Learn to Draw People: 15 Lessons for the Beginning Figurative Artist

1. Intro: I love drawing people. I think they are fascinating and I want to share my love of drawing people with all of you. A lot of my students over the years have told me that the hardest thing for them to draw is the human form, whether it's a portrait or full body. But we're just a collection of shapes, just like anything else. If you can draw a tree, you can draw a person. I want to show you some of the tricks and techniques that I've learned over the years to make it a bit less intimidating, some of the lessons we'll be focused on portraiture and how to capture the elements of the face. And we'll also do a lot of drawings at the full figure from a lot of different angles and poses, so you can get comfortable with that too. The key to learning to draw anything is consistent practice. So that's why I've broken this up into a series of short lessons, each videos about 10 min long. And don't worry if you don't have any experience because this class is perfect for beginners, I'm going to start at the very basic level and then build from there, sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. 2. Lesson 1: Learning Proportions - Face: I am very much a people person. I love people I always have, and I really love drawing and painting them. I've also been teaching art a long time. And I know that human subjects can be challenging for a lot of people, especially when you're first starting out, I wanted to teach a class where I could share with you some of the things that I've learned over the years and hopefully make it a little less scary and a lot more fun. So are you ready to get started today? We're gonna be focusing on learning the proportions of the face. So sharpen your pencils. Get some paper. And let's go. Alright, here's our model for today's drawing. I chose this one because they are looking straight at us. We'll be able to see where all of the features are placed. Start talking a little about proportions and how you might approach drawing a face. And then as we go through these classes will start working with models who are facing in different directions. So grab a pencil, I'm using a to-be pencil. You can use whatever you have handy. Don't worry about having the same exact thing as me. The B is the softer lead. The other option you'll see sometimes is an H. So those are the harder lead pencils. And that just means that if the lead is harder, it makes it a little bit of a lighter mark. The softer lead comes off more easily onto the paper, so they tend to be a bit darker. So that's what I'm using. So you'll be able to see what I'm doing. And let's jump right in. I'm going to draw just a simple oval shape to start with. Now this person's face obviously is a little bit more nuanced than that. But it's always good to start a drawing. Just looking at simple, basic shapes. And then you can go back and adjust, add all the details. So I've got my, my egg shape on here. And you can see that I draw very loose and light at first and I draw a lot of kind of scratchy lines. I find that helps me to keep from getting too caught up in details right away. If I keep it very loose and light, It's also easy to erase if I make a mistake. And then as I start refining things and get more confident that everything is where it's supposed to be. Then you'll see me pressing a little bit harder and maybe doing a little bit cleaner line work. Now our faces are in general, pretty symmetrical. That's not to say where exactly the same on both sides. I know I have a slightly crooked nose and if you look at people, you'll notice different interesting characteristics like that. In general, you can draw a line down the middle of the face. That's called the line of symmetry. And that gives you a good starting point for placing the features, since there will be two eyes and the nose is roughly the same on both sides and so as the mouth. So we've got our oval and our line of symmetry so far. See this isn't scary. You can do it. I hope nobody was too scared about getting started today. I know sometimes doing a new thing can be a little intimidating. There's this expectation you think you have to do it perfectly. That is not anything we are worried about here. We just want you to have fun and learn some stuff. So now we're going to draw guidelines for where to place the eyes, nose, and mouth. As a general rule, you will hear people say that the eyes go about halfway between the top of the head and the chin. And that's a good, that's a good general rule. But just like all rules, they're kinda made to be broken. So you can start with that idea, but then look at the reference and just see for yourself if that holds up. In this case, the model is actually looking, tilting, tilting the head up just a little bit. And so that shifts the placement of everything. So instead of the eyes being right dead in the middle, they're gonna scooch up just a little bit. So I want you to find the midway point first of that line of symmetry. So it's about right here. And then just come up here from that line. And because the model is looking up, when we draw this guideline, it's going to have a slight curve to it like this. So go ahead and draw that. E.g. if the model were to have been looking down, you would draw a curved line the other way. And you'll see why in a minute, why we have to do that curve. Whatever type of line that you draw for the eyes, you'll do the exact same curve. Or if it's a perfectly straight line, if the model is really looking straight on at us, then that might be a straight line. Or if they're looking down and it will be curved this way. But whatever, whatever you do for this line, all of the other guidelines that we draw will follow suit and have that same, that same curve to it. So we're going to come down, I would say, find the halfway point between here and here, right here. And I'm just going to come up a little bit from that. Maybe about the same distance we did there. We're just estimating. I'm just looking at the reference, kinda getting a sense of where the nose might be. And then I'm going to draw another guideline right here for that. So right now we've got this, this guideline for the eyes, this guideline for the nose. See you can do this. I mean, it doesn't look exactly like a person yet, but we're on our way. Alright, now, we are going to come down, find about the halfway point between here and the chin, which is here. And I'm going to scoot up just a little bit again. The reason I'm doing that upward scoot is because the model is looking up. And so that makes everything just shift a little bit upwards from where they might be. Otherwise, you could you could draw the lines all the way across if you want to. I just tend to do that for the eyes because they are the farthest. And then I'll do a smaller line for the nose and a little bit longer line for the mouth. All right, That's a great start. Now, we have about 3 min left for this video. So I wanted to just show you how you can start placing some features using these guidelines. We're not going to get a fully finished drawing today. We're just kinda thinking about the general placement of things. You're welcome to continue the drawing though after the video on your own and see how far you can get with it. So I'm gonna begin by drawing. It's, the reason why it was important to have that curved line is because we place the corners of the eyes right on that line. That tells us where the eye goes. So you're going to come out a little ways from the center. And you're going to start right here. And just draw the shape that you see. And try to keep, keep your eye moving back and forth between your paper and the screen to look at the model and just draw the shape of the eye that you see. You can kinda follow along if you want to draw it the way I'm drawing it, Like that. Okay? Now you want to have the same distance from that center line on the other side. So what I like to do is use my pencil to measure. So you can put the point of the pencil here and use your thumb to capture that distance and then slide it over, make it a little dot. And that's how you know how far over to put that i, and then I'm gonna do the same thing here. I'm going to measure this. I pinpointed the pencil at one end, thumb at the other. Scooch over, make a dot. And that's how you can make sure that the two eyes are the same size. Okay, go ahead and sketch this one in now again, making sure that the each corner lands on your guideline. Okay. Go ahead and draw a little circle now inside there. The other side, you might have to tweak them a little bit. If they don't look, if they don't match. If you draw one circle and it looks smaller than the other one, where it looks like it's not in the same position as the other one. Sometimes takes a little tweaking when you're drawing eyes to make sure that they match up the way they're supposed to. And it's can draw a little curved line up above the eye to represent the eyelid. And let's really quickly sketch in nose and mouth. So I'm going to draw kind of a V-shape right here, meeting at the middle and landing right on this line. Then we're going to draw a little circle on each side to represent the nostril. And then go ahead and draw another curved line on each side. Like this. Don't worry if your drawing doesn't look exactly like mine. Don't worry if your drawing doesn't look exactly like the model. This is just for practice. Right? Now coming down to the mouth, I'm drawing the inside top line first. So this is the line that the bottom of the upper lip, if that makes sense. And so each end of that will land right on your guideline and then her mouth is slightly open, so I'm going to draw that next. See how you can use that line of symmetry to help you place things where they're supposed to go. So now I'm gonna come up a ways here. Do another V-shape like this. Extend the mouth a little bit on each side. A good rule of thumb is that the ends of the mount, the corners of the mouth usually align around the center of the eye. So you can even draw a line down or just kinda like look to, you can even lay your pencil to use that for a straight edge. And then I'm going to draw the bottom lip. This top lip. Since we came this far, let's go ahead and do some eyebrows. I know we're going a little over our time, but hey, it's our first-class. Let's get to know each other a little bit here. Not going to Rusty out the door on day one. All right. Then if I were continuing this, which I guess I am, I would go back now and reshape that oval that I started with and try and draw more of the true shapes that I see. So everything that you kinda put down first in your drawing, It's really just a guide to help you start placing things and you can go back and keep adjusting until you get it exactly how you want it to be. Being an artist does not mean that everything that you draw as perfect right away. We always have to tweak. See if it kinda the top of the head. This little angle. Here. It's when you can start really seeing these angles and the more subtle shapes that it starts to feel like the specific person that you're drawing. Just very quickly. I'm going to draw some ears. They always can look to see where things are aligned. So the year is a little bit below the eye, the top of the ear, and then the bottom is a little bit above the mouth. A little hard to see here because of those earrings, but that's about where her, his land come over here. There's a lot more we could do with this drawing, like I said, but I'm going to stop it here after I finished this year. I encourage you to keep going. If you feel so inspired though, see how far you can take it now that you've got the basics down, this is really actually where the fun part begins. We can go back and start drawing the eyelashes and all the, all the little things that make it look like that person. So I hope this first-class has given you a good understanding of how you can start mapping out the facial features. And we'll continue with this in future classes and get a lot more in depth. See you did it. I knew you could. Congratulations on making it through your first lesson. In lesson two. We're gonna be learning about the proportions of drawing the full figure. So get ready and I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 3. Lesson 2: Learning Proportions - Full Figure: We are going to be learning about the proportions of the full figure today. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. Today we're zooming out and drawing the full body. And just like yesterday, I'm gonna be showing you some simple steps for how to approach that. So to begin with, I like to draw a line to represent the spine, I guess, of the person or the central axis of their body. In this case, the model is, I'm standing pretty straight. So that line will be straight two, if the person is leaning one way or the other or doing some sort of more complex pose, then that line might change. So it's a good way to just kinda start it, kinda anchor the figure on your paper, figure out what their overall position of the body is doing. Then there are three simple shapes that I like to use when I'm helping people understand how to start figure drawing. And that is an oval for the head, just like what we used yesterday when we did the portrait. So up here at the top of the line, I'm going to draw that. And you can see how in this case the model is tilting his head a little bit this direction. So when you draw that oval, give it a little bit of a, of a lean. Not much. This is a way you can start to think about how the body is positioned, what it's doing. You'll see me grab this. Sometimes this is called a kneaded eraser. There. Come in very handy. I like them a lot because you can shape them and get in and erase whatever you need to. Again, not as not essential. You can use any kind of eraser you want. Alright, the next shape that I use for figure drawing is a triangle shape for the torso. So I'll use this. This model is again standing pretty, pretty straight on. That line for the top of the triangle will be straight across because not one shoulder isn't higher than the other in this pose. And then you're going to draw the third point of the triangle will be right on the line. Like that. This is a good time for me to point out that everything that I'm showing you here is just simply my way of doing this. There are no right or wrong ways to do anything in art. So as we go through and we start doing some more gesture drawings and figure drawings, you might find that you don't like these shapes at all. You might want to do it a totally different way. And I want to encourage you to explore that and try and see what works best for you. Now I'm drawing a third shape, which is a rectangle for the pelvis. Like that. Sometimes when you do figure drawing, if it's a really quick gesture drawing, which is when you're just trying to get the essence of deposed, you might not get much farther than just a few simple shapes. So it's good to have this, something like this in your back pocket that you can use. Alright, so now I'm going to draw the legs and I'm using, you can see how his legs and he's got a little bit of, uh, his legs are a little bit apart, kind of a wider stance here. So I'm drawing rectangles for the legs. I'm doing down to the knee. So right here. Then another rectangle and then they don't have to be perfect rectangles. You can see how I'm kinda tapering them a little bit so that they get narrower as they go down. This rectangle is a very similar in length to the one below it. The same on this side. Like that. And then I'm just going to draw this little wedge shape are also kind of like a triangle. For now. For the foot. You don't want to get caught up on little details, trying to make everything look perfect right away. You just wanted to get the basics down. Because once you do that, then you can check your proportions. And that's what I'm going to show you how to do. But let's get him some arms first. So coming out of the end of this triangle. Elbows usually come about at the waist, it a little bit above, in this case, like that. Then the second rectangle, because of the position of his arms, will come in towards the middle here. And then you could just do an oval or a circle, square, whatever you wanna do to represent the hands like that. Okay? Now this doesn't look exactly like a person, but you can see it's on its way. And this is the point where I checked my proportions. So if you've ever seen an artist when they're at work, holding up their pencil, maybe closing one eye or holding up a paintbrush and doing this, they're checking proportions. And so what I'd like you to do right now is hold up your pencil like this. Straight up and down. They're pointing towards the screen that you're watching the video on. And I want you to align the point of the pencil. I'll use my drawing as an example here, but you're actually going to be holding it up to the photo of the model. I don't want you to align it so that the tip of the pencil is at the top of the model's head. And then slide your finger or your thumb down to the models chin. So you're capturing the size of his head. So now I'm going to do that. I'm kinda off-camera, but I'm doing it to the photo of the model as well. I've captured the measurement of his head. And then I'm going to slide my finger down or my hand down so that I can count how many heads the model is, two different increments of the body. So I'm gonna do this right now to the model. I've got the measurement of his head. And then I'm counting down to see how many heads high he is from the top of his head to his feet. So you do that as well. And we'll see if we get the same number. Three for almost eight is what I got. It helps if you close one eye. It also you want to make sure that you keep your arm at a steady distance. If it moves back and forth, it's going to change things. So I got almost eight heads high for this model. So now I'm going to capture that same measurement, but on my drawing. So I want you to do that as well. And then count down and see if you're drawing has the same results. So 1234567. So I made him a little short. This is why you want to start with simple shapes because it's easier to adjust. So right now I have is feed here. I'm going to move them down here. I wish I could lie and tell you that I did that on purpose. But this is just how drawing works. I think a lot of people have an expectation that when you draw, it has to be perfect right away. So in this case, it looks to me like I made his legs a little too short. So that's the part that I'm going to adjust. If you aren't sure. You can also count down and see how many heads does it take to get to the waist? How many heads does it take to get to the knees? And that can help you sort out those proportion issues too. But I'm just eyeballing it and I can kinda see from doing that that I had his legs a little bit too short. So you just fix it? Well, I think so many times when people are first starting out withdrawing, they get freaked out because they think, oh my gosh, it has to be perfect right away. If I mess up, I must be terrible at this and then they just want to give up. But nobody draws everything perfectly right away. You just have to get something down on the paper so that you can start to check those proportions. And then at that point, that's when you can fix it and make it perfect or your version of perfect, whatever that might be. Alright, So now if you had more time, you could go back on top of this and continue making the drawing more detailed, more realistic, less geometric. So I see that there's really more of a kind of a slope to the shoulder that does this. So you build on top of that basic, you know, the basic geometric shapes and flush them out to make your drawing more realistic. Now I'm not going to do all of that right now because we are at the end of our time for today. But I encourage you if you want to keep going, to try that, see if you can take your, your simple geometric drawing and add more detail. And as you do that, then you can erase away some of those preliminary shapes because they've served their purpose and you don't need those anymore. You did it. Congratulations, you've completed two clauses. Now you know about drawing faces and bodies. We're going to dig into this so much deeper soon in our next lesson, we are going to be doing some gesture drawing. I can't wait, it's one of my favorite things. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 4. Lesson 3: Gestures - Full Figure: Welcome back. I'm excited to see you. I'm excited to keep drawing with you. Today is one of my very favorite things to do. We are going to be doing gesture drawing. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper and let's go. A gesture drawing is a quick sketch where you're not going for the details, but you're trying to capture the essence of the pose. So today we are going to do three, three-minute gesture drawings. Your help to draw really fast, which is a great thing because it helps you to stay sorted out of your own head. So here's our first model. I'm going to set the timer right now and we're going to just start drawing. You can think about the basic shapes that I showed you yesterday, or use whatever technique you want. I'll probably try a few different things here so you can see how I might approach it. But really, the goal of this is to not think. Just draw you ready, set, go. I'm gonna do a line for the spine again, like I talked about yesterday. And I will go ahead for this first one and draw the same basic shapes that I was showing you yesterday. So the oval, in this case a triangle. If you look at the angle of the shoulders, they kinda tilt upwards this way. It comes down and meets here. And then you see that the pelvis is actually angling this direction. So just by drawing those same basic shapes, but paying attention to the position of the model. You can see how that gives you more of a sense of how that model is moving. In this case, we have about 2 min left. Not to stress you out, just letting you know that you do have to draw it quickly. And that's actually a really good thing. Alright. Get that leg shape in. There. Might be angling up a little more than what I have. Just. It's usually a good idea when you're doing quick gesture drawings to try not to erase if you draw a line that you don't like, just draw another line, make it a little darker, fix it, don't worry about it. You can see how I'm holding my pencil far back. That's one of my tricks that I use to help me to keep from getting too, too tight, too detailed. Alright, so we've got legs, arms coming in now and we have about a minute and a half to go on this drawing. I'll give you time updates again, not to stress you out, but just so you kind of pace yourself. Remember, we're just going for the essence here. This isn't about getting all the details are making it perfect. If it looks remotely like a human who is doing the position that you see this person doing, then consider that a win. Okay, So now I'm gonna go in and just draw a few details to start to make this feel a little bit more like this model. Shoulders. I have about 30 s to go. Not even worrying about details of like clothing or fees or anything like that. Just just get the overall pose. You can see how I'm going right on top of my previous lines and just making them a little bit darker, a little bit more refined. Alright, and time is up. So there's mine. Take a look at yours, see how you did. If you like it, that's awesome. If not, who cares? Time for another one? Are you ready? Alright, let's do it. All right, here's the model. Let me reset my timer for 3 min and go. Alright, so I'm gonna do that line again. He's leaning forward a little bit. So it kinda goes like that. His head though is a little bit straighter. Like this. Little bit of an angle to the shoulders, the one that's closer to us. It looks a little bit higher. Close off that triangle. Going to angle the pelvis a little bit because he's seated. Like that. You've got one leg comes up here down. So it's the same shapes. But you can see how they look different depending on the direction and how the, how they're kinda overlapping the other parts of the body. We have 2 min left for the swim. If you don't get the whole pose, That's okay. I'll gesture. Drawing can certainly be just one part. Now we see this leg comes out a little bit farther. This one is a little bit foreshortened. It's coming toward us so it might look shorter than the other leg. It isn't actually shorter. It just appears that way because it's coming toward us. This leg comes down. Another foot, It's kind of a wedge shape. Alright, then out of this shoulder, we have one arm that comes down like this. Over a lot of overlap in this pose. One trick that I like to use is to look at the shapes of the negative spaces. And the negative space is just the background or the space around the subject. So like this little triangle right here. And then there's another shape right here that you can use as the basis for knowing where to place this arm. If you draw the negative space, is the positive space that actually the model will start to show up. That's one trick that a lot of artists use and it helps you make sure you're getting things where they belong. Alright, and I'm just gonna do ovals for the hands because we don't have time for much more than that really. And I'm gonna go over a few of my lines. We have about 30 s to go. See how much you can get done in that time. Neck, flesh out, some details. All right. Time's up for that one. How did you do? Let me reset my timer again. Turn the page. Time for one more. Are you ready? All right, Let's do it. Here. You see is starting the timer now 3 min and go. This time. Instead of doing the shapes that I showed you, I'm going to just jump right in and kinda start drawing and do a little bit more of a scribbly kind of approach, which is another way that I like to do these sometimes. So you try out whatever works for you. Sometimes I think the scribbly, loose, sketchy approach like this really helps me because I can just feel it out as I go, I guess is how I would describe it. I like I feel like when I'm drawing a person, it's about trying to not just show how they look, but kinda capture their, their energy a little bit. And so I like a lot of movement, a lot of scribbly lines and that kind of thing. Every artist is different. Some artists love very geometric shapes. Some artists love really curved lines. I'd encourage you to just experiment, see what feels right to you. It's all about just whatever helps you to get the thing down on the paper. In your own way. There's no right or wrong. In art. When you're doing gesture drawings, it can be fun to try drawing the figure at different sizes. I'm doing all of mine consistently because they have to fit them on the camera. Wouldn't help you much if I was drawing way out here and you couldn't see what I was doing. But when I'm, when I'm doing gesture drawings, a lot of times I really love drawing on large sheets of paper and using charcoal or something where I can kinda get it down. Be more expressive, I guess with my marks. So if you're, if you're drawing small and that doesn't feel right to you. Try drawing bigger. Try something different. There's always different ways of mixing it up to see what works best for you. Looking at the negative shape, we have about 50 s left. By the way, I was not being a good timekeeper for this when I was getting a little too wrapped up in my drawing, I apologize. I love getting to draw along with all of you. This is really fun. I hope you're enjoying it too. I hope you're not stressing out. I hope you're not thinking, Oh my gosh, this doesn't look perfect. I must not be good at this because you're not supposed to be perfect. I always learned the most from drawings that I don't love or drawings that I think look terrible actually. Because when you stop and analyze it and try and figure out what, what doesn't work. That's the learning opportunity there. Alright, so there's my third one. And just in time because time's up. Alright, you did it. Congratulations. I hope you enjoyed that class and I'll be back tomorrow for lesson four, where we're going to be learning about the planes of the face. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll find out soon. See you then. Bye bye. 5. Lesson 4: Planes of the Face: Today we're going to be learning about how to break down the face into planes or shapes is another way to think of it. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. Here's our model for today. We're back to portraits again. And this time I'm showing you a technique that is all about breaking down the face into different planes are different shapes. But let's start off with our oval again. And the model is kinda looking up. There's a slight lean, so I'm going to draw the oval, leaning this way just a little bit. And then behind the oval, I'm going to draw a circle like this. You can draw it all the way around. That might help you to make a little more sense. Because what we're doing is we're thinking now about the overall shape of the skull. The oval is more of a representation of the face. The circle gives us the back of the head. It's still just using simple shapes to represent what we're seeing, but it gives us a little bit more of a three-dimensional feeling. And then coming out from here is where we see the neck. Okay? So now we're still going to use that technique that I showed you on the first day, which is drawing the line of symmetry, figuring out where the eyes, nose, and mouth go. So in this case, because the model is turned, that line of symmetry is going to be all the way over here. And it's going to curve a little bit because the face is round. It's not a flat, It's not like a, like a flat piece of paper. It's got a curve to it. And because it's proving in a three-dimensional space going to the right, that curved line will curve to the right also. Alright, now the eyes, we're gonna go halfway point, little bit up because this model is also looking up like our first model. And if you follow the, if you were to draw a line from the corner of the eye on the right to the I on the left. You'll see that this guideline for the i kinda angles up a little bit like that and then would curve like this to wrap around the head. See if you can get that that guideline on close to where I have mine. Then we're going to come down about halfway and then I'm gonna go up a smudge because it looks to me to be about where his nose there and then when it come down again a little ways and do the guideline for the mouth. Okay, Now this is where I'm going to change it a little bit from what I did on the first day because you're ready now. You're ready to get more complex. When I draw faces, I like to think about, almost like imagining that I'm sculpting the face. So thinking about it in a three-dimensional way. So to begin with, instead of drawing the eyes right away, what I'm gonna do is actually draw what I would imagine to be the shape, the models eye socket. So the top of the eye socket is about where you see the eyebrow. And then it comes over to here, down way below that line. And over like that. Now the I on this side appears smaller, doesn't it? That's not because it is smaller, but because that's, that's a perspective thing that I is turned away from us, or that's a whole side of the face is turned away from us. And so everything that is farther away from us gets smaller. That's how any, anything in perspective works. If you're drawing a street scene, if you're drawing a landscape, or if you're drawing a person, everything gets smaller as it gets farther away. Alright, so now I'm going to continue from there to sculpt the face using very geometric lines. And you'll see what I'm doing here as I go along. So I'm going to build out the nose next. It's got a little bit of a interesting shape to his nose. So let me adjust that is not such a straight line, a little bit more of an angle to it and it comes out of here. A good way to think about this when I'm teaching this technique, I often will call it. The soccer ball approach. If you picture a soccer ball, it's a sphere, but it's made up of all the little geometric shapes. That's kinda how we're building this face. We're just connecting geometric shapes. It's like we're building him out of Legos or something. The shapes that you see, the shapes that you choose are allowed to be different from mine. I know I say this a lot, but there's no right or wrong way here. It's just about how your brain can kinda take apart what you're seeing and then recreated. The key to this technique is using very geometric lines. And just thinking about how all of these different sections connect. The way that you can tell where there is a plane shift when you're looking at a, at a model is because you'll notice there's a shift in the lighting. So you see how right here, e.g. there's a plane, there's that little shadow like this. This comes over that which is building out that face one plane at a time. I think it's a really fun technique. Because even though it looks kinda strange at first, you can see that you immediately can start to see a little bit more dimension than if you were to just draw the oval and do an eyes, nose, and mouth on top of that. In this case, you're really getting to see kind of how the, the volume, the dimensionality of that, of that model. And then you go back and do the details, the eyes, the nose, the mouth. And they'll feel more believable because you've taken the time to create a structure for them. So sometimes when you do just the, you know, the oval and draw the features on top, the person can end up looking a little bit like a peanut egg, which is not what you want. So this is a really good way to just break it down a little bit more. See that dark shadow here on his head that tells you there's a big plane shifts. This can also be really helpful if you do paintings or if you're planning on adding color, doing shading. Because if you take the time to figure out where all of these different planes are, then when you go to shaded or painted or whatever it is that you're doing, you have a good sense of where all of those shadows need to go to make it look more realistic. Now we have about a minute left. So I want to show you once you get to a point where you feel like you've got the, the essential shapes down. Then you can go back in and start refining it and adding details. So one of the first things that I'll do is now go inside the eye socket and drawn. I come over here and do this one. Then I can see I need to bring in this side of his face a little bit. It's okay to tweak your drawings as you go. It does not have to be perfect right away. You can use your eraser and lift up the lines a little bit. But you want to keep it, make it so you can still see them. And then go back right on top and do the more curved true lines that you see. So you're kinda taking that robotic, more structural drawing, but that you started with, then flushing it out and making it feel more realistic and also adjusting it as you go as needed, that it feels believable and in proportion. I'm like I need to widen this here a little bit. Here we go. I feel bad that I didn't get to give him his hair. Got some nice here. Okay. We'll do some quick here. I know we're out of time, but just can't leave them like that feels wrong. You can definitely keep going with this drawing. Maybe even try doing some shaving if you feel like it looked for where you see those shadows and start bringing them out? All right. I'm going to stop there since we're out of time. But like I said, feel free to keep going. See how far you can take this drawing. Great job everyone You made it. I hope you enjoyed that lesson. Be sure to share your artwork. I want to see in our next lesson, we are going to be doing contour drawings of the body. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 6. Lesson 5: Contour Drawings - Full Figure: Today we're going to be contour drawing the figure. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. Today we're doing contour line drawings of the figure. That is another way of doing a gesture drawing in a contour line drawing though you're looking a little bit more at the outlines and also interior lines. But when you start the drawing from the beginning of the drawing until the end, the goal is to never lift your pencil off the paper. So everything is connected. Everything is kind of one big long continuous line. If you want to get from one area to another, you have to find a way they're navigating through the body with lines. So it's tends to be a bit more expressive, maybe a little more stylized. Just really have fun with it. This is not about perfection. This is about looking at the model and trying to capture what you see in a new way. So we'll have 3 min for each one of these. Let me get my pencil ready. I'm going to start the timer, and let's go. Alright. I'm going to start, I'm going to start up here at the top. And I'm just kinda looking at the edge. But I'll break through. Sometimes. You end up with, I think, a little bit more expressive lines, a little bit more playful. We're definitely not going for realism here. This is about responding to what you see in front of you and just kinda having fun with it. See how I'm kinda doing the face, but I'm also just everything has to remain connected. Every line has to merge with the neck. So I'm just kinda going from one part to the next. Usually with contour, drawings were less concerned about measuring and proportion because what you can't stop to do that stuff. So it doesn't really matter. It's more about just the direction of all the different shapes, the way the lines interact. And if the portion if the proportions aren't perfect, that's okay. Like look at mine, look at that wacky arm. That's okay though. That's what a contour drawing is supposed to look like. In some ways, I think when you allow yourself to be a little bit looser with your work, it actually can free you up and your drawings become more interesting. We have about a minute left. Wacky hand. You can just change the lines by drawing another line darker. You can even try doing a blind contour drawing, which is where you don't look at your paper the whole time that you do the drawing. You just look at the model. Then when you finish, you look at your paper and see how you did. I'm not going to be doing that myself today, but feel free if you want to try that on one of these poses. It's a very fun way to draw. Okay. Time's up for him. How do you do? Now? Obviously, mine is a little wacky. The hands look kinda crazy. There's some very expressive line work. That's okay, that's what this is all about. Ready to try another one? Alright, let's do it. She is. Alright, another 3 min. Ready and go. Just have fun with it. I think. So easy to put a lot of pressure on yourself when you're drawing a human. Because you really want it to look like that person. Gosh, especially if you're drawing somebody that, you know, pressure is really on, then thankfully, probably don't know these folks that we're drawing today, so they will never know. I won't tell them. And once again, I'm holding my pencil really far back so that I'm not tempted to try to overly. Control these drawings. I really want to allow myself to be expressive and to have more expressive lines, expressive marks. Less controlled, the better. You're doing a more detailed drawing and more technical and you really want to be precise, then you can hold your pencil closer to the tip. You have a little more control that way. It's interesting just navigating around the drawing when you are drawing this way because you have to figure out how to get your pencil from one point to the next without lifting it up. I like that little hand. It's not highly detailed, but it captures the essence of it. I think that's really what a good gesture drawing is all about. Just capturing the essence of what you see in your own way. Okay, We have about a minute left. Might end up retracing your steps a little. That's a good. I have about 15 s left. Let's see if I can make it back up here. All right. Here we go. Time is up. One more. Alright. Ready? Wonder what he's pointing out? Ready, set and go 3 min. Now, you see me. I keep starting at the head, but you can start at any point in the body, wherever, whatever speaks to you, wherever you may be, feel the most comfortable, that that would be a great reason to start in a certain area. There's no, No, no right or wrong way to start one of these. Really just looking at the shapes. Try not to think too much of it as a person really just look at shapes and the folds increases in the clothing can actually be really helpful. Especially when you're doing a contour drawing like this, because you can use those to get from one point to the next inside the body. But also the way that the fabric is folding increasing is really telling us a lot about what the body is actually doing underneath the clothing. The way that it's twisting, turning the movement of the body. So I would encourage you, when you're doing these contour drawings to include some of those folds and wrinkles that can be very, very helpful. Remember, we're not going for perfect. You see mine, none of mine have been perfect. Which is trying to capture something about the essence of the pose. That's it. I get my way back down here. Okay, there we go. Got lost in that shirt for a minute. We have about 1 min left. Always a scramble at the last minute. You're also always welcome to choose to just draw a certain part of the body. If you don't want to draw the whole thing, you could just do the upper body, you could just do the legs, whatever, whatever you want. Sometimes it can be really interesting to crop the figure and not, not draw the whole thing. 20 s to go. See if I can make it. Oh, he's got a wacky me here. Let's see if I can fix that. So I'm just going to redraw the line where actually want it. Like here. Here we go. Okay. Time is up. Wasn't that fun? I had a blast, I hope you did to you. In our next lesson, we are going to be focusing on drawing eyes. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 7. Lesson 6: Studies - Eyes: Today we are going to be focusing on one of my favorite things. I think I save that every time. Everything's my favorite. But today's favorite is the I sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. Today is all about the I. So let's jump right in and get started. I like to start with just like always kind of a very loose sketch to get the basic shapes down. And then we'll go into detail. You see I'm drawing very light, kinda like I'm doing a gesture drawing makes it very easy to adjust. If anything isn't looking quite right. Just go for the big, simple shapes first. I think eyes are so important when you're drawing people. Especially if you're doing a portrait, it's usually the first place that the viewer will go. We're just naturally drawn to looking at, I'm looking into people's eyes. It's how we, how we read. The person has how we first try to gauge their emotions or how they're reacting to what we're saying. We'd just that human connection looking into somebody's eyes. So if you're going to spend a little extra time on one part, that would be a good place to do is when you draw the eye, I find it very helpful to think about how that eye is sitting inside of the face. How it, how the skin is overlapping above and below to create the eyelid. The actual eye itself is a sphere. We're just seeing one little sliver of it, but it's really a big round ball in there. And when we do a little shading, hopefully we'll have a little time where we can do some shading that, that really comes into play. You don't want your eye to look flat when you shade it. You want to look at the reference right now you can see how it gets a little darker over here in the corners. And also it's a little darker up here where the eyelid is overlapping. All of that is helping us to see that the eye is round. It can be a little scary to put shading and the white of the eye. But if you look at the reference, there's very little. That's actually pure white. It's, there's a lot of different values and that will, that all makes the eye look more realistic. Alright, so I'm drawing very roughly sketching in some eyelashes right now. Paying attention to the direction that I see them going. Try not to just draw what you think eyelashes look like. You've got a beautiful model right here in front of you. So really look at the direction that things are moving in. Draw what you see, not what you know. It's an old saying. Every artist has heard it. I'm sure you've probably heard it from me before. But it is very true. Alright, I'm gonna draw eyebrow. Okay? And now that we've got the basics on there, we have oui, good. We still have quite a bit of time. I'm not even going to have to like keep you on today. Let's go in and do some shading now and make this, I really look realistic. If you need longer to get your drawing down, go ahead and pause the video until you're, until you get it to this point. Now what I'm going to do is start right here in the middle and just sketch in some of those reflections that I see. That's always an interesting thing about drawing an i2 because they do reflect the environment looks like this window or a door or something in front of this particular model. So you get a little bit more of a sense of what's happening around them just by what you see being reflected in the eye. And now I'm going to start doing some shading. So I'm going to start right around the edge here. That's where I see in this particular model. It looks the darkest, and then it just comes in and in various shapes and patterns. So I'm going to go dark around the edge. And also just sort of use that opportunity to clean up my circle a little bit. See you look at that. I drew a perfect circle. No one has to know. Well, except for all of you watching the video, that there were about five or six other lines. They're going dark all the way around. And then pulling it in. You don't have to replicate the pattern exactly. It's a very intricate, fascinating combination of shapes and patterns that happen in there. I mean, you certainly could really do a very detailed technical rendering of that if you are inclined, but probably not in 10 min. So I'm just going to roughly estimate some of that stuff. Now I'm just using one pencil for everything. I'm using my pencil. If you're somebody that likes to use the range of pencils, you can always switch, get a harder lead for when you wanna do lighter values, like how I'm going in now in doing this inner part, where I want it to be a little bit wider so that the darker pattern contrast it a bit. If you're just using one pencil like I am, you just vary the amount of pressure that you put on it. So like now I'm going back in to do this part. Press a little harder, make it dark again. You can always go back in and erase out highlights too if you haven't gone too dark. I'm kinda working around the highlights so I don't have to do that too much. But I might take my little kneaded eraser and come in and just make a few other little patterns, shapes. You can kind of shape this however you want to get into the spaces. Okay? Now I'm gonna go along the top here. Darken that. I really want to get to. Showing the shading on the white of the eye. So let me go ahead and do a little bit more of that now. You see how since we've added the dark in the center of everything else looks super light. Because value is one of those things that's very relative. Dumb. You cheat, you change the value of one thing in your drawing and then it really changes everything. So you might have to backtrack and darken or adjust the amount of contrast in different areas. Once you've established your darkest point. A little bit of shading right around here, just kinda softens that edge. Now I'm going to make this dark crease. You don't want it to feel too much like a line. If you're going for, if you're going for realism anyway, if you're going for realism, the less lines the better because you don't really see outlines. When you're looking at something that's three-dimensional, what you see are shadows. So I'm going to just pull that line down and then also pull it up. Because looking at that reference, you can kinda see how the shadow goes both ways there. And then I'm going to do is darken the eyelashes. Can I do a little bit of shading down here as well? I think doing a little bit of shading around the eye just definitely helps to make it feel like it's sitting inside of the skin. You don't want it to feel like it's bulging out. We were gonna do a little shading here. And then we'll do these lashes. And let's just darken that eyebrow smooth shading and over here, completed. Now as with most of these drawings that I've been doing in here, I could spend a lot longer on this. And if you are in the zone and enjoying working on this one, I would encourage you to keep going until you feel like you're done. But minds at a good stopping point here, everything's sort of at least had the same degree of shading and feels pretty well worked out. So I'm going to call this one finished. Like I said, you keep going. If you wanted to. I could spend a lot of time working on eyes. I think they are just fascinating. Icu. Good job, everyone. Hope you enjoyed that lesson tomorrow we're going to continue with this close-up idea and we'll be practicing noses and mouths. So I'll see you then Have a great day. Bye bye. 8. Lesson 7: Studies - Nose and Lips: Today we are going to be focusing on drawing noses and mouths. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. Okay, today you're getting a two for one special were drawing nose and lips. So let's dive right in and get started. Now, as I often do with faces, I'm going to begin with that line of symmetry that I talked about earlier, where it just kinda helps you line everything up on the face. I'm curving it a little bit because I can tell that this person is look is positioned in a three-quarter view. And then I'm gonna go ahead and draw a little guideline here for the nose, it looks like it's angled just slightly dipping down on the right. Then I'll come down to about where it looks like that mouth goes. We can always adjust if needed, but that feels about right. I think that'll work. Now. I'm just going to start lightly sketching in the shapes that I see. So I'm going to start with the nose and notice how the nostril on the left appears bigger. The nostril on the right. It's not because this person has a unusual knows. It's just because of perspective. That's the that's what happens when a part of the face is facing away from us. That everything on that side, in this case, everything on the right side, looks smaller. See how I'm using that line of symmetry though to make sure that that's where the center of the nose goes and that's all. That will also be where the center of the mouth will go. I'm going to draw this little flap over here on this side. Kinda comes under like this. And over here you can see I, just like when I was drawing the planes of the face, I definitely tend to start in a more with more geometric lines. And I like to sometimes just lightly sketch in where I see some of the shadows because that tells me that there's a plain shift at that at that area. That's why it goes from light to shadow because the nose is angling in a different direction. So any of those interior lines you can sketch while you're going, it just helps you. It makes it easier to when it is time to add shading or other details. Alright, so those are, those are good start for our nose. Now I'm gonna come down, I think I'm made that line a little too low. I'm going to scooch it up, just a smidge. And then I like to start right in the middle. And I'm drawing the line in-between the upper and lower lip. There's usually a little bit of a curved shape right here. And then it tends to kinda come down on each side. And then depending on their expression, in this case, it kinda curves back up again. Down, up, over. Alright, so there's that center line. Now, we can just build the lower lip and the upper lip out from there. Usually it doesn't go all the way to the far corner. You can see in the photo, the lip actually kinda begins just a little bit inset like this. Then same thing on this side. The edges aren't super defined. So you might not want to have a real dark hard edge or hard line, kinda keep it a little softer. In this case, if the person had really defined lips or maybe it was wearing lipstick or lip liner, then that would change that. But this case, it's more natural. Okay, back down. And just in a little bit like that. Alright, now I'm going to also go ahead and draw this little teardrop shaped kinda divot that it's between the nose and the mouth. And draw a couple of the little laugh lines, smile lines over here. And maybe a little hint of where the chin starts whenever I'm drawing close-ups of facial features like this, just like with the eyes. I like to just think a little bit about what's going on around them. Now I'm gonna go in and erase. Guidelines don't need those anymore. And we have a little bit of time left. So I'm going to do some shading. I like to start by trying to just lay in where I see the biggest chunks of dark and shadows. So I definitely see strong shadow here. All the way down. Just kinda fades out. It looks like there's a light source that's coming from this direction. So that's why everything on the left is little darker, or in some cases a lot darker. See how drawing those lines of the planes really helped me. Now that I'm shading, I'm going to go real dark in here in the nostril and continue this shadow. It looks like it comes all the way over to about the center. Gets a little tighter, they're a little smaller. Alright, then we have shadow up here. Dark shadow for this nostril. And it's also a bit of shading right here on this part to me that a little too wide. There we go. Not going super detailed. I'm just looking for the big areas with the most contrast for now. If there's time, come back and fine tune it even more. Take that on up. Now this whole left side here of the skin in-between the nose and mouth is a little bit more in shadow because it's facing away from that light source. And then it gets a little darker inside of this divot. See how just doing that little bit. It really adds a lot of dimension to the face. Without a lot of effort. It's my favorite kind. Okay, Now onto the lips. So it's really dark over here. It actually fades up into the skin. And then a lot of shadow on that upper lip. That tends to be the case if the lighting is coming from up above because of the angle of that lip, that will be usually more in shadow than the lower lip. Is chris. Different if the light was coming from below or if it was some kind of unusual lighting situation, that might not be the case. But in general, you always want to just look at your reference though that's the, that's the go-to. You can know all the rules there are. Reference might not follow any of them, so just always keep looking. Alright, so now it's kind of a medium value here. Going to curve this up a little more. Here we go. And then there's a lot of little texture lines here. And then in-between them is where there's some highlights hitting the lip side over here on the left, more in shadow a little bit later down here. But closing off those highlights, I might come back to it a little darker value here. This is just playing. You just get it in there and play. That's, that's my favorite thing about drawing. Just noodle away until it looks good. And don't be afraid to erase if something doesn't feel right. Those are the best learning opportunities really, when you look at a drawing and you think, Wow, something is not right here. That doesn't mean you should quit and give up. That's the time to really step back, study it, compare it to the reference, and see if you can figure out what's wrong. Sometimes just literally taking two steps back away from your paper will give you the space and the perspective that you need to notice issues. You can also try flipping your drawing upside down. That's a really good way to spot something wrong because it just disorients you enough to be able to see it with fresh eyes, looking at it in a mirror as another good trick, I use that one a lot. I'm stealing a little bit of shading here under the mouth. Again to just help place it in context, make it feel a little more dimensional. Okay, now, I want to keep going, but I've already been at it for 10 min and we are at a good I'm at a good stopping point. You feel free to carry on. If you are having fun with this one. And try practicing some more noses and mouths and eyes and anything else that you find challenging. It can really be helpful to just isolate that thing, draw it big, and study how it's made up of a lot of famous artists did a lot of studies of just parts of the piece, parts of the face, parts of the figure, whatever it was they were painting before they would actually do the real, the real thing. Alright, I said I was stopping. And I will. So there's mine. Awesome job, everyone. Tomorrow in less than eight, we're going to be drawing hands. See you then. Bye bye. 9. Lesson 8: Studies - Hands: Today we're going to be drawing hands. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. Alright, here's the hand we're going to draw today. Let's get started by focusing on simple, basic shapes like always, I know I'm a broken record sometimes. But that really is the best way to approach just about anything you need to draw. So I'm doing sort of a rectangular shape for the main section of the hand. Well, I don't know if you'd call this really a rectangle. Started out that way, but I'm giving it a little bit more definition than that. So kinda having a taper toward the wrist like this. Really, I want to encourage you to draw whatever shapes you see. There's no one way to do any of this, but this is the shape that I am starting with. Like that. Then let's draw the fingers coming off of this top part. And I think this is probably the best recommendation I can make for you when drawing hands is to think about the structure of those fingers. A lot of times people will just draw, draw the fingers without thinking about the shape of the structure of why they bend the way they do. And the fingers can end up looking very, very undefined, like little sausage links or something. So we don't want that. So the way to avoid it is to kind of draw each section of the finger, making it a little bit more geometric at first. So that's just going right to that first bend, the first digit. And then the next one. Here. The finger gets skinnier as it goes toward the tip. Alright, the last one here. See that wasn't so hard. And then it kinda comes down a little bit in here. Then let's draw that thumb. Cv. Just break anything down into shapes. It's suddenly a lot less scary. So we're gonna go right to that first bend. That's the first digit. And then also, I'm looking at the shape of the negative space. I know that's something we've talked about before. Right up here and down. I shorten this finger just a little. There we go. All right. There we have the first finger and thumb. Now in this case, the other fingers are kinda tucked behind, but we still want to think about them and think about their position. Get the knuckles in. So we have one here that they're on a downward angle you see from here down. And it helps to draw a little guidelines for yourself like that. The first 1 s, one, third one comes down kind of angles over toward the wrist than the arm is at an angle, kind of goes to the left. Bring that over a smidge, little bump and back. Alright, now we just have one more finger to draw and that's where we see this little piece of the middle finger sticking through ray here. And then it bends, comes down. It really does help whatever part of the body you might be struggling with to just take the time to sort of isolate it and draw it by itself. Everybody says hands are so difficult, but look how quickly we've gotten this sketched out. See, you did it. You can do it. And now we have some time left to really refine it, and I love that. So let's take advantage of that. I'm going to go through now and just sort of follow this finger all the way around the perimeter and try to capture a little bit more of the subtle shapes that I see there. So we start off our eyes, I start off more geometric. That doesn't mean you have to. And then I go back and refine it and really try to draw the two shapes that I see. A lot easier to do that it makes it a lot, lot more comfortable if you've taken the time to do that loose sketch first because then, you know that things are roughly where they're supposed to be. And so you can go a little bit deeper into detail with the confidence that you don't, you're not going to have to erase it and redraw it a bunch of different times to get it in the right spot. I'm just rounding things out where they need to be. This was not an easy hand to dry, could have picked one that was doing a much simpler position. But I figure you're on you're on less than eight, you're ready for a challenge. I don't have to keep it interesting for myself here too. Okay. Like I said, I was drawing this finger and then I went everywhere except that finger. It sounds like me. Let's continue. Then it comes here. Okay. And I think I need to make it just a little bit smaller. A little bit about fingernail, you can see I'm going to go ahead and draw that. Erase some of these extra lines that I don't need anymore. Okay, Let's come up here and get this one worked out. So this comes up over like that. Raise some of these lines. Let's get that thumbnail, sketch it in. Now it'd be a shame with all the beautiful waiting in this picture not to do at least a little bit of shading and this drawing. So let's jump in and do some of their, I like to focus on where I see the most contrast between light and dark. So I'm going to follow right along where the highlight is, this highlight that is right on the right side. We can tell by looking at this that there's a light source that's coming from the right from the right from the back because it's not it's not lighting up a whole lot of the hand. It's really just getting along the edges. I'm just doing a quick sheet here just to get a little bit of value. And I think that can add so much dimension to a drawing. Just makes those, those lines kinda come to life. So it's worth taking the time to do a little bit of air. Okay, here we go. And now you can never say that you can't draw hands because look, you just did one. And hands are great because you can just keep practicing. Obviously, you can use your own hand as a model. Or you can find plenty of references online of hands in different positions. And just study them. Look at the shapes, don't be intimidated. You can, you can do it. And especially when you're drawing them as a part of a larger image that shows more of the body. You can take what you've learned from this and not feel so intimidated or not feel like you have to avoid that part anymore. It's just a collection of shapes, just like anything else. Just emphasizing some are my shadows a little. I know I need to stop because I think we're at our time limit. I don't want to stop having too much fun and you don't have to stop. You can keep right on going. But here's mine. Yeah, you did it. Let me give you a hand. I can't help being cheesy. I hope you enjoyed that lesson tomorrow we are going to be drawing the face from the front. Have a great day. Bye bye. 10. Lesson 9: Drawing Practice - Face from the Front: Today we are going to be drawing the face from the front. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. Okay, here's our model for today. We are doing another face from the front. But this time because you've had a little bit more practice now, we will go a little bit more in depth. So let's get started. To begin with. We see there's a little bit of a lean to the left. I'm going to draw my line of symmetry right here. And then kinda just get the overall head shape, the big oval to start with. And then, then we will refine it, of course. Okay. Now this model is looking pretty, pretty straight on at us in terms of eye level. So that guideline for the eyes really is going to be about halfway between the top of the head and the chin. That's something that can throw people off a little bit because you expect it to be higher, but you have to take into account that the hairline is actually going to be, you know, probably about here. Of course, if it was a drawing of me, it would be about here. But we're not going there. Alright, then knows is about halfway my little above halfway between eyes and chin. Just a smidge. And same with the mouth. About halfway, but a little. Kinda just want to look at the model and estimate the best you can. Wear those things go. Now I'm using the approach that I shared with you in the planes of the face lesson. I want to start by just kind of like lightly sketching some structural shapes. I'm not doing the eyes right away. I am thinking more about eye sockets. I'm thinking about if I was sculpting this face out of clay, what are the shapes I would need? And you can see I'm keeping my lines very loose, very light at first just to get everything in position. And I'm looking at where I see shadows on the face. And that helps me to figure out where those different planes are, where there's planar shifts in the face are. This is something that does take a little bit of practice to understand the using the whole soccer ball method. So what I like to call it anyway, I don't know that I've ever heard anybody else call it. But doing the planes of the face really does help you to create a much more three-dimensional looking image. Alright, so that's the basic setup. See is a line right with the top of this eye sockets are where the eyebrow is, and then the bottom of it's just a little above the nose. We see we do see more of this year than this one. So that tells us that there is actually a little bit of a turn to the phase after all, the left side is turned just ever so slightly away from us. And that's why we see lots of that ear. Also means we're going to see a little bit less on this side of the face and a little bit more over here. Okay? So I've got the basic structural elements, I've got the basic planes sort of late in here. I need to make a few tweaks, but overall it looks pretty good. Alright, now I'm going to start with the eyes. I'm going to come right here inside of the eye socket and just do a real light sketch for where I think that I need to go. Keeping it nice and loose it first here. I have a tendency to want to draw eyes too big. So I have to kinda just watch that and adjust as needed. The more that you draw, the more you are going to learn what your own tendencies are. And then you can sort of take the steps to correct them if you want to, or you can just embrace it and thought that'd be a part of your style to you. Every artist is allowed to do whatever they want. It's, it's good to learn how to draw realistically. But you don't have to stay there. You can learn the rules and break them. Can find your own unique style. That's a great thing. When I paint. That's really when I get very abstract with figures. I do a lot of painting with the palette knife and just let crazy colors and shapes kinda takeover really have fun with it. So I encourage you to allow yourself to be expressive to everything doesn't have to be realistic. Okay, sketching in the eyebrows here on top of that shape where I had the eye sockets. Now I'm going to just start refining everything, starting with the edge of the face. I'm going to figure out where the hairline goes. He's got some grid here. We've got to get that in there. Not jealous at all. Maybe a Louisville. You can see I'm still being very loosened, sketchy at this stage. I don't like to commit to quickly must have commitment issues. But that way you just feel a lot freer to adjust. Know that's the biggest thing. Can't be afraid to tweak and can keep tweaking and keep refining until you're drawing feels right to you. If something feels wrong, it probably is. So don't let that intimidate you. Stop and analyze it. Figured out why, what isn't working about that part? Because if you can recognize that there's a problem, that's, that's wonderful. That's the, that's the biggest most important step. But you have to follow up with fixing it. I'm just going back over top of my lines. Adding more detail, refining. It's very sparkly. Eyes. Gotta get those in there. Okay, let's get his mouth raising it just a little bit as I did this, I think he I think I made it just a little TOO. Looking at to see where the corners of the mouth kind of align with the center of his eye. Right down from there. You remember how we did the lips when we worked on the close-up of that. But that little divot in the middle should fall right on the line of symmetry. Lower lip in there. Just going to very loosely kinda suggest his beard. What I wanna do too, if we have time, is just get a little bit of the shading on his face. That's going just like, just like with some of the other recent drawings we've been doing that to stop that enhances it so much. It's when it really goes from feeling like a two-dimensional line drawing to three-dimensional form. Let's see if we can get a little bit of time for the beard too high. There we go. Give you a little beard trim. I'm just going to very quickly see it in the here. And then kinda just do some, some lines on top too, show the movement of the hair. You don't have to draw every strand of hair when you draw here. That's a, that's a mistake. I see a lot of beginning artists make you want to draw every single hair, but that can make it look very stringy. Not usually the look people want, It's better, less is more. And you want to think about, instead of each individual strand, you want to think about sort of showing different sections or different clumps of hair, I guess would be the way to describe it. Look for the plane shifts in the HER2, you can see where it gets darker in shadow. And you can even use your Kneaded eraser to pull out some highlights where the light is hitting. But we don't want to make him look like he's got blonde tips. Okay, so now let's do a little bit of shading on his face. This is the part that just makes it in. If you've drawn some of those lines for the planar structure, then it makes it really easy because you've given yourself the outline of some of those shadow shapes already. Upper lips, a little darker, more in shadow here. Under the nerves. I'm just going for the big shadows. We don't have time to do a lot of detail here. Will you do? If you, if you want, you can keep going. And I encourage you to, this is a great pose. This is a great, great drawing to practice on and really study that face and see just how far you can take it. And especially applying some of what we have learned by focusing on the eyes, nose, and mouth and those recent lesson. See if you can put it all together now in this one. Okay. And just because I don't want him to be a floating head, I'm going to take a minute here and just draw a little hint of shoulder. Sometimes in a drawing like this, when you have limited time, you can just really focus in on certain details, especially around the eyes are good, good place to emphasize. And then just let things start to, start to fade away as they move. They can just kinda dissolve until wine, everything doesn't have to be fully rendered. Soften that mouth a little bit. Little shading on that lower lip. Shading over here. You can tell I don't want to start because I'm having fun. But I promised you 10 min, I'm going to try and stay as close to that as possible. All right. I'm stopping and stepping away from the drawing in 1 min. Okay. Done. Great job, everyone. Tomorrow we are going to be drawing the face again, but from a three-quarter view, you'll see how everything changes. So have a great day and I'll see you then. Bye bye. 11. Lesson 10: Drawing Practice - ¾ View Face: Today we are drawing the face again, but from three-quarter view, and that's going to change everything up a little bit. So get ready, sharpen your pencils, get some paper. Let's go. Here's our model for it today. And we are looking at a three-quarter view this time, which means the model is turned a little bit in one direction. So to start with, like always with port threats, I'm going to do that line of symmetry down the middle of the face. And it's going to curve this