiming for a smooth transition from light to dark shading. It might take time for your hand and your eye to gain some coordination to get that effect. Once you've finished experimenting with your 2H pencil, move on and do the same with the 2B pencil, and then the same again with the 6B pencil. Start by making some very light marks and some very dark marks. Shade a small area by moving the pencil back and forth. Make marks by moving the pencil loosely from the shoulder. Adjust the pressure of your lines within a single stroke, starting lighter, then getting darker. Or the opposite, start dark and then lessen the pressure to get a lighter end of the mark. Then create a shading scale by starting very, very light and increasing the pressure of your pencil as you move across the page with that shading motion to create a scale from lightest to darkest shading marks. As you go through your pencils, you'll notice the difference between each pencil. Notice how the 2H pencil is quite hard and sharp, and that it's easy to draw a nearly invisible line. With a 2B pencil, you can get a reasonably sharp mark, but at the same time, you can get some dark marks for darker shading. In comparison, a 6B pencil will get blunt quite quickly. So it's good for soft dark shading or for very dark tones, and you may have to keep sharpening it if you want to use it for fine detail.
5. Understanding Sketching: A sketch is a simple drawing of something without many details. Sometimes sketches are made as practice for a final drawing or painting. Usually, sketching is also done at the start of a drawing to lightly put down the main shapes of the subject as a starting point before building up the line in the shading. We can think of a sketch as the foundation lines for a drawing. It's important to draw with loose and light overlapping lines so that, if needed, they can be erased or simply drawn over top of. It's like you're molding the shape as you draw. Let me demonstrate how sketching can be useful. If you were to draw a circle with a single dark line, chances are, you'll end up with something pretty wonky. There are people who can do this, but most of us aren't able to coordinate our hand and our eye in such a way to create a perfect circle with one single line. However, if you take the time to lightly draw a series of joint light lines where you think the edge of the circle should go, you can then adjust it as you draw. Have a go now, start with loose light, short lines overlapping as you move around the circle edge. If you see any bumps or angles in your circle when you're sketching, just keep adjusting it, almost as if you're smoothing the edges out of soft clay. Once you've molded the edge, you can draw a darker final edge based on your foundation drawing, once you can see where the correct line should go. We can use this same process of foundation sketching for more complex subjects, like fruit or figures or anything you choose to draw.
6. Different Types of Pencil Grip: There are three useful ways to hold a pencil. It's normal to switch between the different grips, depending on what you're drawing. This is standard grip, this is what you probably already use when you're writing. You have lots of control but not a lot of freedom of movement, except from the wrist, and the pressure on the page is quite heavy. This is a overhand grip. This is the way you often see artists using a pencil. It involves moving from the shoulder and just resting the tip of the pencil on the page, not your hand. Although, sometimes you can use another finger as a guide on the paper. This is the best way to hold your pencil as it allows you much more freedom of movement and control over the pressure on the page. However, it does require practice. It's like learning to use a pencil all over again, so don't worry if this feels very strange to you at this point. Then there's what I call the loose grip. This one is in-between the other two grips. Hold your pencil a little bit further back than normal and allow the base of your hand to move across the page with your pencil. The movement comes from the shoulder instead of the wrist. While the heel of your hand is on the page, it should still move freely across the page. Let the tip of the pencil rest on the paper instead of pushing it down. This grip gives you some of the freedom of the overhand grip as you move from the shoulder and steer the wrist, but it has more of the control and the familiarity of the standard grip that you're used to. Try out each grip and if it feels okay, practice the exercises in this course using the loose grip, moving from the shoulder and keeping the pressure very light.
7. Exercise: Sketching Basic Shapes: Before we move on to more complex subjects, let's just get used to the feeling of sketching by drawing some basic shapes. Use a light, loose foundation sketching technique to sketch circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles. Remember the different pencils we tested? The 2H pencil is the best choice for your foundation sketch because it's light, it's easy to erase if you need to, or you can just draw over top. Start with a circle using short light lines joined together, molding the edge as you go, move on to a square, a triangle, a rectangle, and any other shapes you want to try. As you sketch, remind yourself to draw lightly. Keep the pressure of the pencil light on the page. Until you have the lines that you want, keep them light. You can always darken it later when you're ready to take the drawing further. Draw loosely with freedom of movement in the shoulder so that the head moves across the page.
8. Exercise: Sketching 3D Shapes: Let's go back to our basic shapes that we've sketched. To start with, we'll add in a depth dimension. We already have the width and the height, go through and add in that third dimension moving back into space. On a square and a rectangle, the angles that move back from the front plane are always going to be parallel. They will always be on the same angle. Likewise, the top and bottom edges, the side edges will also all be parallel. If you need to, you can pause the video and draw in that third dimension by copying what I've done here.
9. Understanding Shading: More about tone. If we want to draw realistic three-dimensional looking drawings, then we need to understand how shading and tone can create form. This gets a little bit technical but it's really important to know. A drawing on a piece of paper is two-dimensional. It has width and height. An object in real life has three dimensions: width, height, and depth. Take a look at an object near you now, and notice how the light hits it. The surface of the object where the light hits, well, it will be light. This is called the highlight. If you take a look at the parts of the object opposite the light source where the light doesn't reach as much, the surface will be darkest. This is called the shadow. The areas in between the highlight and the shadow where only some light reaches are called the midtones. They might be one midtone or they might be five different midtones, depending on the complexity of the object and on the light source. The main thing to take from this is that objects in reality have at least three different light values or three different tones. Three-dimensional objects have a highlight and midtone and a shadow. This means, if we want to draw the same object on our two-dimensional drawing surface, we need to create an illusion of three dimensions by identifying and shading at least three different tones. We've already practiced how to shade at least three tones. We've shaded five times. Now let's use some of these to create an illusion of three-dimensional form.
10. Exercise: Shading Tonal Values: Before we move on to more complex subjects, let's just get used to the feeling of sketching by drawing some basic shapes. You set light to loose, foundation sketching technique to sketch circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles. Remember the different pencils we tested, the 2H pencil is the best choice for your foundation sketch because it's light. It's easy to erase if you need to or you can just draw over top. Start with a circle using short light lines joined together, molding the edge as you go. Move on to a square, a triangle, a rectangle and any of the shapes you want to try. As you sketch, remind yourself to draw lightly, keep the pressure of the pencil light on the page. Until you have the lines that you want, keep them light. You can always darken it lighter when you're ready to take the drawing further. Draw loosely, with freedom of movement in the shoulder so that the hand moves across the page. So far we've focused on how to sketch and draw a line. The other really important aspect of learning to draw is shading. For the next exercise, we will shade five different tones. Tone refers to the range of gray values between light and dark. It's important to be able to shade a range of different gray tones in your drawing to show light and shadow. Because we're going to be shading both light and dark grays in this exercise, ideally you have a 2H pencil for the lightest tones and a 2B pencil for the middle tones and darkest tones. Start by sketching out five boxes and number them from 1-5. Our aim here is to create a scale of gray tones from lightest through to darkest. So Number 1 will be our lightest tone. Number 3 will be our middle gray tone, and Number 5 will be our darkest tone. Shading different tones is all down to pencil pressure and control. For each box that we shade, we want the whole box to be only one value of gray. It needs to be a smooth even coating of pencil. To get rid of any white spaces, we need to build it up in layers with patients. Using a 2H pencil start shading box Number one as lightly as you possibly can. Use a pencil on a side to get more coverage in softer marks. Move it back and forth from one side of the box to the other with the pencil tip barely touching the paper. But since we have that loose grip can come in handy. Once you've been over the whole square, you can go back over again to eliminate any white spaces, but still keep the tone as light as you can. Now we'll jump down to the other end of the scale to our darkest tone. Use a 2B pencil on it's side, moving back and forth with light pressure. Even though we want this to be our darkest square, rather than going as dark as we came from the start, we can build up layers to get a deep even tone. Once you've filled the box with a light layer, go back over again with another layer of shading. Sometimes changing the direction of your shading on the next layer can help eliminate those white gaps. Remember, we want an even layer, not lots of different grays in one box. Keep building layers until you feel you've achieved the darkest possible tone you can, with a 2B pencil. Can you see how when I shade by building up layers, I'm not left with any white marks in between my pencil shading? For the next step in this exercise, we're going to move to Number 3. This is the mid-tone, the middle gray from. Shading box Number 1 and box Number 5, you should have an idea now of how much pressure to use to shade a middle gray tone. Aim for a gray that sits right in between the lightest tone and the darkest tone that you've already shaded. Again, build the square up in layers, starting light, filling the whole square and then changing direction with your pencil and building up a darker layer. It takes some time and some patience, but that's what a lot of drawing is about, it does take patience. So it's good to start practicing that now. Now that you have a lightest tone, a middle gray tone, and a darkest tone, go ahead and see if you can shade Numbers 2 and 4 with each box. Look at the tones on either side of it and try to shade a gray that fits in between them using either your 2H pencil or your 2B pencil. Another way of thinking about the scale would be to call Number 1 the lightest gray, Number 2 is a light gray, Number 3 is a mid gray, Number 4 will be a dark gray, and Number 5 is the darkest gray. Remember light pressure and patients is the key to shading smooth even tones. Once you've shaded in boxes 1-5, have a look at them, think about whether the tones are evenly spaced apart. Is there an equal range between each tone, or are there two that look very similar and the jumps between the tones are too great? If so, you can go back over and just adjust some of those tones. So you have evenly spaced steps going from the lightest possible gray that you can create, through a middle gray and finishing Number 5 with the darkest possible gray.
11. Exercise: Shading 3D Shapes: Now imagine there is a light source coming from one direction. Any way you imagine the light hitting directly on that three-dimensional shape, there will be a highlight or a number 1 tone. Anyway, opposite the light source and behind on each where the light will not reach much will be a darker tone. Maybe a number 3 or number 4. If it helps, you can write these numbers next to the area you think should be that time. You can see on the square, the top surface is going to be number 1 because there's a lot of light that will reach that surface. This side opposite the light source, it might not be black, but it might be a number 4 tone, very dark gray. To the side here with some lighters reaching close to the light source it might be a number 2, a light gray, and it may be further down, closer to the base it could be a number 4. The line between an imaginary table that the cube is sitting on and the cube itself will be a number 5. There'll be a very dark shadow along that bottom edge. Once you've figured out your tones, very lightly shade in all of the areas with the lightest possible tone, the number 1 tone. Then we're going to build up our darker layers like we did in the previous exercise. Notice how my hand is moving loosely across the page and I'm using that loose grip. Even though I've identified that these other sides will be darker because they are further away from the light source, I'm still adding a light layer of shading first so that I can build up smooth, even layers as I go. Can imagine opposite the light source that there's a shadow being cast by the cube as well, as if it's sitting on a tabletop. Shade this one sun lightly, number 1 tone, and then we can start to build up our darker tones. Then you might want to allocate some numbers to that shadow so the closer to the base of the cube it is, it's going to be darker, further away from the cube, the shadow that it's casting will start to disappear. Maybe it'll only be a two. Once you've done a light base layer of shading over the whole object and the cast shadow, then start to build up your layers, still using a 2H pencil and take your time. You can always go darker, but it's pretty tricky and a bit messy to go lighter. When you're getting to the darker tones, you could switch to a 2B pencil as long as you're not too heavy-handed. Keep your touch very light and build up those layers, changing direction when you need to. If you feel like you're getting some white gaps between your shading lines then shade the opposite direction once you've got a nice coating of pencil down. On the front side of this cube, that is away from the light source, I'm aiming for a number 4 tone. The numbering system that we're using here only refers to the previous exercise where we created the shaded scale in the boxes numbered one to five. It's not a recognized way to refer to a particular tonal value. If you need to, you can take a look back at that exercise, think about what tone you're aiming for, and compare it to that box number. This front edge I'm aiming for a number 4. Once you've got three tones and hopefully you see it starting to pop and take on a bit more form as if it's got some white to it, the final tones to add are the very darkest tones. We can add a dark line along the base of the shape to indicate the minute space between the object and the surface it's sitting on where no light will reach. There shouldn't be any outlines around any of your shapes. The only dark line you have is that line along the base where it's sitting against our imaginary tabletop. As soon as you add a dark outline around anywhere else, you're actually flattening out the image because you're adding a tone which shouldn't be there. I'm taking my time to smooth out that layer of shading, make sure there's no drastic changes between the tones. Because we don't have these shapes in front of us with a particular light source on them, some of it is left up to your imagination. Where do you imagine the light would be hitting the most? Where do you imagine it's not reaching? Maybe on some of those surfaces, the top half of one side might be lighter than the bottom half of one side and they could be a smooth gradation going between them. Have a go at the pyramid on your own and I'll take you through shading a sphere once it's done. Select your light source first, indicate where the cast shadow is going to be, and then create a light layer of shading with your 2H pencil, the very lightest, and start to build up your tones. Remember, you can write down the numbers of the tones that you think the different parts should be if that helps get things clear in your head. [MUSIC]
12. Exercise: Shading A Sphere: So far we've been shading using a back-and-forth motion, creating a series of lines really close together and building up over top of those to get different tones. That's really useful for shapes that have flat edges, but when we're shading a sphere or something that's curved, sometimes those shading marks that we make from side-to-side, those lines actually break up the illusion of form. Have a go at this shading technique for the sphere, instead of shading side to side try shading in all different directions. Sounds funny, but try shading up and down and side to side and round and round so that you don't have any definite direction of line. You have lots of white gaps to start with, but the more you do this, the more you build it up, those white gaps will get filled and you should be able to create an even layer of shading. Can you see how by concentrating in the center of this area of shading, I can build up that area a little bit darker and then feather out the edges of it so it appears like it goes from dark in the middle out to light at the edges. This is how we're going to shade the sphere. If you find it difficult to shade in all different directions, up and down and side to side and round to round, then even think about just shading in small tight circles. Keeping it nice and light and then building up, we need to feathering off edges so that you don't have any strong divides between the darker areas and the lighter areas. Let's go back to our sphere and have a go. I'm going to identify the light source, mark out a cast shadow very lightly. Now I'm rubbing out some of that top edge because if I think about where the light is hitting, the part closest to the light source is going to be a number 1 and this dark edge around there is going to break that illusion, so even the edge has to be a number 1. The opposite side from the light source here is going to be about a number 4. Like the other shapes, I'm going to cover the whole area with a light layer of shading, but this time instead of side-to-side, I'm trying up and down and side to side and round and round. Or if that feels a little bit strange and you're having trouble controlling your pencil, just try round and round small circular movements. You can try the different grips, it might be easier to work in this really loose manner using the overhand grip. Once I've got a light layer of shading down, I'm starting to build up another layer. But because there's no edges on the sphere, I've got to be really careful that there's no strong lines, strong divides, between the different tones that I'm using. That's where this circular shading or this every direction shading can be useful. Moving to a 2B pen, I'm going to start from the darkest edge now and I'm going to try to integrate this dark tone into the shading that I've already got down there. I want the shading on the sphere to move from a dark tone through to a mid gray through to the lightest tone without any strong divides between them. Can you see that line between the dark tone and the mid tone? To get rid of that, I'm just shading over top of it, but with a really light pressure. Don't forget about the cast shadow as well. You want to build this up at the same time as shading the object, rather than shading the object perfectly and then having to come back and try to fill out their cast shadow. It's better to build up a drawing overall together if you can, rather than in little pieces. I'm shading that shadow with that same loose alternative shading method. Each time I want to add a darker layer of shading, I'm starting at the darkest edge, the bottom edge, and then moving my way up towards the lighter areas, so I can lessen the pressure of my pencil as I move upwards and hopefully get a nice smooth gradation between the tones. It's not until you're almost finished that you add in those darkest tone. The line underneath the sphere is going to be the darkest area because there'll be very little light reaching it. When you feel like you've finished the sphere, take a look at it. Think about whether you have nice smooth gradations between your tones or is there anywhere where you can see clearly that the tone changes. Because if there is, you need to go back over it and just very lightly blend those layers of shading together. There's no edges on a sphere, it should be a continuous gradual change from dark to light.