direction because of the way that the model is turned. Kind of like that. And roughly draw the head shape, which is going to be much closer to the line of symmetry on the right side. We'll see a lot more over here, actually quite a bit more. I'm gonna do that what I did previously where I draw kind of a circular shape to represent the back of the head, the skull area, and then more of an oval for the face. Okay. Now, let me do really look to see now before I draw it, look at the eyes and see if you can figure out the direction that that line needs to go. When I look at it, first of all, I see is she's pretty much looking straight on at us. But there's just the slightest bit of an upward tilt, a little bit of a curve like this. You see that? It's just has to do with the way her head is positioned. It really is worth taking the time to study that face and figure it out. If you can't tell by eyeballing it at first, it's okay to print out your references, put a piece of tracing paper over them and just draw these guidelines so that you can understand how the, how the structure of the face works. I encourage you to try that. Because if you do that a few times, then you'll really start to get it and you'll be able to recognize it more. If you have the ability to do any digital work, that's another way to do it. You can bring the bring your photo reference into whatever program you use. I use Photoshop a lot myself. And then you can just draw right on top of it to figure out where the shapes go. Okay? Now let's draw the eye socket shapes. This I is closer to us. We see more of it. That means we see more of that eye socket. On this side. It's facing away. So we see lives like that. Then I'm going to just start building the nose. I always, I always kinda use words like that when I'm drawing in this way because it is like, like you're building in essence it really, the flat paper opens up in a way and you can just really start to envision that three-dimensional form. For me anyway, that's what makes it really fun. We go from drawing on something that's flat. And then all of a sudden it just feels like you're seeing that person right there on your paper. I love that. Never gets old. I've done so many drawings and paintings of people. And I just love it. I just think it's so exciting, something so fascinating about people. I love, I love drawing and painting them and I love really trying to capture not just what they look like, but kinda little sense of who I think they are. Alright, now we're going to come down to the mouth. This time. She has slightly open mouth. So we don't just get to draw one line in the middle. And if you look, there's that line of symmetry down the middle, you have that little teardrop shapes. So you know that that's where the upper lips gonna go, the center of it. Then we do not see very much of this side of the lip compared to this side. And that's because of the perspective. So let me draw this over here and she's smiling. So that curves up and then down. So this area is the inside of her mouth. And then we'll work outward from there to do the upper and lower lip. So we've got upper lip here. Just a little bit of it. Lower lip here. Tried to choose photos where you'll get a variety of different kinds of drawing experiences here. I think that's always a good thing. So we haven't done an open mouth like this yet. But just like with anything, you just look for the shapes. Don't get too caught up in thinking about, you know, what it is or what's, what's happening. Just where you see. Alright. Now I'm gonna come in and do the eyes. See on the right side that I actually partially hidden by the nose, which is not necessarily what you would expect if you were just drawing it from your imagination. So that's where, that's where references come in really handy. They keep kinda keep us from drawing what we think we know. Focus on what we're actually seeing. Then I noticed that the edge of her face is right here. By that, I so I'm gonna go ahead and draw that in. That'll just helped me to start to shape that. Let's come back here. Get the pupil and iris late in. Okay, Good. Get that little reflection. Okay, now, let's just get the eyelid into some Laius is here. Okay, we'll come back and do more detail, but let's get the other IN to make sure that everything looks right. So we've got here's the the side of the nose. Then there's the shadow area. Eye socket starts here. Corner of the eye about here, I would say comes up, makes sure that both sides land on that guideline. That's why we drew it, after all, got to take advantage of that thing. That looks pretty good. Pay attention to where the pupil and iris are. You see the in this case it's all the way over on the left. That's why she really has that sense of looking at us. Okay. We're getting there. Okay, Now I'm gonna do that little eyelid. You don't see much of it. This is a little line right up above, Little smile line underneath her eye. And then let's go ahead and do the eyebrows. Pay attention to the shape of them in the direction that they're going. That adds a lot to the expression. Eyebrows are very expressive. They can be anyway. Okay, now let's go on and kinda refund some things and get the rest of her face worked out the face shape. So the forehead comes up to here. Kinda angles in a little bit. You see a little bit of hair comes down. We have this fabric that's sort of sweeps down right beside the eyebrow. And then it comes up like that. Let's figure out the layers of this fabric. Now we have the gold fabric first. This comes about here. Comes over, up like that. Then this comes down. And over. So right around the nose is where the fabric tucks. Then this other piece that comes down starts to form the chin. And you see how I like to approach different areas from both sides. So I got, you know, about this far down here and now I want to make sure that everything over here is lining up. So kind of bouncing around really helps me kind of get things placed where they're supposed to be. It also just works very well for my ADD personality. I bounce around all the time. That's my MO in life. Let's come down. Eight that chin over. Connect into this a line here. And now let me draw it in. I'm going to erase my guidelines. And then I want to draw just a hint of the teeth. Teeth or something. You don't want to go overboard with a vacant start to really take over a drawing. So sometimes I'll just draw like a little hint of the shape, that little triangular shape that you see from the gums. Then I'll come and draw the bottoms of the teeth. I won't even connect each one up. I'll just kinda let people make that connection themselves. It's better to not over-emphasize the teeth in your drawing. I think. Unless you want to go for that Look, I always find if I if I emphasize the teeth too much, it ends up looking like that boy who was on the cover of Mad Magazine, that big, big grid. So if that's the vibe you want, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, this is probably a good approach for teeth. Less is more even. That might be a little to emphasize. So you can just take your eraser and dab. I'm not going to have time to shade her in like we did with the one yesterday. But you feel free to do that with yours if you would like. Instead, I'm just going to make this one a more refined line drawing. So I'm just going to take a couple extra minutes here to go over some of the lines, especially giving more of a sense of darkness around her eyes. Just got beautiful eyes. So I want to emphasize that even in a line drawing, you can create a sense of emphasis. Emphasis. You can also create even a sense of the volume just by making some lines darker and others lighter. That can suggest where shadows are if you don't actually get to drop it on shaded in. Loved keep working on this and I probably will, but we are at the end of our time. So I'm going to wrap this up. You keep on going though, if you are in the zone, I never want to enter her up. An artist in the zone. Hope you enjoyed this. I certainly did awesome work. You did it. I hope you're putting all of these drawings on your refrigerator or somewhere. Tomorrow we're going to be drawing the whole body again and we'll spend the whole class time on one post so that you can get a little more detailed. Have a great day and I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 12. Lesson 11: Drawing Practice - Full Figure Pose #1: I can't believe we're already at less than 11. It seems like we just started. I hope you're having a blast in this class. I'm certainly loving getting to spend this time being creative with all of you. Today we're going to spend the whole 10 min drawing one full body pose so you can get a little bit more detailed than you've been able to in our gesture drawings and contour drawings to sharpen your pencils. Get some paper, and let's go. Alright, I've got a great pose for you today. I couldn't do it myself, but I found a photo of someone doing it. So let's jump in and get started. I'm going to do the kinda the line for the spine first. And this is a really good one for that because it starts off and I've angled like this and then twists in the middle head about here. Right. Actually lower it just a smudge because I don't want to run out of room for the hands. Which is actually a good point to bring up. Sometimes when you're in the middle of a figure drawing, you do run out of room. You might have to take the arms or the legs right off the page if you didn't account for that from the start and that's okay. It's much better to do that than to squished the figure and into the frame. Make their proportions all wacky so that they fit. I've seen so many drawings like that when they're figures approaching the edge and you just kinda like want to shorten things or make it, make them fit somehow. So don't do that. I'm looking at that negative space above the head, keeping it very loose here. First, you can see I'm kinda using some of the shapes that I, that I shared with you earlier on, that triangular shape for the torso. But I'm also adapting those shapes now at this point, you don't need to be quite so rigid about it. If you started out that way, maybe, maybe allow the shapes to become a little bit looser now, a little more like what you're actually seeing. If you're ready for that. If not, just keep doing the triangles and rectangles. But I tend to like to round them out a little bit more and actually really look at the shapes that I'm seeing. Then I'll come back and give him close and I'm in a minute. Let's get the essentials on here first. Okay. This knee comes out or the leg comes out sort of towards the top of that pelvis area is really stretching. So that's something that you might not want to draw naturally or might feel wrong, but just draw the shapes that you see. Look at the negative space here. Draw the, draw the shape of the negative space. And I know I've said this before too, but it really does help me to try to approach a drawing like it's a quick gesture drawings. So even though we have 10 min to do this one piece, I've already gotten the basics of the pose down, and we're just a few minutes in, so that leaves a lot more time to refine it. To check proportions. You can measure his head and count down and make sure everything is landing where it's supposed to. And then you have all this time to do details, which is what I'm going to do now. I'm gonna go back into my drawing and start refining it. Starting with the head. I'm not doing details, but I am going to provide a little bit more information. So get the hair shape in there if you want. You doing all the facial features. But I'm just kinda doing some of the main shapes that I see just where I see the most contrast. So kinda like the eye socket. It's a lot of shadow there. So I'm going to draw that this whole side of his face is a bit in shadows and G there. Then just work my way down. It's a lot of great folds increases in the fabric on this one that really help understand what the body's doing. Some kind of drawing those two as I go. I wonder how long he had to hold this. I've posed for some figure drawing classes. It's not easy. Of course I never posed like this. My poses are usually means is like laying there. You get with to get that other sleeve and there can be kinda looser with your lines if you want. This is a good one to try. You know, being more expressive, you could even do contour line drawing or whatever you want. I'm not drawing the hands in detail, but I'm just again, kinda like with the face, just picking up on some of the main shapes that are that helped to define what we're looking at. You can go as detailed as you want. We provide you with the photos. In addition to having them here on the screen. If you go to the page where we have the lesson, you can see the photos, you can zoom in, you can download them and zoom in on certain areas. So if you really wanted to do a more detailed drawing of this, you absolutely could. Okay, now I'm gonna get some of those creases and folds on his genes. This is a fun one. I like drawing dancers because you get some really interesting poses, lot of movement and contortion of the body. It's really fun challenge. It makes you look at it more as shapes. I think when somebody is in a pose, that's not necessarily what you would consider a normal pose or casual pose, but they're more doing something more extreme like this. I think it's easier to get out of your own way or get out of your head. Stop thinking of it so much as a body. Just draw the shapes. We didn't do a lesson focusing just on feed. But take everything you've learned from the hand lesson. It applies to beat to start get the big sheep. Then focus on toes. And really look at structure With a minute to spare. So I'm gonna do a little shading. I loved the shadows on this. There's some great shadows. That definitely helps. Give the figure more volume. I hope you're enjoying this. If so, you're in luck because we are doing another one tomorrow. So get ready. Can't get enough practice doing figures Studies. I really think they are one of the most valuable things if you really want to learn how to draw, practice drawing the figure. Alright. I think that's going to do it for mine. You keep going as long as you want. Yes. Great job, everyone. Woohoo, you did it. I'm your biggest cheerleader tomorrow we are going to be doing the same thing we did today actually, but a different pose, different model. I think it's great to spend some time really drawing the full figure and seeing how it looks with different models in