13. How To Use A Blending Stump: Here's a little something else you can try. If you have paper blending stumps or even cotton buds, you could use them to integrate your shading a little bit more so that you're smoothing out some of the marks from your shading. It's easy to get carried away with this, but it's best to use it sparingly. Otherwise, sometimes everything ends up just looking really gray and flat. Move the blending stamp or the cotton bud in small circular motions with just light pressure on the paper until you achieve the effect that you're happy with.
14. Shading Summary: Go through and shade at least four or five different 3D shapes. If you need to take a break between shapes, that's fine. But do try to complete this because as you do this, you're practicing that control of your pencil, you're practicing how to build up certain tones, how much pressure to use, what movements to use. So you're developing that muscle memory and that's really important. As you're shading, try to use a back and forth motion with your pencil, utilizing the side of the pencil lead. Take your time to fill in any white spaces between your shading marks, you can go back over lightly in the opposite direction to help with this. Avoid creating hard edges between patches of shading. Work lightly and gradually to create smooth transitions between light and dark areas. For each shape, make sure you do have a highlight tone, a mid-tone, and a shadow tone. It's those three tones that are going to help create the illusion of three-dimensional form.
15. Project: Shading A 3D Vessel: I'm going to take you through drawing a simple object, sketching it, and in shading it. I'm using this little white vessel. You can see it's quite shiny. I'm not going to focus on any of those highlights with the lightest touching it. Mostly just trying to create a sense of three-dimensional form. That's your focus. To start off, we will use our ellipses. Really nice loose marks. I'm holding the pencil overhand and moving from the shoulder. My hand is moving across the page. You can see the picture there. It's not the exact angle that I'm looking at, but it's pretty close. My drawing will end up being slightly different because I'm actually drawing this from life I have in front of me right now. Starting off with drawing your loose ellipses, trying to get the same kind of oval that you can see in that opening. By using a 2H pencil and these really light marks, that means that I can go through and rub out anything I don't want before I start building up the drawing. We're working on the foundation of the drawing. We're going to build it up in three stages. Foundation, then building up the layers, and then adding in the details. I drew the top eclipse and then I've drawn the bottom ellipse, giving myself an idea of what that might look like if the vessel is see-through. Then I've added in those sides. Using a putty eraser, you can just go around and clean up a little bit of their edges, especially any edges that you want to be really light. We don't want to outline anything with a dark line unless there is actually a dark line around it that we can see. This is a really simple drawing but because there's so much subtlety in the shading, there's no strong divides between light and dark. Everything is in gradation. It's going to take a few bit of time. Drawing does take some patience, especially this shading and building up stage. Pretty soon I'll speed up the video, but I just want to show you these first stages, putting in that foundation sketch and then building up your layers from lightest to dark. I started with a 2H pencil, and I'm just building up a nice even layer of shading, and then adding in the shadow as well. We want to build up the drawing overall together, rather than drawing the whole vessel and then having to come back and try and make the shadow look like it's part of it. While we're using that 2H pencil, I'm going to shade the foundation of the shadow as well. As I go, I'm tidying up a few little bits that I can see aren't quite right. I'm trying to keep that edge quite clean because it is really a white edge, and it's going to be defined by the darker part inside it. I'm going to start shading in that darker part, but I'm still working really lightly. You want to try and get everything in the right place using a 2H pencil, so we have a really good guide to then build upon. You can always go darker with your shading and move to a 2B pencil, but it's harder to go light once you've built up a lot of dark shading because when you're using an eraser, even a putty eraser, it's going to start to look messy, it'll look patchy. This is the base of the inside layer. Like I said, I'm not worrying about how dark it is, I'm just getting it laid out, and then I can build it up. Once we start building it up, we're going to be comparing the tones. How much darker is the inside part than the outside part? What number tone is it? Is it a number 1, one being our lightest, is it a number 5, five being our darkest? Or is it somewhere in between? Maybe it's a mid-tone, maybe it's a number 3. I'm going to speed things up a little bit because most of this is just building up layers and layers of shading. Once everything is laid out and you feel like it's mostly in the right place, we can start building up layers of shading. I'm still using a 2H pencil, but I'm going over again with another layer, changing the direction, making sure there's no obvious divides between my lighter tones and my darker tones. I want them to blend seamlessly from one to the other in a nice smooth gradation. As you're working on this, you're looking at a subject or the object, and you're comparing the whole time. Your view of it might change. You might see something new when you've been looking at it for a while. You might see a dark area. I switched to a 2B pencil here. I'm just building up those areas that I think are a little bit darker. You can see in the photo that the interior of the ball is darker on the right-hand side and then there's that lighter patch on the left-hand side. I'm just building up the right-hand side and the inside. That's going to define that front edge, that really light or that white edge. You can use your putty eraser to clean that up a little bit if it gets a little bit gray. I haven't used any outlines anywhere except perhaps right down the bottom there. If you have a look at the bottom of the bowl, there is a dark line. That would be your number 5 if you're thinking about the tones. One being the lightest and five being the darkest. Make sure you're building up your shadow at the same time so that the image is unified. Then once you've done your foundation, you've done some building of the layers, then you can start putting in some of the details. The main detail here is that dark line underneath. If you have a look at the photograph, it's not a solid line all the way across, and it's not a hard edged line. It's quite soft, especially on the shadow side, it has a soft edge to it. From here, it's just a matter of comparing and adjusting your tones. Have you got the darkest part darkest? Have you've got the lightest part lightest? Have you got the right relationship between the other tones, which are darker, and which are lighter? If you want to, you could go in and add the background to define that top edge. You see it's not quite like the photograph. I've moved the horizon line down the horizon line of the table. It's actually a little bit closer to what I can see. But putting in the darker background, if you squint, you'll see the wooden background is quite a bit darker than the bowl and the tabletop. Putting that in is going to define the edge of the bowl. Rather than putting an outline, we can essentially use a darker background to outline the bowl. As soon as you do that, you should get the sense that it's popping out of the page a little bit. Don't worry if your vessel is wonky. This is really just about getting that feeling of it being 3D, the illusion of a 3D form, not about proportion or measurements or anything like that. We'll get into that a little bit lighter. I've shaded in more of the tabletop. Comparing the tabletop to the vessel, it's darker than the bowl, but it's lighter than the wall at the back. Everything when it comes to shading is about comparisons. If you want to use your blending stick, you could do that. Just be careful, especially depending on what kind of paper you're using. It doesn't just smudge everything to very boring, flat gray. I actually prefer the marks, even though it's quite strong pencil marks that you can see in the background, I prefer those to a really smooth surface because it gives the drawing a little bit more life, makes it look hand-drawn, has some energy. You need certain conditions to be able to shade something perfectly smoothly. This isn't the right paper for that. It's probably not the right pencils for that either. I'm just tidying up some of the edges. In this part I'm working on now, it's quite a tricky area because the room is white, but this gray section on the left front corner, if you could call it a corner, it's quite tricky to figure out where the lightest part ends and where it starts becoming gray, and then where it gets light again. This is by no means a perfect drawing. I can see myself that there's things that are not right with it. It's not quite the right shape. It's maybe a little bit taller than it should be. The angles on the sides aren't quite right, and the oval of the opening is just a little bit wonky. You can get that feeling about it that there's something not quite right with it. I can't quite figure it out so you see me working back and forth on it a little bit. But overall, we're aiming for the illusion of three-dimensional form. If you can start off really lightly, don't have any dark outlines where they shouldn't be and build up your layers gradually having those nice smooth gradations from light to dark, then you should be able to get something that feels like it's got some weight to it, it's got some depth. You could put your hand inside that vessel, even if it's a little bit wonky.
16. Part2: Finding Edges : There are two obstacles to overcome when learning to draw. The first is practical technique. What materials to use, how to control a pencil, practicing coordinating the hand and the eye. The second obstacle is to do with changing the way that we see. As a child, we learned to communicate visually by drawing symbols of what we see around us. Children enjoy scribbling, mark-making, and storytelling in art. It's not until about eight or nine years old that they even interested in creating a realistic likeness of what they're drawing. As an adult, drawing realistically is usually our main concern. But by this time we have strong preconceptions about the objects around us based on our experience of them. This, plus our inclination to communicate using visual symbols, makes it difficult for us to then clearly see the lines, shapes, and tones in front of us when we learn to draw. Here's an example of how this can cause problems. We recognize that a picture of an apple is a round shape with the stalk and a leaf on top of it. We believe this because one, we've learned that this is a symbol for apple. Two, we've experienced the roundness of an apple. But if you take a look at a bunch of apples, you'll see that each one is different to the other. Some have straight angles, or bumps, or lean to one side, and to be able to draw a particular apple, we need to override the preconceived ideas we have in our head and see it not as an apple, but as a line, shape, and tone. When it comes to drawing people the challenges even more difficult, partly because of the complexity of the human body, but also because of our intense experience of an emotional connection to the body. In this lesson, we'll try out some different approaches to seeing and drawing, including gesture drawing, contour drawing, drawing negative spaces, and upside down drawing.
17. Understanding Gesture : Gesture drawing is a style of quick sketching useful for warming up the eye and the hand. It should be performed with energetic movement of the pencil working from the shoulder and keeping the whole arm moving constantly. Gesture drawings are completed very quickly. They can be as short as 20 seconds or as long as a couple of minutes. The aim is to gain an overall impression of the form and movement of your subject. Gesture drawing is useful for developing a direct connection between the hand and the brain by working constantly and quickly. There's no time to think about it.
18. Exercise: Gesture Drawing: For this exercise, we're going to work quickly for just a couple of minutes. We're going to use a large piece of paper, if you have one, and a permanent marker. The reason we're using the permanent marker is we don't want to think about having to rub anything out, we're just going to go for it. Set up a small still life or use the photograph provided in the reference or on-screen. Take a look at your subjects. Then, when you're ready, put pen to paper and start to draw as you look around those objects. Feel like as you follow the forms with your eye, you're also following with your pen on the paper. The movement is constant, you keep moving. Don't take your pen off the paper. Don't stop your pen. Keep following the forms, building up lines and adjusting as you go. When you feel like you've captured the essence to the form, just stop. You end up with a drawing that is very sketchy, very loose, but it has some energy to it and it's giving you a really quick and intense look at that subject. You're drawing so quickly that you don't really even have time to think about what you're trying to make it look like. You're making a direct connection between your hand and your eye, and that's what we want. Your eye need to capture just the basic essence of that form. For instance, this jug, the spout is really important, the handle is really important. When I move to the bottle, I'm looking at the opening of the bottle, those ovals that run through the bottle, through the base of the neck, and in the bottom of the bottle as well. Once you've done the exercise in permanent marker, divide a sketch book page up in to two and choose one of the objects to do a quick two-minute gesture drawing in pencil. For this bottle, I'm starting with those oval shapes of the opening, the base of the neck, and the bottom of the bottle because it's the roundness that's really important that is a feature of this bottle. Then, I can add in the edges and only then once I've got the essence of the form down, I might go through and add in a few details. You might surprise yourself with this and come up with something that is more accurate than you would think or that has a very different style to what you are used to drawing in. Two minutes and then stop. Set your timer again. Choose another object. This time, set a timer for one minute. Same process, choose your object. As soon as you start to draw, keep your pencil moving. Keep looking at the object. Your eye should be flicking back and forth between your drawing and the object constantly. You need to stare in just at your page. If you do end up staring just at the object, your hand is still moving, you're still drawing at the same time. Another way to think about this would be what would it look like if the object was made out of wire framing. You can see through to the other side, you are capturing the weight and the form of the object. You can also draw through the object. Do as many of these quick gesture drawings as you'd like. Just remember to keep it simple. You are capturing the overall form of the object. You are exploring it with your eye and your pencil. You're not worrying about what it looks like or whether you've got perfect proportions or all the details. If you find this really difficult, don't worry, it's just a practice in loosening up and making that connection between the hand and the eye. You don't always have to draw like this. But it's also good to practice things that challenge you, things that feel uncomfortable to start with. The more you do them, the better you get at them and the more useful they will become, the more you can apply these to your drawings in real life. It's particularly useful if you're sketching outdoors or sketching something that's moving. You are practicing drawing really quickly and capturing just what you need to to convey what it is that you're looking at. Really, all drawing is is looking at something and replicating it on a two-dimensional surface. It sounds really easy, but there are these obstacles that get in the way. This gesture drawing can help a bit to override some of those obstacles. When you're gesture drawing, remember to keep your hand moving constantly. As your eye moves across the form, your hand moves at the same time. You're exploring the form with your eye and your hand, your pencil at the same time.
19. Understanding Contour Drawing: Contour drawing is a way of overriding preconceived ideas of the way an object looks. It's the opposite to gesturing in the way we do it, but it operates in a similar way. By drawing the edge or the contour of an object at a very slow pace, you're more likely to see things exactly as they are and not as you believe them to be. By looking at minute areas of an object at a time rather than looking at the object in a way that you can name it, it's harder for the brain to put symbols in place of what you're actually seeing. The key to contour drawing is to keep your pen so touching the page into work patiently and slowly. Whereas gesture drawing, we are drawing so quickly that we don't have time to think about things. With contour drawing, we're drawing so slowly that we can't think about the object as a whole. We can only think about the very minute area of what we're drawing at that particular second.
20. Exercise: Contour Prep : This exercise is a practice for contouring. You can download these resource shapes and have a go at slowly following the shape that you can see in the left-hand box. Start at one end, move your eye along the line. As you do so, move your pencil along the line at the same speed. As your eye changes direction or turns a corner, so does your pencil. Keep your pencil on your page the whole time. When you come to the fourth box, you can see it's a lot more complex. As you go through this exercise, you can choose which path you take. If you come to a point where two lines cross, it's up to you to choose whether you continue the line that you're working on or you move onto the new line. This is a little bit what it's like when you're drawing an object because you might come to intersecting edges, you might come to contour lines or edges that go within the object rather than just around the outside. It doesn't matter which one you do first. You can just follow it at a whim, whichever way feels right to you. Eventually, you're going to come back to those other edges, those other contour lines. If you feel like you've gotten off track or gone the wrong way, go back to the last correct point and simply draw over top. It's much better to practice this exercise with authentic and honest looking rather than skimming over parts. During the practice, you're learning how to see like an artist sees.
21. Exercise: Blind Contour : We are going to do some contour drawing, we'll do some blind contour drawing and then some modified contour drawing. I've gone to my garden and found some things it would be interesting to draw. I've got a little spider there, itching and right, have a look for objects that are preferably organic so they have some really interesting lines and they're not predictable. These are just some examples of what you could use. A small pot plant like this would also work, but just remember that contour drawing is really slow practice, take our time, so it's better to start with something really small, nothing too big. I'm going to do this one with the black ink pen and I suggest you do the same if you've got one even a ballpoint pen is more permanent, and it means that we have to be a little bit more careful about what we're doing. I'm going to set a timer for five minutes. This first drawing we do is a blind contour drawing and there a couple of rules. The first one is that you are not allowed to look at your drawing on the page. The second rule is that you can't take your pen off the page. Set yourself up so that you can't see what you're drawing. It may be that you have the object on the table and you can draw on the page underneath the top page so you can't see what you're doing or just make sure that you're focusing only on the object. Really important that you don't get distracted and look at what it is that you're drawing on the page. First thing to do is find a place to start. I'm going to start moving my eye very slowly along the edge or the contour of the object. I'm trying to look at every single millimeter of their edge. As your eye moves, your hand is going to move at the same speed. When your eye turns a corner, your hands, your pen on the paper is also going to turn a corner. When your eye crosses a small bump in the edge, your pen is also going to do the same. Take your time, keep it really nice and slow. Imagine you are actually drawing your pen line on the edge of that object. Or another way to think about it is you're tracing the object's edge with your finger. You can continue to move around the edge of one petal and then move to another petal, or you could just go along whatever edge your eye takes you along. The key is not to lift your pen off the paper. What that means is if you head down one direction and you need to get back to another place, you need to trace back over with your eye and with your pen, the area that you've already done. Because we're not looking in our drawing, the line is probably going to go in a different place. But that's okay. This is an exercise in looking. You might be able to see where I am drawing with this. I've gone from couple of petals on the right-hand side and then up one of the stems and then down the other stem. I'm not really doing this in any order. I'm just following whatever edge I come to, changing direction with my eye and my pen is doing the same thing. It doesn't matter which edge you go along as long as you are looking carefully, slowly, patiently. You don't want to miss any millimeter of that edge. You might feel your eye starting to speed up. You might feel some feelings of restlessness or impatience. Just give yourself this time to really focus. It's a good mindfulness exercise as much as a drawing exercise. It's only five minutes. Five minutes of focus following an edge, practicing how to look closely and carefully, and how to coordinate our hand and our eye so they both moving at the same time. So our hand is recording what our eye sees as it sees it. It's pretty clear by now that my drawing is not going to look like the object and that's okay, because when we're drawing we really do need to be able to see what it is we're putting down on the page and make comparisons as we go. But we're going to do that shortly. This one is getting into that zone of looking. Even if you come to a straight edge, don't zip your eye along and move your pen really quickly along it, follow it slowly each millimeter of that line you're going to look at and draw. We've just got a minute or so to go, keep drawing and I'll let you know when the five minutes is up. That's five minutes. What that's done is given me a good practice at looking. When I look at this drawing now, I can see that there are some paths that I have really picked up on and noticed that I might not have noticed otherwise.
22. Exercise: Modified Contour : This modified contour drawing will go for at least 10 minutes, but I will speed up part of the video. We can start together and send in, set yourself some time away from the video, away from any noise, any distractions, and set a timer for five minutes or 10 minutes, your choice. This second drawing is a modified contour drawing. This time you can look at your page. We're going to be flicking our eye between the object and what we're drawing. Starting the same way, finding a place to start. Then as your eye starts to move around it each, your pen is moving at the same time. You're looking mostly at the object, but every now and again, you just flicking your eye back to your drawing, so that you can make sure you're going in the right direction. You can judge when you need to stop and turn a corner. Like the blind contour drawing, we're drawing with a single slow line and keeping the pen on the page as much as possible, at least to start with. Make sure you don't miss any detail. Even if it looks like a plain and simple straight line, move your eye slowly along that edge and have your pen move at the same time as your eye. We're trying to create a coordination of speed, of movement between the hand and the eyes, so that they work in tandem with each other. You might find that you come to a point where two parts join up and your drawing doesn't quite match up. Instead of forcing it to match up or trying to make the ends meet, just keep looking, keep drawing what you see. You might end up having to do the same line two or three times, and each time it'll be slightly different, but each time it will be more and more accurate. You can come inside the outline to draw the contours that you can see there. Any edges, any lines that you can see, whether they are an outline or whether they're part of the surface of what you're drawing, you can draw. If you need to move to another part of the drawing, you're going to double back over what you've done, still looking as you do so. That's just about five minutes. I'm going to speed up the video and probably work on this for about 10 minutes, just so you can see what the finished drawing will look like. Can you get rid of all of that ego, and concern, and worry about what it's going to look like. Can you just experience this practice of looking and drawing. That's all we're doing. That's all we're thinking about. You may find that you have a voice inside your head that is talking along as you draw. You may be describing to yourself which direction your eye is moving in, and it's okay. You might be saying to yourself something like, "And then it boots down here, and then it turns this way, and then it set a little bit. That dialogue is fine, but if you feel that sense of worry coming in or you feel anxious about this, see if you can let that go and just treat this as an exercise in practicing to see the way that an artist sees. You can see that as I start to add in some of those contour lines inside the outline, some of the surface marks start to create a really interesting drawing that has a lot of honesty in it, and looks like something from nature, because you've spent the time to pay attention to all those small details, things you would otherwise overlook. As I'm drawing these fine contours on the inside of the petal set undefined lines, I'm adjusting the weight of my pen on the paper, so you can draw a really fine, light line, maybe a slightly broken line by just barely resting the pen on the paper.
23. Contour Drawing Summary : Contour drawing is not easy. It takes practice, it takes control of the mind was so used to moving quickly and looking at our phones and things changing all the time. To sit still and draw for five or 10 minutes can be a real challenge. But have a goal, see your timer even just for three minutes to start with, and see if you can focus on edge of what you're drawing. Practice coordinating your hand and your eye to move in tandem with each other. Practice noticing every little change in that edge that you can say what is unique about that particular thing you're drawing. Can you capture every minute part of that edge. Think millimeter by millimeter so that you don't miss anything unique to that object.
24. Understanding Negative Space : Negative space is the background space around and between objects. If you can focus on seeing shapes of negative space instead of the object itself, you're more likely to draw what you actually see rather than what you know of the object. The reason for this is that we know, for instance, what a flower should look like so it's easy for our minds to alter our perception. However, we don't have names for the negative spaces, such as these in the image on screen. Those spaces in the background, we don't have any names for them, we can only draw them by purely looking. It's like looking at the background as a silhouette to help you see the true edge of what you are drawing. In this exercise, we're going to focus our eye on those negative spaces, rather than on the flowers themselves.
25. Exercise: Negative Space: This quick exercise on negative space is just to get your head around what negative space is and how we can change our viewpoint to look not at the positive spaces, but at the spaces in between what we're drawing, the negative spaces. You can download and print out this image, and then simply draw around the negative spaces that you can see. In this image, it's any of the areas that are black. As we do this, we're trying to focus our eyes just on that shape that's created by the negative space, really trying to see it is almost like a physical shape rather than an absence of something. We're drawing one space, two spaces, three spaces, carrying on and adding in all of the negative spaces or negative shapes that you can see. If you don't have access to a printer or can't print this out, in a moment, we're going to go through and have a go at drawing these shapes in our sketchbook. Take a good look, get your mind used to looking at the negative shapes. Notice what kind of shapes they are. Then moving to our sketchbook, we can draw in a rectangle around about the same size as the one on the page. I have a go at drawing in the negative spaces that you can see into that rectangle. As I follow the edges, I'm looking at the edge of the negative space, not the edge of the tulip. Think about where it joins up with the sides of the rectangle. I've done this shape and this shape. Now I'm moving to this one here, following the edge with my eye, but keeping in mind that I want to focus on the negative space. We're training our eye to look at those negative spaces rather than jumping straight to the object itself. The reason we're doing this is because we have an idea that any object that we're looking at, we have these preconceived ideas and those can get in the way sometimes. Looking at a flower, we have an idea of what the petals are like just from our experience of them. Looking at these negative spaces, we don't have any experience of this particular shape or this particular shape, so all I can really do is look at it and observe it and draw it. We're tricking our mind into saying things in a fresh way, so that we don't put any preconceived ideas in place of what we're looking at by focusing on these negative spaces. I've drawn this one, this one, this one. I've drawn one edge of the space here, but now I'm going to go and draw this one over here just because it's a little bit easier for me to focus on. Now I can go and draw this edge of that large negative space, keeping my focus on net space itself, thinking about drawing the edge of that space, not drawing the edge of this flower. It's a little bit of a mind game and you have to play with yourself. Keep your attention on the negative spaces. Obviously, when you're drawing, you're not always going to be just drawing the negative spaces, but this is a really useful tool to be able to switch your eye between the positive and the negative to make sure that you are actually drawing what you see in front of you. If you feel like you need more practice this, our second image here on the resource sheet as well. Again, draw around the image first, focusing your mind and your eye on the negative shapes rather than the positive shapes. Treat this as an exercise and training your mind to look at the negative spaces. When you're ready, you could have a go at doing the same thing as we did with this one, drawing a rectangle, and then having a go focusing on the negative spaces when drawing those in.