different positions. So have a great day. And I'll see you then. Bye-bye. 13. Lesson 12: Drawing Practice - Full Figure Pose #2: Today we are drawing the full figure again. We'll be spending the whole class time on one pose, but it's a different pose. Then yesterday's, sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. Here's our model for today. Let's jump right in. We're going to spend the whole 10 min working on this one just like we did yesterday. I'm going to start with my usual line for the spine. Little bit of a slant to it. Head up here. I'm sure you probably know that where the head goes back now. Let's see a little bit of an angle to the shoulders. Comes back like this. Sort of doing a modified version of the triangle, oval square thing that I showed you earlier. This time I'm doing shapes that are a little bit closer to what I'm actually seeing. So if you feel comfortable doing that, Go right ahead. If not stick with the more simple geometric shapes to start with. Or if you have another way you like to do it, do that. All right. Leg over here. You can see just like usual, I'm starting very loose and sketchy, pretending that I only have a couple of minutes to get this down. And then I'll come back and refine it. Very low commitment level at this point, if something is off, it's easy to fix. Trying to look at how the elements on one side of the body relate to the other. Always check the alignment of things that can really help. Especially in a more complex pose like this, where you do have a lot of overlap. The arms and legs. Just using very rough sketchy shapes for now. Always want to check the sheep of the negative space too. That's telling me I was looking at this little opening right here. I think I had her arm going out just a little too far. So remember to draw the shapes of the negative spaces there. Now, that helps me know where to put that arm like this. And then that also tells me that I might have this knee out as mids too far to correct one thing and then it kinda opens the floodgates. But it is a really good way to check. All right, there that feels better. That really is what this phase is for putting something down on the paper so you have the ability to compare and just make it exactly how it's supposed to be. All right, here's our other arm. That's looking pretty good. I think I'm ready to start doing some more refined line work now and we still have about 6 min left, so we're doing good. If you're not quite here yet, you keep going. Get your shapes working, make sure that the proportions feel right. Then go on to the next step. For me, the next step is just using a little bit cleaner lines. Paying more attention to some of the subtle things. Going to just kinda imply a face, not gonna get too detailed with it. A little suggestion of eyes. Knows if there's time and always come back and refine that further. But at least if not, at least there's something on there. Now, what does keep on working our way down? The neck? Some hair in there. Hold on a second. I have to adjust an I. It's looking a little wacky. There we go. Alright. Good enough for now. Alright. Onto this arm. When I go through and do the second, second pass over things, that's when I'm really looking for where I see any curves are subtle things that I didn't pick up on the first time. That's when it really starts to come to life. I think you get the essence down first in your quick gesture. Drawing in essence is really fun and important too. But then if you do have time for detail, that's when it becomes extra light gouache. That combination can't really do one without the other. You can have really great details. But if you don't have a good sense of the overall than they might not really come together in the way that you want. Drawing is especially figure drawing is this constant. Stepping back to look at the big picture, check how everything is relating. And then kind of going in and really focusing on the details that you want to bring out to you. How are your drawings come in? Are you having fun? This is a challenging one, so if you're struggling a little, don't feel bad. Just take your time. Look at it and see what doesn't feel right. See if you can fix it. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to constantly be. Looking up at the reference and then looking back down at your paper. That's really how you spot mistakes. See even in this stage, I'm still being pretty loose. I'm not going super detailed yet. It's just a matter of steps, steps toward the tail. You can kinda gauge it by the amount of time that you have if it's a timed thing like this. And that way you're always sort of bringing everything up to the same level. And then if there's more time, you can go even further with the detail. But if not, it will still hold together and work as a drawing. Not going to go super detailed on the shoes. I could spend the whole 10 min just drawing this shoe, but I wanted to say a lot going on there. Got her on there pretty good. Now I'm just going to go back and use the minute or so that we have left to refine it a little further. Grab a sharp or pencil here. Might even do a little shading. That'll help get some of those different planes of the body working together to make the model feel more dimensional. You can tell the light's coming from the right side, especially when you look at the face. It's very illuminated on that side and more shadow on the left. It's always good to think about light source, even if you're not cheating, even if you're just doing a line drawing, you can still create a sense of the light source just by using heavier lines where the shadow in lighter lines in the highlight areas. To make it for a beautiful line drawing when you approach it that way. And it really will create a sense of the lighting without doing any shading at all. Just about out of time here. Just wrap up these hands a little better. I always tell when someone's trying to avoid hands, but everything else will be really detailed and then the hands will be kinda just like little bubbles. So I always try to take a minute and refund the hands of good. I do think they're pretty important. There we go. I hope you enjoyed that. Keep practicing to, you can keep working on this one. You can look up other models online in different poses or recruit your friends to pose for you. That's always a good thing. I make all my friends do that for me, for various projects when I need a reference for something. Okay. I said I was stopping, so I guess I should. All the awesome work I hope you enjoyed that. Tomorrow's lesson will be all about shading in capturing light. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 14. Lesson 13: Shading and Capturing Light: I'm excited that you're still drawing with us. I hope you're enjoying this class so, so much today we are going to be learning all about shading and capturing light. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper, and let's go. Today's all about capturing light and shading. So I chose a reference that has a really dramatic light source coming in from the left. And we're going to sketch this portrait as quickly as we can. So we have a little bit more time left over to do some shading on it. So to start with, I'm going to draw the line of symmetry, which is going to be sort of arcane to the left because the model is turned that direction. Get a rough head shape on there. Okay? It's a little bit of an angle to the eyes. You can see a little bit lower on the right. And so that means all the other guidelines will follow suit. Now I'm going to, I'm going to use my soccer ball approach here. I like calling it that it's so weird. But by what I mean is drawing the planes of the face. I'm drawing the eye sockets right now. Since we're focusing on shading today, It's great to start off just thinking about the planar structure of the face because then you'll be in a better position to do the shading. The planes are all defined by where we see shifts in light and shadows. So this will really help that process. I'm just been a very loose, very geometric way, drawing the shapes of the face. That wherever I see a shift going from light to dark, I'm, I'm sketching that in lightly right now. Then we'll refine this in it as we go. Just like always. Have to get something done first. So you can see how it looks. I hope if anything would come away from this class, feeling a little more empowered to just start off your sketches and your drawings in a loose way and not let go of some of the tension that I see a lot of people kind of holding onto when they're doing a drawing summit, you feel this pressure that it has to be perfect. And when you draw something that is imperfect, you get all stressed out. And this actually makes it just so much more freeing, so much more fun if you can just kinda let your pencil glide along very loosely without, without that stress. Okay, so now I've got the basics. I'm not going to do the hand. I think that's going to take too long. I want to get to shading here. So let me quickly sketch in eyes. Remember the corners go right on that guideline that we drew. He's kind of looking up, you can see the the placement of the pupil and iris is on the upper part of the eye there. And then we'll come over here, the sides farther away from us. So this I is going to be a little bit smaller. I'll always think about perspective. That in looking pretty good, we don't see a lot of detail on this side. And for as far as eyebrow and all kind of blends into the shadow. And that's a really good example of draw what you see, not what you know. If you don't see the eyebrow, you don't need to draw it. Just focus on the shapes and lines that you do see. Over here. We see a bit more of it. So I'll go ahead and sketch that in. And then let me refine the shape a little. My goal is to spend about half the class getting the drawing down and the other half shading, we have about 30. So 30 more seconds of drawing here. If you need longer to get your drawing worked out before you go on to shading. Feel free to pause it when I start drawing and keep going yourself. And then whenever you're ready to rejoin and start shading, then just press play again. Can just shut me write up. Slow down, Paul, I'm not ready for that. One advantage to doing video classes. Alright, that looks pretty good. We really don't see much detail in the ear either because it's all in shadow. So that is enough information for us to start doing some shading. So now what I like to do. Start by just laying in some general value. Wherever I see the darkest tones, we already have. White. The white of the paper creates the highlight. So I like to jump right to the opposite of that. And land where I see shadow. Now you can see how the hairline just kinda goes right into the shadow on that dark side of the face that's facing away from the light source. So I'm just kinda with my pencil on its side very loosely. Weighing in all of the shadows. I'm not going as dark yet as I see it. I kinda like to build up the shadows as I go. So I'm going to take everything to this middle value first. And then we can push it as far as time allows with the drawing, even if you don't go as dark as you see it. As long as everything else is working within that value structure that you're creating, then it will be believable and it will capture the light. So in other words, you don't, you can work with something that's called a compressed value scale. In this case, right now, in my drawing, we're only seeing the values from the lightest end to about the middle. And you can do beautiful drawings only using the values in that range. But of course it makes it more dramatic if you push the values farther. So we'll keep going. But see how just getting that little bit of value on there. Already, we get a sense of how the light is hitting the figure. Now the other thing I wanted to be sharing point out to you when you are doing a drawing and you really want it to feel realistic and you want it to have believable lighting. The best way to accomplish that is to not rely on outlines for anything because the outline makes it feel more like a drawing, which is a drawing. So that's okay. But if you want it to be more realistic, you want to get rid of those lines by turning them into shading. So look to see where is the darkest value. Whenever you have a line in your drawing, is it to the left, in this case in the background? Or is it on the face? And so in this case, the background on the left side is definitely darker because that's where that's the side of the face that the light is hitting. So I'm just going to lay a bit of value back in here and that will make that side of the face really pop out and feel like the light is hitting it. You see that? Alright, now I want to jump in to the eyes here. That's where I'm gonna start laying a little bit darker value. I might even jump up to a. What is the six B pencil that'll give me a little bit darker. Without much effort. Fan of air, little shading and I got a little darker up here pushing those values. Now, Let's get this. I leave that leave space for our little highlight. Don't be afraid to put value on the whites of the i2 because it's not white. It's in shadow. That actually helps tell the lighting story too late effects, everything. Little bit more weight value here. Alright, I'm going to start going darker now and my shadow darker here. Working with value and thinking about light and shadow just involves a lot of pushing and pulling with you. When you adjust the value of one area, it kinda shifts everything. So you have to just kind of keep looking and seeing where you need to go next to make everything feel balanced. And I would encourage you squint your eyes a lot because that will help you to see the big picture. So look at your reference in squint your eyes. You see how all the detail kinda disappears. And you just focus on the big sections of light and dark. It's, it's easy to get so wrapped up in the details that you lose sight of the big picture. So that's a trick that I use a lot to help me. Kinda just make sure that everything is working together the way it should. And that's really what the values in your drawings do. They work together to create that sense of lading that we wanted? I believe I am out of time here. As always, keep going with this drawing if you want. Go as detailed or as loose as you would like. But you can see how even just in our 10-minute time period, by being very selective about how I approached it, we've pretty much managed to really mimic the value structure of