26. Understanding Upside Down Drawing : This now well-known technique, found in the book Drawing on the Right side of the Brain by Betty Edwards works in a similar way to drawing negative space. By simply turning an image upside down and viewing it this way while we draw it, we're able to more clearly see the line, shapes, and tones that make up the image without those symbols and our heads getting in the way. Because it's much more difficult to identify with the subject when it's upside down. It's like tricking your brain into seeing something for the first time in a completely new and objective way. Go ahead and download this image to do this exercise.
27. Exercise: Upside Down Drawing : The idea behind drawing upside down is that when we take an image like this one here, which we recognize as a person, a face, a hand and turn it upside down, we can identify those areas quite so readily and so release tint to try and make it look like something that we know. We really just have to look at the edges and draw them in the way we see them. Try and find shapes, break it up into small puzzle pieces that we then join together. Choose a place to start. You might start at the opposite side. I'm left-handed so I'm starting at the side here. It doesn't really matter where you start. Following the edges, flicking your eye back and forth between the image and what you're drawing, and coordinating your hand and your eye so they move at the same time. When you get to a corner or a change in direction mean you're going to make that change. If you've done the negative space exercise, then you can also flick your eye between spaces looking at the shape here and see the positive shape and it can help. You're going to move back down to here and work on the hand for a little while, or speed up this video. But just to get you started, I'll take you through some of it. Don't worry about rubbing anything out if there's something that's not quite right like this here. It's not quite what I see there, then you just go over it and draw it again. This is just a practice in seeing, it's not about producing a final artwork. It's not the negative space there that I can look at. Get in all of the lines that you can say, all of the details. The fact that this is a line drawing does make it easier to see clearly the edges, and you can see that this hand looks fairly realistic. I might not have been able to do that without having a look at this upside down but you can apply this to other images, to photographs. So if we take this one here that we were drawing for the negative space, as well as looking at negative spaces, you can turn it upside down and have a go at drawing Elvis's face. Because we're not so familiar with these shapes when they're upside down, it's easier for us to see them clearly rather than drawing a nose the way we think a nose should look. I'll speed up the video here, but have a go and take your time. You can always take a break whenever you want and come back to this exercise, just when you want to get back into the drawing zone. Really try to see this as an exercise in looking. It's not about producing a perfect artwork. It's about training our eye about practicing looking in that very careful way where we are identifying in each and following it with our pen or our pencil. When we get to a more finished drawing, we're not going to use this the whole time, this method of drawing. But we can bring that in when we need to. So we learn proportion, we learn these different ways of seeing, we learn that turning our image upside down can help us to see things in a fresh and different way, and then we choose what we want to use later on. It's like having a toolbox and then we pick and choose what we need depending on what is required. I hope you follow through with this, keep working on that image even if you do a little bit and then come back to it later and do a little bit more. Put on the practice and the more you do exercises like this, the better you'll get at seeing and drawing what you see.
28. Part 3: In Proportion : If our goal is to draw realistically, then, being able to accurately measure and draw proportions is equally as important as sketching and shading. We can use scales for measuring proportion to do two things. Firstly, to correctly draw the dimensions of one subject. How does its height compare with its width? Is it taller than it is wider? Secondly, we can measure proportion to enable us to capture a sense of perspective and depth in our drawing by showing the correct relationship between objects that are close and objects that are farther away. This term sighting just means using our pencil, or our hand, or our eye to measure and compare the proportions of what we're looking at. It's all about overriding what you know about these objects and finding a way to accurately compare them. If you look at the object here, you'll find that the comparative proportions are very different than reality. To get the same sense of distance, depth, and perspective in our drawing, we would need to reflect this comparison.
29. Understanding 'Sighting' : How do we measure proportion? Sighting is a method of measuring that involves using your pencil as a ruler of sorts to compare the lengths and angles of what you're drawing. It can be used to achieve accurate proportion within one object or to compare proportions between different objects. We can use sighting in a two-dimensional space, such as on our drawing page or we can use it in a three-dimensional space when we're drawing from real life. To use the method of sighting, we simply hold our pencil in our hand, make sure our arm is completely outstretched in front of us so that we're looking at our pencil and our pencil is between the subject matter and our eye. It's really important that you have your elbow straight because as you move the pencil closer to your eye or further away from your eye, you're going to get different measurements. By keeping the elbow straight, we know that the distance from our eye is always going to be the same. There are three main things we can measure using the length of a pencil and keeping our arm outstretched. Lengths and widths. Line up the top of your pencil, and move your thumb along it to take a measurement of the width of the object. Hold this, and in keeping the arms straight, turn your hand to compare the measurement to the height. You can also compare this initial measurement to other objects in the same. Angles. You can use the line of your pencil to judge the angle of a surface by holding the length of the pencil alongside it. Points that line up. Use your pencil horizontally or vertically to see where one object lines up within another object in a [inaudible]
30. Proportion Project: Still Life: What I'd like you to do is see up your own still-life. Find three objects, make sure they're quite simple, they don't have any decorations on them, they're very plain and arrange them in a way that the bases line up in different ways so they intersect across different objects. Don't have them all in a straight row because you want to make this a little bit challenging and make it useful so that you can actually use these sighting methods. Then have a go at sighting using your arm outstretched, the methods that I've already shown you. First step is to decide how big on your piece of paper your drawing is going to be. Do you want to make the base of the first object that big and create a really small drawing or do you want to make the base of the first object this big and make a much bigger drawing. Then start taking measurements, heights, and widths, comparing them in your subject matter using your outstretched arm, keeping the elbow straight, running your thumb up and down your pencil, turning from horizontal to vertical. Whatever relationship you find in that subject matter, you're then going to make sure the relationship is the same in your drawing. I'm going to repeat it because it happens a lot. You're [inaudible] taking that measurement that you take there and putting it onto your drawing like this. Because we want to be able to draw this at any size and that's limiting us to one particular size, it's going to be very small drawing. We're taking the relationship of the proportions in the subject matter and then making sure that the relationship of the comparison between those proportions is the same relationship in our drawing.
31. Exercise: Drawing Proportions Of One Object : I'm going to take you through how to use siting on a photograph to measure the proportions of one object. I have this photograph of the apple here, but you can download this if you wanted to print it off yourself. Just start by having a look at some of the proportions here. I'd like to start with the base measurement and for me that just makes the most sense. You might decide to start with the height measurement, but usually either the horizontal, or the vertical, the width, or the height, you'd start with one of those. If I've made this my base measurement here, every measurement I type from now on is going to be related to this here, this is my unit of measurement and I'm going to see how many times this fits into the height and maybe the width across the widest point as well. If I put a axis through here, vertical axis right through the center, and we're going to measure how tall this apple is through the center. I take this measurement here, my unit of measurement, there it is there, it's from the tip of my pencil to where my fingers and my thumb meet. I'm going to turn this around and see how many times it fits into the height of the apple. This is one, put my finger there is a little marker, two times which is nice and convenient. If you have downloaded the photograph, you might want to make some notes, so I could put times two, and like I said, everything is going to refer back to this unit of measurement. I didn't have to say times two of what, I just know that it's times two of my unit of measurement, I could also measure the widest point here. Again, taking my unit of measurement, lining it up, I just check that. I'm going to my finger here. That's one. It's just slightly less than two. For the sake of argument, I could say that it's two, but let's say it's one and 9/10. It's this one here. Those are the main measurements that I need to know, and if I was doing this from real life, from an actual apple, I'd be taking the same measurements, but I'd be holding my pencil out in front of me, lining it up with my eye then taking a horizontal measurement from the base of the apple then comparing it to the height of the apple. If I want to draw this now I'm going to map out the same comparative measurements that I've taken here. What I'm definitely not going to do is take this and put that measurement on here. That's a mistake that happens quite often in class. I want to make it really clear you're not taking this in this. We don't want to make an apple that is exactly the same size as this one here, we want to draw an apple that has the same proportion. It could be bigger, it could be smaller. Just to prove that point, I'm going to make mine a bit bigger. This is going to be the base and you can see that it's quite different to that there, they don't match. But I'm going to follow the same processes I did when I measure this out here. I'm going to get the same comparisons, the same relationship between the base and the height. What you could do now is you could follow along with me [inaudible] drawing an apple to these proportions. You can start off any size you want. That very first mark that you made determines help if you're drawing is. I could have made it a really small line at the base, then my apple is only going to be about this big. But I'm going to do mine this big, so this's my scene to axis. Remember this scene to axis on the apple that I'm drawing, my subject, is two times the base. So in my drawing, it also has to be two times the base. I can take this, and we go, one, two. That's where the top of my apple was going to go to through that scene to axis. The other thing I measured was the widest point, and I have a little bit of an issue here because where I measured the widest point, the widest point of the apple isn't right in the center of the apple, it's a little bit higher up. What I could do is maybe take this base measurement and see where the widest point of the apple falls along with scene to axis. It's just one and maybe 1/5. What I'm doing now is finding the line with that widest point which is one and 1/5, and it's not super accurate science. If you wanted to do a highly technical drawing of this, then you'd probably actually be using rulers and decimal points and all sorts of things. But this is the way that we can apply it to real life. If that's going to be where my widest point is and I figured out that the widest point is one and 9/10, just a little bit less than two of these here. I could do, let's take this, we could maybe go from the scene to maybe just make it slightly less on each side. It's going to be a widest point there, this is the widest point of my apple. Now I have the relative dimensions and I could even just loosely sketch my apple in here if I wanted to now. But there's a couple of other things we can use our siting for. We can use it to measure angles, so I can take a look at this angle here. This is really good for measuring curves. Anywhere you see a curve, if you can break it up into maybe three angles, you're going to have a lot more accuracy than if you just try to draw the curve. Because we tend to exaggerate these curves when we draw them. There's this angle here, I'm going to compare that to a horizontal. It's maybe, this could be about 45 degrees. This one here looks just slightly less, perhaps this one is 45 degrees and this one here is a little bit greater, this one might be 50 degrees. This is the angle that is coming up here from the base. I could draw that angle in here, in here. If we were doing this from real life, we'd be using a pencil. Same way we did here on a two-dimensional surface, but we'd be holding it out in space and we'd just be lining it up with the angles that we can see as I line up with our eye. There is angle here which is on a slight incline, everything should match up now. If you wanted to get really technical, you could measure the links of these angles that we're putting in, but it does get a little bit complicated because we are dealing with a curve. I'm really just using those angles as a way of checking what I think should be drawn there. There's a slight angle here which is probably quite important to put in. It goes from the center-line, that's maybe on the bud. Maybe 10 or 15 degrees, then this line here is actually completely horizontal. It goes up so slightly, but coming out from the center-line it's horizontal, and those are really good things to look for. Anywhere you see a horizontal line or a vertical line we know what those are, they're really easy to draw in. If you can find those, you're only going to help. We could look at the angle of the stem, if I think about a right angle, then it's definitely greater than 45 degrees. You don't have to even name these. If you don't want to say that certain degree, you could just look at it and gauge it, then make sure it's the same and you're drawing as well. Here's the stem. I'm using a too big pencil so you can see it but from there if you're using a two inch pencil, you'd just be drawing over top, and those lines, those construction lines or foundation lines would disappear. Once you've done your proportions, you've mapped them out, then you can draw in the details as you shading at the top. It's just a really basic example of how to measure the proportions, I can see there's still a few little things that aren't quite right, there's something not quite right here, I think I've gone in a little bit too soon, so it probably goes out a little bit. I'm trying to break it up into straight lines, like that. The main thing to understand from this is that the proportions are relative. I could have done exactly the same exercise here, but drawn a really teeny tiny apple down the bottom here. It would still be that apple, it would just be a much smaller version. It would be that apple because I've measured the proportions and I've made sure that the same relationship is happening in my drawing here.
32. Exercise: Comparing Proportions of Multiple Objects: For this exercise, I'm going to take you through citing and proportion. But this time we're going to have a look at how it works when you've got more than one object. I've got this photograph here that I'm going to use. You can download this if you want to. This exercise here is in preparation for you having a go at setting up a still life yourself and measuring proportion from life. Even though we're going to be taking measurements on this two-dimensional surface like this, I'll also show you how I would be taking the measurements in a three-dimensional situation or a real-life situation where I have the still life here in front of me and I'm using my paint. Holding my arm outstretched and using my thumb to make the measurements and taking that measurement of the object there. I'm going to start exactly the same way as I would with one object. I'm going to measure out all of the first object. Then I'm going to take a unit of measurement from this and use it to measure these other objects. I work quite quickly and you can copy me. You can follow along with me as I do this just to get a feel for how to do it. Practice is everything. Let's take a few measurements from here. First, I'm going to use the base as my unit of measurement. We're going to need to measure the height. We're going to need to measure the height of the opening, and we're going to need to measure the widest point across here. All of those I'm going to compare to my base measurement here. I need to start by deciding how big my drawing is going to be and just to make sure I can fit it on my page here. I'm going to make it about this big. It's possibly slightly smaller than that there. It doesn't really matter how big it is. All I need to do is make sure that any measurements and proportions I put on here have the same relationship as the ones in the photograph. This base here is my unit of measurement. I'm going to take that. We're going to see how many times that fits into the full height of this little cup here. It fits one and a third. That's going to tell me how high this needs to be in my drawing. It needs to be one and a third times the base. One and a third. You notice I'm taking this base measurement and comparing everything to that. I'm not taking the base measurement of the photograph and then bringing it over, even though it might be fairly similar. I'm taking a measurement here, one and a third. I'm making sure that relationship is the same here. Take my base one and a third. That's the very top of the vessel. Need to see where this rim of the vessel starts. Again, the base. It's about maybe two-thirds of the base. You can even just by eye have a look and go, okay? Yeah, this opening here is a little bit less than each side there. The widest point is right in the middle of their opening. Let's see how wide the opening is at the widest point. One and two-thirds. Well, lots of thirds happening here. That widest point of the opening needs to be one and two-thirds of the base. Here's the base. It's a little bit tricky here because we're also trying to make sure it's symmetrical. Let's just take a guess. Some of it is guesswork. One. I'm going to come in a bit here. One and two-thirds maybe come in just tiny little bit more. Now I can start to join these up. I can check the angles now to make sure that when I join these up it's going to be the right angle. Let's say it's definitely greater than 45 degrees. Maybe about 50 or 60. Mine might be a little bit too much and maybe I need to just make a few little minor adjustments. I'm drawing really dark so you can see it, but you would be using a 2H pencil, super light so that you can go over anything lighter with your shading or building up your font. Okay, next thing I need to do is start to bring in these other objects. As much as you can, you want to stick to the same unit of measurement. I'm going to stick to the space of the first object because if I take this unit of measurement and the next time maybe I used this and use it to measure something else. Each time you're going to get a degree of error, because this isn't a super accurate method. It's the way artists work. It's the way we can use sighting to draw, but it's not down to the decimal point. Okay, here's something else we can measure. We can measure where about the base of this bottle lines up well or where it intersects through that vessel. This is where you would use lining upwards. You'd hold your pencil on a horizontal line and look at your object in front of you, and you can run your pencil up and down the same and see where things intersect. I can already see that this section here is greater than this section on that front wall of the vessel. I could even just take a bit of a guess. That's where the bottle is going to start. I can check the base of the bottle. Take the base of the little cup, and the base of the bottle is about two-thirds. Again, it's slightly less than two-thirds. It's about here. I can measure the height of the bottle, again, taking my very first measurement. Everything's coming back to that first unit of measurement. One, I use my other finger as a marker, two, we've got two up to there, about where the shaft of the bottle starts to go inwards. One, two, and then the rest of it is another base length. This should take us up to the top of the bottle there. If I want to get super accurate, I can measure the opening of the bottle, how wide is it compared to the base? Let's do that. I'll probably, actually, find these angles first, and then just take a guess. But for the sake of this exercise, I'm going to take the base measurement here, the opening of the bottle at the top is less than 1/2 of that. I have to make sure my drawing, the opening of the bottle here is less than 1/2 of the base of this vessel. Everything is relative and it's less than 1/2, but one might be a little bit too much. Less than 1/2. Let's just make it a little bit wider. This is where you can bring in a little bit of your gist to drawing too. You can see everything starts to come together, never really using one tool or one technique in isolation, but they're all useful tools. Then we need to add in this apple here. I haven't put in the curve at the bottom. That's something I could do later, maybe looking at the negative space in here. Again, seeing if you can use straight lines to put in those curves rather than just doing a curve like this because you end up with something quite exaggerated. Let's put this apple and the first thing we need to do is find the position of the apple. Where does it line up on a horizontal line with everything else? It's on a higher level than the base of the bottle, that intersects just beneath the lip of the cup and the front there, so it shouldn't sit right about here. It should be higher than the base of the bottle. This is the base of the bottle, here is the base of the apple on a horizontal line, so always on a horizontal line. It's about right there. See those two horizontal lines same as in my photograph. I could think about, well, where does the apple intersect on a vertical line? It's fairly close to the centerline. We can divide this space between the centerline in each of the base, so up into four sections. In this first section here is where the apple will want to sit. There's different ways you can think about this. It really comes down to, what makes sense to you? How do you understand it? We can think about, where does this top of the apple here and sit with the bottle, so it happens to be the backline of the table if you're putting the tabletop in. Let's say we could think about whether it's halfway, it's definitely above halfway. I'm going to take a guess and say maybe about there, but then we could also check it. We could take our base measurement, see how many times to the top of the apple. One, probably about one and a half. Take the base measurement, 1 and 1/2, and it's about where I had my line. The apple was going to go in here. How far across does the base of the apple come? We could compare it to our base of the cup again. Take that measurement, it's about half of the base of the cup. The base of the apple is about half the base of the cup, just put it in. We've got a framework for our apple here. We've got the height of it. We've got the base, we've got one each. Then we can put in these angles here, this one, this one here, especially along the top. I'm going to just do that by eye, but you can definitely measure them if you want to, give them a name. How many degrees do you think it is? You can actually take this measurement here and put it on here if you can keep a steady hand. Doesn't work so well in real life. There's a straight line across the top. You can see that part of the apple here is actually indeed straight, is a horizontal line and then it starts to come down. Got this line here of the part where the apple starts to deepen, so I can think about that angle. You can actually start to, in a way, triangulate all of this. You could think about, well, how does this line up with the top of the bottle? How does the top inch of the top corner of the apple here line up with the top of the bottle? What angle is it on? See if you've got the same angle. How does the bottom corner of the apple line up with the bottom corner of the little cup, and the same on this side?
33. Proportion Summary: What I've got now is a drawing that has the same proportions as the subject matter. I could have started really small. I could have gone really big. It just happens at mines fairly similar size to the photograph here. But what's really important is that the proportions are same. You can run your eye over things as well, and maybe now think about negative space. Have a look at these spaces on here, that can help you see things differently the whole time we're trying to override some of those preconceptions we might have. We're trying to see more clearly. By switching the way that you look at things from one mode to another, from analytical siting and proportion to negative space, to looking at shapes of shadow, all of that is going to help bring this together. Another thing is we don't want a super boring drawing. We don't want it to be just a perfect proportions. We want to bring in some shading, we want to bring in some life to it as well. Looking at the negative spaces, looking at contour drawing, especially when you get up to something organic like an apple, those methods of looking are going to bring a bit of life to it. A couple of things to keep in mind. Look for any horizontals or verticals. Obviously we've got these vertical lines of the bottle because it's man-made, we know that they are completely vertical. But even in these organic objects, the top of the apple here, there is a horizontal line there. They are really useful to find because we know what those are. We don't have to take a guess at what angle they are. We've got the edge of our page here. If we want to make sure that our lines are straight, there's horizontal and vertical lines. The other thing to think about is triangulating. What's the overall shape that the composition creates? We did things line up on an angle, we did things line up on a horizontal line, or on a vertical line. I didn't really do too much with the vertical lines. But if I wanted to double-check, I could go through and think about, we had this cup and to seek the apple at the back, it's probably about halfway through. Where does the edge of the vessel here, the edge of the cup, and to see the bottle, is that about right? That's about a quarter. That's probably about right. You can take this as far as you want. You can be super analytical about it and measure every single tiny little thing. But they're also really useful techniques just for checking. If you started off with a general sketch, a gesture drawing, and then you wanted to make sure you've got your proportions right, you can go through and check. For example, I think there is something not quite right here, this height, just looking at, flicking my eye back and forth. What I can do is take some measurements. I could do another double-check of the width of the base, and the height of the front edge, and it's probably actually slightly more than two-thirds and I think I might've seen it was two-thirds. Yes. There's something not quite right there, and if it does happen, you've got to find the easiest way to correct it. I don't want to change the width of the base because I know that it's right. All I'm going to do is just pop this down a little bit in this base. I'll bring it down a little bit lower, and it's still pretty much the same angles here. Actually it's a little bit more accurate to this angle here.
34. Part 4: Tone & Shading: By now, we've got a good idea of the techniques we need to combine to be able to accurately see and draw a subject. We need to know how to measure to check proportion, how to look closely at edges to see detail, how to build a drawing using foundation lines first, and how to shade different tones. In this lesson, we'll focus once again on tone, to practice seeing highlights and shadows, and to understand just how important tone is in creating the illusion of three-dimensional form. We'll experiment with using new drawing media, chalk and charcoal, on different kinds of paper. If you don't have charcoal or toned paper, gray or brown paper, you can still work through this class, just use pencil on paper. Try using a 6B pencil to emulate the soft and dark qualities of charcoal.
35. About Using Chalk & Charcoal: Charcoal and chalk are useful mediums for adding highlight tones and shadow tones. They can both be applied quickly and cover more ground than with pencil. They both smudge easily and will need to be sprayed with a fixative spray to maintain the image quality once you've finished. Willow charcoal is made from burnt willow sticks that make a soft, dark gray mark that can be easily smudged. It comes in thin, medium, and thick sticks which can be broken into smaller pieces. Compressed charcoal is made from powdered charcoal mixed with a binding agent which is compressed into long blocks and gives a denser, dark mark than willow charcoal. It smudges easily, but it's not as easy to erase. Compressed charcoal is also available in pencil form. Chalk comes in compressed sticks like those used on a blackboard, or as compressed chalk pastels or in pencil form. Any variations of these materials will work for this class. However, I'll be starting with willow charcoal because of how easily it can be smudged to create smooth shading effects. It's important to note that because of the messiness of charcoal, people tend to either love it or hate it. So be aware when you're using charcoal and chalk, that it will easily spread and create a powdery dust. Make sure you have a clear tabletop to work on, so you can wipe it clean afterwards.
36. Experimentation: Charcoal: I've got three different kinds of charcoal here. Willow charcoal, which comes in the different size sticks of willow. I've got some compressed charcoal which comes in a long block for, then I have a charcoal pencil, and this one is a soft charcoal pencil. You can get soft or you can get had. I've also got a couple of cotton buds and a tissue that I'll use to blend with. Before you start drawing with charcoal, just have a taste of whatever materials you have. Try drawing hard lines, soft lines, thin lines, broad lines using the side of the stick, then create a shading scale, starting from the lightest possible shading and increasing the pressure to the darkest possible shading, like we did when we tested out our pencils. Repeat the same thing for the compressed charcoal. Hard lines, soft lines, thin lines, broad lines, using the side of the block of charcoal, and creating a shading scale from light to dark. Notice the difference between the willow charcoal and the compressed charcoal. The willow charcoal is very soft, the compressed charcoal is a bit grittier and grainier. If you have a charcoal pencil try the same thing with the pencil as well. Having charcoal in a pencil form gives you the advantage of more control. If you have a cotton bud or a tissue, induce some experimentation, seeing how you might be able to blend these scale so that you end up with a nice smooth gradation from light to dark. You can also use your finger to do this, but the cotton bud will give you a little bit more control. Notice when you've been using the cotton bud for a while, there will be an accumulation of charcoal there, and you can actually shade with it. You don't want to take that and put it on a light area of your drawing. Now practice applying tone to create form by shading some simple spheres. Use your charcoal very lightly to start with, then add in a darker layer for a shadow, imagining your light source coming from one direction. Add in a base shadow, then blend the charcoal to get a smooth surface across the sphere from light to dark. You can try using a tissue as well. Use a tissue in small circular motions. You need to build up your charcoal with layers, particularly once you've smudged it or used a tissue to blend it. The willow charcoal especially will rub off the paper very easily. Keep building up layers until you have a range of turns from light to dark in your sphere. Repeat the same process using a charcoal pencil. But compressed charcoal in block form or in pencil form are much darker, which means you have to start with a very light touch, and they also don't rub out quite as easily or smudge as easily. Any marks that you put down are going to be harder to remove if you make a mistake. For this one, I've created a base layer with compressed charcoal pencil, then I've taken my eraser and erased out some of the lighter areas. You can work that way with charcoal as well. It's like shading in reverse. Then buildup some darker layers and blend the layers together with your finger or a cotton bud. When you're blending, you want to work from the lightest area down to the darkest area, not the other way around. Because if you start from the darkest area, you'll be carrying a lot of charcoal up with you to the lighter areas where you don't want that extra charcoal.
37. Exercise: Shadow Shapes: I've chosen this photo to use because it has soft focus, like the soft edges that are created when you use charcoal, and it has rounded forms. Remember form is all about tone. We'll start by doing an exercise to train our eye to see tone. Start by looking at the photograph and identifying where the lightest areas are and where the darkest areas are. The top of these two lemons, you'll see the lightest area. Also the center of this lemon and the edges, the path where that lemon has been cut open and then think about where the darkest areas are. Obviously the background is black is also these two shadow areas in here. Try to see those as shapes. You might even take your pencil and draw around them if that helps, look for the highlight shapes. What I see might be slightly different to what you see. Keep looking and see if you can identify different shapes of tone, starting with the lightest areas, and then looking at the darkest areas, what shapes can you say that are created by the shadows on the subject or in the image? Use a pencil to sketch out the basic shapes that you can see in the photograph. Keep this sketch loose. Don't worry too much about it being perfect. We're going to use this as a diagram for our charcoal drawing by identifying the different shapes of shadow and tone that we can say. You might find it useful to look at the negative spaces here when placing these lemons together on the page. Look again at the photograph and decide where on the lemons the lightest areas, and then use your pencils to actually outline the lightest areas that you can see in your drawing. You could think about this as being two tones. The whitest tone that you can see and maybe the next lightest tone that you can see. Then start looking at the tones that are darker than those. What other shapes can you see there? Anywhere where you can identify a main area of one tone as a shape and place an outline there. Obviously when we do our shading, we're not going to have these outlines, but this is an exercise to help you identify those different tones. Once you've identified the lightest and darkest tones, you can start to break these up further. What subtle tones can you see within these? Keep adding in more shapes of tone as you identify them. Once you feel like you've identified most of the main tone shapes, give each shape a number, with number 1 being the lightest tone. How much detail of tone you add is up to you. It depends on what you can see. Aim for about five tones, number 1 being the lightest, number 5 being the darkest or black. You may find that you have more tones in these and it's okay. The aim of this exercise is to get us looking for shapes of tone and comparing them, and putting them in some order in our minds so that when we come to shade the lemons, we have a plan. Even though we're drawing an actual diagram for this exercise, in the future, you might just take the time to identify in your mind which are the lightest tones and which are the darkest tones in the subject that you're drawing. Then you can fit everything else in between by comparing them to your highlight, the lightest tone and your shadow, the darkest tone.