that photo. And with even more work, you can take this and make it into a very realistic drawing if you wanted to, by continuing to go on top and add details and refine things. But this is a good stopping point. For me. Awesome job, you did it. The next lesson is actually a two parter. It's going to stretch out over the final two classes. And so we'll be spending a little bit longer working on proportions and drawing the figure tomorrow. And then in the final lesson, we'll be adding a lot more detail and rendering. Have a great day, and I'll see you then. Bye bye. 15. Lesson 14: 2-Part Drawing - Focus on Proportion: Today's the first part of a two-part lesson where we'll be drawing the figure. In today's class, we'll be focusing on just getting the drawing right, getting the proportions worked out, all of that good stuff. And then tomorrow we'll get into a lot more detail. So sharpen your pencils, get some paper. And let's go. This is going to be a two parter we are spending today focusing on just getting the drawing down for this model. And then be sure to hang on to the drawing because then tomorrow we're going to continue with shading and rendering and making it look realistic. I wanted to end this series by a really letting you focus and do a bit of a longer drawing. So let's get started. I'm going to do my usual Can I get the line of the body, the angle of the head, keeping it very loose. This is not a, this is not a full figure. Obviously this is we're only seeing from the waist up, will get to go a little bit more detailed. Definitely use what we have learned about hands. All the, all the facial features, eyes, well the eyes are closed but still get to draw, draw them. They're still there. And nose and mouth and shading. We're just going to put everything together. I would also encourage you to really use this as an opportunity to explore. As far as drawing styles go. What you want your, what you want your drawing to look like. Do you want it to be more line oriented? Do you want it to be more realistically shaded? Do you want it to be stylized in some way? I've been approaching everything from a somewhat realistic angle. But that's just one way you could do anything. You could take a cartoony approach, you could take a very illustration approach and stylize the figure. Have fun with it. Still starting very loosened, sketchy though like I like I always do. Getting that handshape in there. Just focusing on shapes. Constantly looking to see how one shape relates to the next. Don't get intimidated by thinking about what it is you're drawing. Just focus on the shapes. You can do this. It's no different than any of our other drawings we've done. Shoulder and that looks about right. I'm saving the facial details for last because I want to get the rest of the body on there and makes sure where that the head size feels right. You could do, you could do the measuring trick if you want. Measure the head count down, see how many heads high. It's always a good thing to do. A lot of nice overlap here with the little bit of the arm that we see, the lower arm at the bottom. Okay. That's looking pretty good. How's yours coming? I'm sure it is coming along beautifully. Alright, let's see thumbs here, jaw line here, here. Here. Here. It's tricky to place for me in this one because of the way her head is turned, it ends up being a little bit lower then where you would expect it. Definitely a case of draw what you see, not what you know. It's always helpful to remember that. Especially when you're drawing something where they're unusual angles like this one. Right? The line of symmetry for the face is very much over on the left side. She's not quite in profile, but she's headed that way. We've got the line for the eyes right about here. Knows. Now. Looks about right, maybe a little lower on the list there. Let's get this face on here. So eye socket, that's how I'm doing it. You can go right for drilling the features if you want. I like to do my planar structure thing. I think every artist started just develops their own way into a drawing. This is definitely what's evolved for me out of the years that I spent doing portraits and figurative work, I've tried a lot of different techniques. I keep coming back to this method of just really focusing on the shapes and the structure and thinking about if I was making a sculpture of this, how would I do that? That helps me a lot, which is ironic because I'm terrible at sculpting. But I can do imaginary sculpting on paper. Refining that side of the face. I think the line for the eyes needs to be a smidge lower. There we go. Because I was just looking at where that left eye, how we just see like the littlest bit of it peeking out from behind the nose. So I know it's got to land right there. So the other one will too. All right. That looks about right. Then use the eye socket to kinda know where the eyebrow goes. Okay, let's get the sign of that phase-in. See what I mean. You can draw anything. If you just break it down into shapes, It's really pretty incredible. Did you think you'd be able to draw something like this? Maybe you did, I don't know. But if you're surprised, just know that that means you can draw anything you put your mind to you. So even though this video series is coming to a close pretty soon after tomorrow, which makes me sad because I've really enjoyed hanging out with all of you doing these drawings. But even though the video series when you're drawing life should not. I hope that you've done this enough now that it has become a habit. And I would encourage you to continue that habit of being an enabler here. Keep practicing, find something interesting and try to draw a little bit every day if you can. Because it really does. You'll see so much improvement in your drawings the more that you continue to practice. I'm sure that you've seen quite a bit already just in the short time we've been doing these lessons. And if you continue to see even more, hey, just refining this hand a bit. When I get the drawing worked out really well. So that tomorrow we can focus, spend the whole time playing with shading. There's some beautiful shadows in this picture. And I think that's going to be a really nice way to end this class by making a drawing that is a bit more detailed. Take everything that you've learned and put it into practice. Pay attention to all those little subtle nuances. Let's see how we see a little bit about finger right here on the other side that's up against her neck. Did you see that? And don't want to forget her hair. And it comes back down. Again. Erase any of those initial guidelines that you don't need anymore. Of course, as always, if you need more time, take as much time as you need to get the drawing to where it feels good. Then you'll be all set for tomorrow when we shade it in. I like to kinda lightly sketch some of the shadow shapes that I see too, that just makes it a little easier when it is time to start shading. Okay. I'm feeling good about this drawing. I hope you are too. If you need longer, like I said, keep going. And then we'll come back tomorrow and finish this up for a final drawing together in this class. So excited to see how this turns out. Great job everyone. Now hang on to this drawing because we are going to continue working on it tomorrow. Alright, have a great day, everyone and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye. 16. Lesson 15: 2-Part Drawing - Final Rendering: I cannot believe this is our final class that has gone by way too quickly for my taste. But the good thing is you can always re-watch them if you want to come back and hang out with me again. And we'll be doing a lot more classes like this to you. In today's class we're gonna be continuing the drawing that we started yesterday. So sharpen your pencils, get yesterday's drawing. And let's go. Alright, here she is. Again, recognize this. Here's our drawing that we started from yesterday. Every, all the line work is done. So we get to spend this whole class just shading. I'm super-excited. So I'm going to begin like I did on the, when we were doing the portrait, focusing on light and shadow by just kinda very gently filling in all of the shadow areas so I can look at some value laid onto my paper here. Here filled in. I like to start loose like this should come as no surprise, that's how I kinda do everything. But even when it comes to shading, I don't want to I don't like to go too detailed to quickly. I like to just gradually build everything up. Which is interesting because in general I'm a pretty impatient person. Like things to happen now and quick. But this is just the easiest way I've found to be able to really wrap my head around what I'm seeing and what I'm drawing. These shadows on the, on the shadow side of her face are very helpful at creating the dimension. Making her look like a three-dimensional form. So I really want to pay attention to the shaping of those that's going to be very important in making it feel like her shading here on the lips, under the chin. Up here. Okay. Now I'm going to bring the shadow on down. This. There's pretty strong shadow beside that hand. Here is strong shadow on her shoulder. So I'm just scanning the whole reference and wherever I see dark shadows, that's kinda where I'm jumping for this initial phase. Down here. This arm is pretty much in shadow completely. Then it gets a little lighter shadow here. Okay? So we have the basics laid out now. And I'm not drawing that whole complicated background, but I'm just going to put a little bit of shading out here and that will make the highlight part standout. I like to do this pretty early on if I know I'm putting a little bit of value in the background, I'll go ahead and do that at this first stage of shading and that way I can use that and see how it affects everything. It just sort of have that in mind. As I'm working on the rest of the piece, I'm going to bring that all the way around because I'm going to use that same shadow to help make her clothing on along her back here kinda stand out to you. Okay. Alright, so now it's time to go a little bit more detailed and I want to start by making her eyes really pop. There's a shadow underneath this I that's really prominent. And just kinda refining some of the shapes and details that I see. This time I'm using the point of the pencil instead of the side, so I can be more precise. I'm looking to see now also inside of the shadows, there are some shifts, areas where it gets a little darker, a little wider, making it fade to light more gradually. Come right around. Her mouth. Here is a little bit of a curved shadow that tells us a little bit about the structure of her face too. There's darkness under the lip, faint shadow here. So this is now the time to really start looking at some of those subtle things that make her feel very, very believable. Okay, and then it gets extra dark here. You see how starting a little bit softer with the shadow allows you to go back and push the dark areas where you need to, but you're not locked into them. You can just build it up where you need it and then leave the lighter value where you need them. Okay, there's little shadow on this finger. Shadow on this finger. I can't believe this is our last video already. Where did these 15 days go? I have really enjoyed getting to spend this time drawing with all of you. I hope that you have to. I hope you've learned some stuff. And mostly I just hope that you feel confident to keep going. I truly, truly believe that everyone can draw. Everyone can be an artist. It's not some magical thing that you have to be born with. It's just a skill that you develop with practice. If it's something that you enjoy, then you'll be more likely to continue practicing and get better at it. I always say, I can teach anybody to be an artist, but I can't teach you how to love it. That's the part that you have to contribute or have. I guess that maybe is the part that people are born with or is a part of your personality or something if this really speaks to you, even if the results aren't always exactly what you want. If you enjoy the process, then that's something to pay attention to you and to keep going. You can learn the skill. Just takes time and practice. If you enjoy the process, that's what counts. We get a little to focus sometimes on the end product and forget that the creative process is the important thing. And I know I have definitely enjoyed the process of making all of these drawings with you. I hope you've enjoyed it to you. I'll be doing a lot more classes like this too. So if you enjoyed this one, keep your eyes peeled for more. How about lot of things in the works? So you'll never be able to get rid of me. One thing that I wanted to mention about value two is that you really have to think about the relativity of the value. So I see how I just shaded. I added some darker values to this year because initially I had left it light, because it does look light compared to what's around it. However, it's not as light as this. So you, even though something might appear lighter than what it's next to you, it doesn't mean that it jumps all the way to the lightest end of the value scale. It's really about trying to look to see what is the true value of weight of what you're looking at. Looking good, How are your drawings coming? I want to see I hope you'll post them or share them with them so I can check them out. I think it's only for here you've got to see all of mine doing a little bit less detail as I move away from the face because I want this to be the focal point area. And so you can allow the details to feed become a little more impressionistic as you move away from, from that, if you would like. I do that a lot in my drawings. I think it's a nice way to help people know what to look at. Actually go a little darker with the shadow here in the background. That's also going to make her face pop a little more. Who your IRA to their friends. Well, we have just about coming to the end of this little creative journey. You don't want to forget the most important step of all. When you make a masterpiece, you have to sign it. 17. Closing Thoughts: Great job everyone. You did it. You made it all the way to the end of our 15 day class. I'm so proud of you. I really hope that you had a blast and I hope that you continue drawing. If you do something consistently for 15 days, that's long enough for it to start to feel like a habit. And I think this is a habit that you should continue. Have a great day everyone, and I hope to see you again really soon. Bye-bye.