38. Project: Charcoal Fruit: Now we're going to create a tonal drawing using the two types of charcoal, willow charcoal and compressed charcoal. Start by lightly sketching in the shapes that you can see with a piece of willow charcoal. Willow charcoal is really soft so you need to keep a light touch with barely any pressure on the page so that you get a light mark. The great thing about willow charcoal is that if you make a mistake, you can rub it out really easily with your hand or your finger. As we go along, you'll see just how easily the charcoal will rub off the page when we start painting it. When it comes to adding the darker tones, we'll switch to a compressed charcoal pencil, which doesn't rub off as easily. When you're knew out these basic shapes, don't be too worried about getting it exactly right. The aim here is to create a sense of white in form and if the lemons are a bit wonky, it doesn't really matter. You could look at some of the negative spaces in between the objects to help position the basic shapes. Identify where the highlights are in the photograph. These will remain the white of the page. Then mark out some of those shadow shapes that you noticed in the previous exercise. Once marked out, start by shading in the darkest parts. With pencil, it's better to start with the lightest areas and build up layers. But with charcoal sometimes it's useful to place the darkest areas first and then spread and blend that dark area of charcoal out into the lighter areas. Notice that when you first add the charcoal and push quite had, it's really dark. But then as soon as you start to smudge it, it becomes a lot lighter. If you don't like using your finger to smudge with, you could use a tissue or a cotton bud. But for this stage of the drawing, we're just mapping out those basic tones. I find it's easier to just use your finger and give it a quick smudge to spread the charcoal lightly where you want it to go. Build up layers of tone using charcoal smudging with a tissue or cotton bag to achieve soft mid-tones. When blending with the tissue you use a circular motion to press the charcoal into the paper and smooth out the surfaces. For the cut surface of the lemon, instead of trying to draw each segment individually with a chunky bit of charcoal, it's easier to shade the whole area, leaving a white rim. Then use a putty eraser to pull out the white lines that divide the segments. Once the overall drawing is blocked out with charcoal, go back over and add another layer of charcoal. This time really thinking about the relationship between the tones. How dark should they be? How does one tone compare to another? It can be difficult to keep those dark tones. For example, the cast shadow on the angle in the foreground is still quite light, where it should be black. But you can darken those areas are even more lighter with compressed charcoal. At this stage, try to identify where the main shadow shapes start and end. Look for more subtle tones within the main shadow shapes. At the bare minimum, we want to have three tones, but ideally we will have five to seven tones. Consider the shadow that's cast on the surface that the photo is sitting on compared to the shadows on the photo itself. Is it darker or is it lighter? To bring in the more subtle tones in linework in the lemon segments requires paying attention to detail. You need to look really closely and see what tones you can actually see. Start by just marking them in with the charcoal stick. Then you can blend them a little bit if they're too dark. Because there is texture inside the lemon segments, it's important to keep some of the linework and not to smudge it too much. It can be quite hard to get a very sharp edge with the charcoal stick because it's so soft. But you can use the point of a patty eraser to get a sharp edge, if you're cleaning up a white area. We are considering the tones of the whole image. Adding the dark background using the charcoal stick on the side. Remember you can break the willow stick up into pieces as big as you want and use it this way to quickly cover a large area of paper. Once you have most of the drawing done, you can use compressed charcoal pencil to add some darker tones in some cleaner lines. Use a cotton bud to really get into the subtle areas of the shading. You can use a cotton bud to remove charcoal if you're using it on a clean part of the cotton bud. Or you can also use it to smudge dark areas of charcoal. Or if there's some charcoal left on their cotton bud, you can essentially shade or draw with it. Check that the edges of the shadow shapes you've put in there are not too hard edged. If that's soft in the photo and you can't quite tell exactly where they start and finish, then make sure they are also soft in your drawing. That way you'll capture the roundness of the fruit. The charcoal pencil can be sharpened to a point much like a regular pencil to give you more control if your drawing finer lines. Charcoal pencils can be tricky to sharpen, especially if you have a soft grade, as they tend to break a lot. Sharpen them very carefully if you're using a standard pencil sharpener. It can be more effective to use a knife to sharpen them or even use sandpaper. Use a charcoal pencil to add in the finer details like the stems on the top of the lemons and some of them more subtle linework in the lemon segments. Keep balancing the tones. If a tone is too dark, you can smudge it a bit. If you need to add more detail, use a charcoal pencil. If you need to bring back some more white, then carefully use an eraser. Basically if you can't see a tone in that parts of the photo, then it shouldn't be in that part of your drawing. An advantage of using the willow charcoal first is that it's so soft. It can be used to create very subtle light tones. It rubs away easily if you need to change anything. An old paint brush can be a useful tool to get rid of some of the excess willow charcoal. Just be aware that this will lighten up the layers again. What can I see in my photo that is not reflected in my drawing? Do I have the brightest highlights? Do I have the darkest shadows? Ask yourself these questions. There can be a lot of back and forward with charcoal. You can remove it very easily. You can add it very easily. It can take a little bit of time to learn how it moves around the page. If you find it difficult, you may prefer to work with only a charcoal pencil so that you have a little bit more control. You can see that it's easy to get quite dirty with charcoal. This is one of the reasons that some people just hate working with it. One way to avoid this is to place a paper towel underneath your hand. Even when you place it on top of your drawing, it shouldn't remove any of the charcoal of your drawing as long as you're not moving it around too much. For example, if I want to work on just a small area of my drawing, I can place the paper towel over the drawing under my hand and not have to worry about smudging the work I've already done with the edge of my hand. You can take this drawing as far as you want to. Obviously, the more time you spend on it, the more subtle refinements you'll make, and the more realistic it's going to look.
39. Experimentation: Chalk & Charcoal: Charcoal and chalk pencils can be used together on gray or brown paper as a way of studying tone. Rather than building up shading and layers of gray like we do with an ordinary pencil, chalk can be used to draw the highlights, and then charcoal can be used to draw the shadows, and the gray or the brown of the paper is left bare to represent the mid-tones. This requires a shift in the way you look at the subject. Rather than looking at the edges, you're looking only for shapes of highlight tones, that's the very lightest or the whitest areas. Then you're looking only for shapes of shadow tones, the very darkest or blackest areas. We'll start this drawing by using the chalk to shade in the highlight areas and this is a bit of a contradiction because we are creating the lighter areas through shading, whereas normally we would simply leave these areas the white of the paper. If you find yourself getting a bit confused, go back to your reference photo and draw around the lightest areas to see them as shapes before using the white chalk to add them to your drawing. The chalk pencil I'm using here is a Pitt pastel pencil by Faber-Castell. You could even use ordinary blackboard chalk for this exercise or a white coloring pencil if you have one. The white chalk pencil can be used to shade at least two light tones on gray paper. If you use light pressure, you get the equivalent of a very light gray because some of the paper will show through if you use a hard pressure with the white pencil, you'll get a bright white for the very lightest and brightest highlights. Similarly, you can use a charcoal pencil to create two tones, a dark gray and a black. We can use these two pencils plus the gray of the paper to create a scale with five tones from white through to black, similar to the one we did back at the start of the course when we were practicing shading with pencil. These areas here, are going to be white or light gray. Some of these areas on the table and some of the areas inside the orange segment and part of the garlic will be left empty so that the mid-tone of the paper shows through as gray. We can use the charcoal pencil for the dark gray and the black underneath most of the objects and on parts of the garlic segments.
40. Project: Tonal Drawing: Use the chalk pencil with a very light pressure to sketch in the basic shapes and in the outline of the garlic. You can use a combination of techniques here, including basic shapes, looking at negative spaces, and using contour drawing to draw the finer details in the edges of the garlic. Think about where the individual cloves of garlic lineup with the main bulb of garlic. The aim here is to build form using tone, so don't worry too much if the proportions aren't perfect. These are organic objects, which means if they are a little bit wonky, it doesn't matter so much. Instead, focus on getting the tones in the right place. Turn your attention to the highlights, draw in only the highlights using the chalk pencil and shade them with a heavy pressure so you get a nice bright white. For any of the areas that are lighter than middle gray but darker than the brightest highlights, you can use the chalk pencil with just a light pressure, which will leave a little bit of the gray paper showing through and that will create a light gray tone, where if we're thinking about the scale of tones where number 1 one the very lightest, then we're wanting to create a number 2 tone using light pressure with a white pencil. You can use the tip of the pencil to follow some of the lines and textures on the garlic skin, it might be brighter than middle gray. Really make an effort to make a distinction in your mind between what would be light gray and what is middle gray. Anything that is middle gray should be left completely alone as the paper will represent this tone. Compare different areas to each other. Is the area that you're working on a highlight or a shadow or a mid-tone? Ask yourself, is it lighter or darker than middle gray? The small segments of garlic are mostly gray with some dark areas, but there are a few highlights on them here and you can add that in with the white pencil. Once we've shaded in all of the whites and the light grays with our chalk pencil, we can add tones that are darker than middle gray. Switch to your charcoal pencil and draw in all of the shadow tones. It might be easier to start with the very darkest areas you can see and then move to adding in the second to darkest areas or the dark gray areas. You can use a cotton bud to smudge some of your charcoal pins or if it's too dark or if the edge is too defined. Remember you're drawing only tones that are darker than middle gray, that is dark gray and black. You're leaving the middle gray empty to show the tone of the paper. Resist drawing lines and still look for shapes of tone and allow the drawing to evolve as you add only highlights and shadows. At this point, once you've put in some light tones and some dark tones, you should start to see the form of the garlic bulb taking shape. Be deliberate about leaving gray areas of the paper to show through instead of trying to blend the white and black pencils together to create a gray. This exercise is about seeing tone and understanding how putting those tones to give it in the right place can create the illusion of three-dimensional form. For the individual garlic cloves, it can be quite difficult to see the different tones. Overall, they're quite gray in the photograph, which means that we need to leave most of them as the paper showing through and focus only on very fine details of light and dark. Try to ignore the fact that it's a garlic clove and instead see it as a series of light and dark lines or smooth shapes of tone that fit together like a puzzle. You can switch back and forth between your white pencil when your black pencil if you need to, as you start to make new comparisons of tone in the photograph. Don't forget about the tabletop. This is mostly gray, but there are some light and dark marks. It can be added to show the wood grain. For the orange slice, we can add in the white border around each of the segments. The segments themselves are going to be mostly gray. That will be the gray of the paper. But you can add in some very fine details with the chalk pencil and the charcoal pencil to create texture within those segments. As we did with the garlic, start with the lightest tones first with the chalk pencil, and then bring in the darkest tones with the charcoal pencil before working on balancing out the tones, comparing them to each other. Which ones are the lightest? Which ones are the darkest? Which ones are light gray? Which one's a dark gray? How do they all fit together? The orange segment will only need some small pencil marks to create texture and this might be where there are some small reflections on the width surface or some smooth shadows created by the forms within the segments. Most of these segment areas will be the gray of the paper. Use both pencils, the charcoal pencil and the chalk pencil, and switch between them when you need to draw the appropriate tones. Smooth out any areas of shadow or highlight tones that have sharp edges using your finger or a cotton bud. It's up to you how much of this photograph you want to complete. You might focus just on the garlic bulb to get that sense of form and let the rest of the image fade into the background. Try to avoid mixing the charcoal and the chalk on the paper. If you need gray, use the pencils very lightly, or simply use the gray of the paper to represent the mid-gray tones. Occasionally, you may need to soften your marks so they appear smoother and this might result in some blending of white and black together, which is okay. But generally, think of using the pencils only for white and light gray, and for black and dark gray, never for mid-gray. I know that can be quite tricky to get your head around, leaving that gray area of the paper to show through. But if you have patience and follow the lightest and darkest forms in the photograph, reflect those in your drawing, you start to see that form come together. This isn't going to come together until you spend some time on it and really spend them into energy to carefully compare the tones and balance them out. If you notice the tone is too dark, gently dab at it with your eraser. If it's too light, build it up some more. All of this requires an analysis of the photo, and in an analysis of your drawing, how do they compare? Do you have the light tones in the right places? Do you have the dark tones in the right places? If not, you need to adjust them until they are correct. It can be a good idea to take a break and then come back to your drawing and look at it with fresh eyes. The drawing process is about constantly responding to and revising your drawing as you start to see more and more in your subject matter.
41. Part 5: Final Project: The Eye: This is going to be the final drawing project for this course. Now in my experience, new students are drawing often came to get going with drawing portraits. They like what they see on social media, and in the hope to be able to draw the same things. Usually they hope to draw them quite quickly. People are looking for quick tricks. I think most people understand. It does take some time. Instead of drawing more fruit or objects for this final project, I'm going to take you through drawing an eye. We'll be using all of the skills that you've learned so far. While this isn't a full portrait, it'll give you a good idea of what a full portrait will take if you decide to have a go at one after this. It'll give you an idea of how you need to approach the looking side of things. How do we look at this in a different way so that we see it as lines and shapes rather than as an eye which we have a lot of experiences with. We continue to try to make it look like an eye rather than actually drawing what we see, which could be quite different to what we think. We're going to break it down into a series of steps. We'll cover proportion, sketching, negative space, contour drawing and tone and shading. Is going to be quite a long drawing so I'll go through each step with you and then I'll speed up the process of carrying out that step. You can go away and do it on your own and then come back when you're ready for the next step. I'm just using regular drawing pencils. If I was going to go ahead and do a serious drawing, mean, I might use some of these fancy pencils like this, where I don't have to sharpen them so much and I have a bit more control on how sharp pencil is. I'm also using a paper that is a little bit nicer. This is a Bristol board or Bristol paper and it's a lot smoother than the sketchbook page, but there's no reason why you can't do this in your sketchbook. As long as you're following the steps, looking for line and tone and shape, then you should get a really good result.
42. Final Project: Sketching & Proportion: Let's start with proportion. First thing we need to do is measure the width versus the height of this eye and start to map this out on here. I'm going to do that with my pencil, same way as if I was citing an object and using my pencil with my arm outstretched, but I'm going to do it with my pencil on the piece of paper. So let's take the widest point, trying to go straight across on a horizontal line if I can't, because it just makes it a bit easier. I'm going to write from here, to here, the very widest point of the opening of the eye. Then I'm going to turn it round and compare it to the height of the eye. It's just less than half. That means when I sketch it on here, I have to have the same proportion. The same relationship between the width and the height, height is less than half. I'm using a two HP, which means it's going to be quite light for these first few stages, may be difficult to see. But I'm just going to put down a line which will indicate how wide my eye is going to be. Like a mark at this side and the widest point of the height needs to be less than half of this here. I'm going to Find what's less than half, this half. Make it a little bit less than it and I'm going to put that through in the middle of the eye and make a mark, the top and the bottom. Sometimes this can be a little bit tricky. You got to use whatever fingers you can or whatever methods you can to measure that out. That's pretty much, all I'm going to measure for this eye. I'm going to use a lot of negative spaces to find different shapes. I might measure the eyelid up here, but you don't always have to do the proportion for everything. It's just to give you a basic guide. Next step is to start sketching this out, laying it out on the page and we're going to do that using straight lines wherever possible for these curves here. The sketching out, the foundation sketch of the string, which means a really, really light sketch. We're going to be putting in these curves here. I want to break those down into angle so I can have a good look with my pencil first, get my eye used to the angles on here. That's maybe 45 degree angle, in say the ones on the lower lid are much shallower. If you can break it down into three lines, 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 for this little bit here in the corner of the eye. Same with the lower lid 1, 2 at bottom of the curve. Almost a straight line, 3 and in this inner part of the eye on the bottom lid is also almost a straight line. I'm going to start with, bit of a straight line just here. I need to make sure I get that and I'm looking for all the straight lines I can. Using those loose lines to sketch with thinking about where these different angles come along to. This comes quite close to this corner before it starts to come down on a different angle. If you're really keen on the proportion side of things, you could go through and measure. Where exactly is it that it turns down? Maybe it's a third of the way across the eye, maybe a little bit less. Sketching the lower lid. This is my guideline, I'm making sure I come right down to my guideline, my proportion that I put in there earlier. There's a little bit of playing around and the whole time I'm flicking my eye back and forth between the image and my drawing. These are basic shape of the eye. I'm going to put the iris in now, and I'm just having a guess, but we can start to think about those negative spaces. If you look at the whites of the eye, what shapes can you see in here? How can they help you to position the iris? For the pupil in, it might not be indeed center, might not be right in the middle of the iris. See there she looks like it's a little bit higher. We'll talk a little bit more about negative space in just a moment, but get down everything you can and then you've got something to work with and putting in the shape of the reflection. This highlight of the eye here and then I'm going to go ahead and put in this top line of the eyelid and maybe a few of these lower lines. Just taking a guess, put a neat darker ring of the iris. Drew the iris and I drew it right around the outside. I'm going to put a neat darker ring that I can see. It's thinner on one side. I'm also going to just mark in this dark line of the eyelashes and not going to draw in any of the eyelashes yet. When I put that in, I can see that the line that I put for the upper eyelid is too low because I didn't account for the eyelashes. We want to get everything right now so that when we go to shade, we don't have to change anything. We're confident that we've got all the proportions ratio the shapes right.
43. Final Project: Negative Space: The next step is to look for the negative spaces. If it helps, you might do the exercise that we did with the negative spaces before and go through and actually draw around these shapes that you can see. The white of the eye is really important. Have a look at the shape that's there. It's like a boomerang shape or a weird triangle shape. Same on the other side. Similar shape but different, so think about how they are different to each other. You've got the inner corner of the eye, there's a shape there, and then you've got the highlight shapes. You could look at the line around the outside of the eye as a shape on its own as well. So breaking it up into spaces and shapes that you wouldn't ordinarily notice in that way. Then, go through and check the shapes that you have in your drawing, in your foundation sketch. Is there anything there that isn't quite right? I think I need to change the corners of the eye a little bit. Think about the size of the shapes. We can turn it upside down and compare it that way. Look from one shape on the photograph to the shape on your drawing, and back and forth. This has really helped me to see that I've got something wrong here. This part here, it comes down much too low. I wonder if somehow if I've made my eye too high now. Remember, it was supposed to be a little bit under half. It's about half now, so I think I've exaggerated this part of the curve here. I know we drew these in straight lines, these parts of the curves, but now's the time where when you're looking at these negative spaces, you could round them off a little bit. Don't change the angles, but just round off the points where those angles meet. We've been putting in the shape of this part of the lower lid here. That exposed part of the lower lid, it's like the upper edge of the lower lid is quite important before the eyelashes start. You can put in that shape as well. I'm just going to remember what each of these shapes are, is all. Sometimes that can start to get a little bit confusing. Looking at the triangle shape here of the reflection, my angle's not quite right. You can really see how even though I've had a lot of experience at drawing, I'm still tricked. My mind is still tricked by some of the things that I expect to be in the photograph and I might be drawing those instead of what's actually in the photograph. Or sometimes you just tend to exaggerate things a little bit too much.
44. Final Project: Contour Drawing: The next step is contour drawing. We're going to use this a couple of times during the drawing, but we can do it now just to make sure that we have some of the finer details. This is where you can go around quite slowly. Still with a two H pencil. Follow your eye along the line in the photograph. Then changing direction when the line changes direction. Looking for any subtleties that you might have missed with your sketching. Rub out any of the marks that you don't need. You don't need to go around everything. Notice I'm not worrying about the eyelashes at all right now. There's the details, they're the darkest part. We're going to add those later. I've changed my mode of looking, to looking carefully at the edges. Following that line of the edge with my eye, as my pencil moves at the same time. Just to try and figure out if there's anything that I've got wrong. I think this here is a little bit out of place. This line that comes up at the side of the iris here. I know that because I ran my pinto along here as I looked along that line as well and I saw where it started to go up. Have a look at the shape of the iris. You can use straight lines to draw that curve. One, two, three. But it might also be useful to follow that edge with your pencil and your eye at the same time. Looking for where it changes direction. There's definitely something not quite right with mine and I'm just going to spend a little bit of time figuring that out. Because you want to get this right, now. You don't want to do all your shading and then find that there's something wrong. I'm going to turn it upside down, have a fresh look this way. This angle here. Check the angle on yours as well. Because we think of the iris as being round, it's easy to miss the subtleties. But these are really important to make it look like this particular eye. You can make a drawing of a general kind of eye, but it's not very useful if you then want to go on and draw a portrait of a person. It has to be what you see. Some of this will take shape when we put the shading as well. We'll find small subtleties, small changes we might need to make thin. Drawing in some of these finer details using my contour drawing. These reflections here. Even the reflection within the white of the eye, there's a shape there that you can follow with your pencil.
45. Final Project: Shading: Now, we're going move on to tone and shading, and this is really where we do most of the work. We need to think about building up from our lightest tones to our darkest tones. First thing to do is identify the white areas because they can stay the white of the page. There's really only two white areas that I can see, these areas in this highlight. Then these highlights on the white of the eye as well, a couple of highlights. Everything else, even this area here that we think is white is a very light gray. Now you can push or pull it how you like. If you want to make everything a lot more high contrast, then maybe you do make most of this white of the page and everything else is darker in relation to this. But you do want to make sure you've got a range of tones. Lights through to darks, white through to black. Here's the black areas, the pupil and a corner of the eye. This part here seems black, but it's actually like a dark gray. Let's start by shading in some light layers. I'm using a 2H pencil. If there's any lines that shouldn't be there, so I can see my proportion lines in here. I'm just going to rub those out. Then get rid of them now. Or if there's any lines that you've got that are really dark, we shouldn't have a dark outline. Along this bottom lid here, you want it to be quite light. That's quite important. Top lid doesn't matter so much because this eyelashes at the top there, along here is very light. Any darker line is going to ruin the illusion of form that we're trying to create. We're going to go through and shade all the lightest areas, the 2H areas. Well, I'll be shading everything really, but I'm going to shade everything with a 2H and then I'm going to start to build up. Even the dark areas, the dark grays around the eyelid here, and the lower eyelid and some parts of the whites of the eye. I'm going to shade those all and then I can start to build up the tones. See I'm using a loose grip, holding it quite far back. You can use a side-to-side motion, or you could use your scribble every direction motion. If you want it to be quite smooth entirely then maybe use a side motion. If you don't mind having a bit more energy, then you could use an up and down motion. This sketch isn't going to be hyper-realistic. Some of the sketches or some of the drawings that you see on, say, Instagram that look really realistic, they do take a lot of time. They take some specialist tools, usually charcoal, and really, really nice smooth paper and brushes and things like that. They take a really long time and it's something you could have a go at it later if you want to, but at this stage, we're trying to get a semi-realistic drawing that has correct proportions. Something that you can be proud of, that looks like an eye, looks like a realistic eye, doesn't look like a cartoon-drawing of an eye. Even though I'm just shading in 2H pencil I can still adjust how much tone I add. I can't go too dark obviously, but this part here, I know is darker so I'm shading in a bit darker with my 2H pencil. Couple of things that I noticed when I was doing this, I found that my pupil was a little bit too low down. It meant I had to adjust this highlighted area here. Things like that are going to happen. If you notice that it's really important to actually make those changes now before we get too far into the drawing. Because then you're going to have the best possible result. You would have noticed that I shaded around the iris. The typical way that those lines go within the iris, and I can see that they do go that way. There's a lot of subtleties in there that we'll figure out later on. But right now, I'm just shading it and so I've got a layer worth everything. Again, not worrying about the eyelashes yet, we'll tackle those together towards the end. But what I'm going to do now is work on the iris of the eye. Work on the inside of the eye so we get to feel that it's coming together. To do that, I can switch to my 2B pencil. I'm going to do the whites of the eyes, make those a little bit darker, the inner corner of the eye. Then I'm going to work on the iris of the eye. Now what I'm going to have to look for for the iris is I've got the pattern inside the highlight, I've got these really light areas here, but they have dark areas within them. It's like there's rings that go around this way. Depending on how much time you have, you could look at each one of those individually, and it's what I'm going to try and do, but I'll speed up the video. Try and see all these different shapes and sections in here, and start to build up some of that detail with shading. If you find that you're smudging things, you might want to get a paper towel or something to have underneath your hand, because we're going to be working on different parts of the drawing at once. I've got my 2B pencil, and I'm going to go ahead. Start just working with a very, very light touch to begin with. The eyeball of the eye is like a sphere. The shading is really important to make it look like it's round. You remember when we did the sphere and we had the light source. The light is coming from this side, but we've also got things overhanging like the eyelids that's creating a bit of shadow. We need to pay attention to where those marks are, those shadows are falling on the eyeball. I'm not going to use a blending stick, blending stump, in this one if I can avoid it. Just because this pipe is so smooth, it will tend to leave marks. You can have a go if you want, and this would be a good place to do that, would be in the white of the eye, to very gently blend these areas of shading. But it's not necessary. Cast your mind back to when we did the tone swatches, the one through to five, numbering the tones. You might be able to use that to allocate a number just to help you gauge what tone you're looking at. This is actually a lot darker than you might think. We know it's the white of the eye, but it's probably like at least a mid-tone, maybe a bit darker. Then in here is very dark, so that needs to be built up, over top. We can balance these tones out a little bit later on if they're not quite dark enough. But do what you can now. Because this area in here is so dark, I'm going to go ahead with my 6B pencil and start putting that in. It save me having to just go over top of what I've been doing. But you can still use a 6B very lightly to start with until you're sure of the shapes that you've shaded. Then you can go over it a bit darker. Even within this dark border of the iris, there's different tones. Some very subtle changes in tone there. Again, it's up to you how much detail you put into this, how much time. Think about whether the edges are soft or hard. Some very soft edges within the eye, within the iris, and even each of the pupil. It's not a really hard edge, it's defined but it's still quite soft. You're going to go ahead and start mapping in some of these main shadows in the eye. The shapes, the lines that I can see. Could think about a clock face and whereabouts these occur on the clock face, is it one o'clock, two o'clock. Think about how dark they are. Everything I'm doing right now is going to have to be dark and darker at some point. But I'm using this to map them out. This is also going to create a bit of structure for those rings that go through. I can see what I'm doing. I could find markers for them. Obviously, the bigger you draw the eye, the more work you're going to have to do, the more shading. When I get to these lines here, again, I'm thinking about what time on a clock face they are, what angle they are. It's going to be about five o'clock.
46. Final Project: Working On Pupil & Iris: I need to get this pupil one because it's making it a bit difficult at the moment with it being gray for me to see the contrast between the other areas. I've done a rush through around here and used some of the lines from the rings around here to give me a little bit of definition and structure. Then I've also got these lines coming out here, but all of those times they're going to have to be adjusted, made a lot more darker. It's like another plan. We did our first plan and this is another plan with the shading. I'm going to put this in quite strongly now. Then that will help me to balance out a few of the other things in. Again, it is really up to you how much you put into this. If you want to keep the iris of the eye fairly vague, that's okay, but you just got to get the tones right. All of my tones right now have to go at least one or two times darker. This has to be almost black. This definitely has to be black. Then these lots of lines inside that need to be a lot darker. You can think about it in terms of rings, is that any kind of ring which is quite jaggedy. Then there's another one ring and then this [inaudible] which has some really light pats on it. Then once you've shaded in those rings, you could just use your eraser to pull out some of the highlights, some of the lighter areas, so you don't need to do every single little bit exactly the way you see it. You can do it, really depends on how much patience you have and what kind of person you are, and how much time you have, of course. The pupil is the blackest point of the drawing. Now that I've got that in there, I can start to compare everything else to it and go over what I've done into a bit more work. Keep working on the iris, up to you how much time you want to take, and then once we've got that to a pretty high standard, we'll come in and do the eyelid. I'll talk about how to do the eyelashes because some some things that really get in the way of what we actually see that we have a really strong ideas about what those eyelashes should look like. It's very hard to not go with your instinct and just do these kind of light lines. I'll talk you through that.
47. Final Project: Eyelashes: You can see how long this is going to take to do this accurately. I'm doing it semi-accurately anyway. I'm picking out pieces that are really noticeable to me and making sure that I've got them in there. Then I'll keep balancing this out and I'll probably spend a good, maybe four hours on it to get it looking really accurate. But I thought before I go and do all of that, I'll take you through doing the eyelashes. Now, we want to make sure that this eyelid first has a bit of shading on it. So we want to get the sense that it's rounded. To do that, you need to have this shadow in here. So I'm doing that with my 2H pencil. When I use a 2H pencil, I'm pretty loose with it. I don't worry too much about it because I then go back over with the 2B pencil, so don't worry too much about the marks that I might be making. I'm not worrying about leaving the highlights here because I could just block those out with an eraser later, the putty eraser. Let's get a bit of shading on here. This is a 2H. Now, when I come back over with the 2H, I'm being a bit more careful. I'm doing this quite quickly so I'll tidy this up a little bit later. It should be darker so I can see we're in. This is quite dark where it folds under there, and then it gradually gets lighter, so you need to create the gradation. Starting to get a bit of a fold over there. Now, there's also the side here to do. But what I want to take you through is how to draw these eyelashes and the most important thing is to look for shapes. In this photo, they are a little bit blurry anyway, so we can actually see individual strands, but think about the main shapes or identify the main shapes. We've got one, two, three shapes here and in some down here as well. But this one here, it comes up at an angle as inline with the pupil. That's a good one to start with. Allow for the width of this dark line here. Then put in shape that you can see. It's a long, oblong shape. It's going to have another little bit coming off the side of it, which is more like a triangle shape on an angle. You want to go along this line here, where this is darker line. Go along the top of it and draw in any shapes that you can see. Make sure you get the angles of them right. Here's the top of that line. Coming along, I've got another shape here, it's like a long triangle going straight up. Quite often these clumps that you're looking for are long triangle shapes. To start with, it's going to look a bit funny, but we're really just mapping them out. You look for negative spaces in between them. There is a bit of a triangle shape in between here, this main one and this lighter one. Then as we come down this side of the eye, there's some light gray, but they're quite strong triangular shapes, elongated triangles. I want you to look for those and resist the temptation to do flicks the way that you think, or even the way that you know, the eyelashes go because you have experience at them. You've got eyelashes. When we get down to this part here, it's like they cool over and again, see if you can see that shape there. It's past that triangle shape and it starts to come along. Hopefully you can see how I've just picked out the shapes. It looks a little bit like a cartoon, like maybe an animated cartoon or something like that because of all the angles. But this will help you stay on track. It'll mean that you avoid doing flicks, it's not really any eyelashes in these spaces here. We don't want to put those in, it's going to make everything look flat and weird. Now you can go through and shade in the shadows. Think about whether the eyelashes are dark gray or closer to black. There's different degrees of tone in here, very subtle tones. When you come down to this edge here, they are some individual hairs that you might be able to draw. But think about them in straight lines. Think about the negative spaces between them, and you might have a few flicks there to help get the right line quality. Then obviously there's going to be some shading here as well in once I've put these lines and I can actually shade over top with no problem, They'll still show through. One more thing to pay attention to is this light line here. Just leave this part just above the side of the iris lid, is a light line, we want to leave that. Don't shade it in, even though most of this looks like it's dark, it's a shadow tone. Keep that light line there because it's part of the lighting on this eye. It's going to help make it look natural, make it look like the right kind of forms are there. We may as well do these ones down the bottom while we're here as well, these ones there are a lot more single strands, but again, really try to avoid that temptation to do just random flicks. Look for shapes first, there is a big one here, curved triangle shape of tone. It's very long, but it's still a shape. Draw the outline of that shape, keep your lines light. But just go around the outline of shapes you can see, and pick out the main [inaudible] and really look at the angle that they go at. Don't make them up. Obviously you'll probably not going to have time to draw all of them, but you can pick out these main ones. Then you might do the rest; just a bit of shading or some textures, and things that make it look like this, other bits of eyelashes there. Little dark that's along here that's lighter or dark gray bits. It's another thing we think of eyelashes as being black, at least on someone who's brunette or got mascara on. We think of them as being black, but if we want to create that sense to have 3D form, we've got to think about, well, how they actually black or are they gray; depends with the light setting and here and there's some quite light areas on the eyelashes. Go through and draw the shapes of the eyelashes that you can see, and then we start shading them. Starting light and then building up darker.
48. Final Project: Eyelids: You can see this is starting to take shape now that I've put the eyelashes in. What I really need to work on now is the eyelid. I'm leaving this area here because I'll do a bit of this in my own time and I'll show you the end result. But I don't want to spend too much time doing something that I'm fairly confident you can do on your own. But this eyelid here, like this fold in the eyelid at this section of the eye, it needs to have those subtle tone, so subtle changes. You could have done this before doing the eyelashes, but I've done the eyelashes first and then I can go over top with my shading, with my 2H pencil, and then build up some subtle tones, subtle gradations. We want to get, this seems that it's holding in, get the depth of that fold in the softness of that fold of the eyelid. I need to extend up a little bit past that line. It will come out a little bit here as well. I've got my light layer of 2H pencil. I'm going to go ahead with the 6B pencil because I want this shading to be really soft, but I'm using it in a very light manner, not going too dark too soon. The softness of the pencil lead means I'll get a softer mark when I'm shading. I'm blending this second layer of pencil into the first layer, thinking about where it's darker, increasing the pressure of it where it's darker, and building out more layers. But taking care to make sure that whenever I put down a darker layer, it's blending into the layer underneath. You can see I'm starting to get that gradation happening in here now and I'll work on this patch down here a little bit more on my own, but it's the same process, starting light, building it up, making sure there's no hard edges there, unless you see hard edge in the picture and obviously, there's a hard edge there with the folders. But before I do that, I'm going to shade up the top part here above the lid, just a little bit more so that I can blend in that darker line. Certainly over here, over here it's quite stark, the difference, there is quite a hard line there. I'm always observing and paying attention, looking at the areas that you're drawing in the photograph, flicking your eye back and forth. Now I'm going to put in that darker line of the crease of the upper eyelid. Using quite a soft mark and my 6B pencil is good for that. Nice, loose sketching, but following that same line, and then I can start to build that up. Thinking about how far the dark shadow of it comes in. If you can find a sharp part of your pencil lead or sharpen your pencil, you can put in this darker part here. It's quite sharp where it meets the upper fold. Then it softens off a little bit here and there's a bit more shading on the upper part. That's the way to approach the upper eyelid. I need to blend in some more shading here. It's definitely too white in this path. This part will stay quite white, but this part here needs to be darker. I need to build up the shading, get the tones right, compare them with other parts of the eye. How does this part of the white compare with the upper eyelid? Keep building those up. Then what I'm probably going to need to do is come over these eyelashes again and darken them up a little bit because they're getting lost now that I've put my shading at the top of it. But that's okay because this is the part of the drawing where you're balancing out tones. You're comparing them to what you think is correct in your drawing. If I'm happy with the shade of the eyelid, then I need to make sure that my eyelashes are darker than the eyelid. Same process for the lower eyelid as the upper eyelid. What I do want you to be aware of is keeping this part of the lower edge light because it's where the light is hitting, and so we don't want to go dark and then a light gray. It's not white, but it is lighter than the white of the eye on the side. Beware of that, keep it nice and light, and then follow the same process as up here, putting a new shading or you could do the eyelashes first if you want to make them a lot darker. But put on a light layer of shading with your 2H. Paying attention to where the tones are when you go in with your 6B pencil or 2B pencil and darkening up some of those layers. I hope that's enough for you to go on with completing your drawing. I am going to keep going and I'll show you the end result, but I don't want to repeat what I've already talked about. Most of the process of this drawing is exactly the same. It's sketching it out lightly, checking your proportions and your angles and your negative spaces, and then building up shading and adding in those darker areas as you go, as you're getting closer to being finished. There's some really subtle things to pay attention to here. This line. I mentioned that this line here is quite large, but there is a darker edge to it as it comes closer to the inner eye. Really subtle things like that are going to make all the difference. Need to come in with a little bit of contour drawing here to get the shape. A bit of a wobbly bit on the inner part of the eye. There's some subtle highlights happening here in the white of the eye. You can even see some of the eyelashes reflected in the shadow that's cast. There's a lot of details that you can look for. I'd encourage you to really pay attention as you go. If you need to take a break. We'll split this up into another couple of days work and each time you come back to have a really good look to comparisons. Think about what should be light? What should be dark? Keep building it up until you're happy with it. Remember, you've got your eraser that you can use as well. There might be some areas around the iris of the eye here we can use it just to pull out some of those highlighted areas, only if you can see them. But one approach would be to shade all of this area here, and come through with you eraser to pull out these lines and things, these lighter lines that you can see. That's one approach that's maybe not quite as clean is shading them individually. But it's an option. One of the tools that we can use. I'll leave you to it now to work on your own. I'll do some more recording so you can see the full process. But now it's really up to you just to keep working on it and keep looking carefully and honestly in her face it is all going to come together. If you do that, even if it doesn't come out exactly right this time, you're going to be learning a lot in the process and each time you do a drawing following the same process, it's going to get better and better.
49. Final Project: Timelapse: Okay. Okay. The user to conditions. Okay. Okay.
50. Final Project: Last Steps: The final stage in this drawing is to just stick back a little bit, we'll go away, take a break, and then come back and do a review, particularly of the tones. We've got all the shapes down and it'd be pretty hard to change those right now. But think about what's lightest and what's darkest in the photograph. Make sure you have the same values in your drawing. Then think about how some of those tones compare or even flick your eye between the photograph and the drawing. Look at different sections. Think about what might be missing in terms of tone and what could be built up a little bit more. If it needs to be built up, you can pick and choose what you work on. I haven't done a whole lot around this lower lid here. I've left it kind of loose and I haven't done much with the skin around the outside. Like I said, the storing is about a four-hour drawing, but you could easily take about eight hours on this drawing if you wanted to, really building up the detail in here. I've done this as a sketch more than a final drawing. I've been quite loose with some of the things I've done in here. The way I've made it work is just by looking for those main areas of shadow, those main max in adding those in, just working my way around the eye, looking for the main parts, not having to get them perfect, but making sure the tones are in the right place. That's what's going to make this successful. The more corrections you make with your tones, so the more you notice with something as maybe too light or too dark and you correct it, the more realistic this is going to look. You can do that with your 2H pencil, just go over and push some of these grays to slightly darker tone or push the white speck if they're too light. Here's probably a little bit too light and could be a little bit darker. Some of these areas, subtle areas. Or you can take your eraser if you need more white and just pick out those areas with the tip of the putty eraser. I think I'm going to stop there. Really important that you have patience with this drawing. If you've got to the end of this and you're like, "I just can't do anymore." and you're watching this final video, and you're just a bit over your drawing, go away and come back, and do a little bit more tomorrow, just work on it gradually. Keep doing a review every time you come back to it. The more you look at this compared to your drawing, the more you're going to see and the more you're going to learn about how to apply what you see in this photograph to your drawing.