Learning to Draw from the Ground Up

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. My name is Jessica and I want to welcome you to a class which will teach you to draw. Even if every other class you've taken in every book you've read on the subject could not do that. The trick to success is in building the foundation. I was in college learning to be an art teacher. Someone told me to teach as if I were helping my students make a stack of things, like boxes for example. But it can't be any old stack. Everyone knows that a stack like this will topple. These kinds of stacks are made by little kids, are folks who are in a hurry. They have no foundation. They cannot stand. But if you build the stack carefully and thoughtfully one step at a time, you build something solid that will last. And not only that, you can stack things on top of that stack, and it will still stand because it has a good foundation. This class is for you if you are an absolute beginner and it's for you if you do have a drawing practice, but don't really understand what you are doing. Or maybe don't get the results you would like. Our class project after having fun with some practice drawings, will be to complete this graduation drawing, which combines everything we have learned and looks complicated. But you will find it easy and fun to do because you will understand what you are doing and why. Our graduation drawing is also the cover of my 100 page creative drawing playbook, a PDF which you can download from the resources section for this class. This book contains all the information from the class and lots of extra step-by-step practice drawings. Let's grab that book and a couple of supplies and finally, learn to draw. 2. Supplies: Let's take a minute to talk about are very, very short supply list. We're starting at the beginning. And you don't need a lot of art supplies have started at the beginning. You just need some enthusiasm and a pencil and anything that will take the mark of the pencil. And so not a cocktail napkin, not so much. But anyway, we want paper that we can draw on with the pencil and that will easily erase. You could use any paper, copy paper, anything that's lying around. However, I promise you that you will be drawing some things in this class that you will like and you will want to keep. I'm going to recommend that you use a sketchbook. It can be any sketchbook. But what will happen? It will turn into your primer to refer to for this class. It won't be scary because the first pages we do will be really terrible. And we already know we're not gonna get bothered by that. In the end, you will have your collection of wonderfulness and proof that you really can't draw. I don't particularly care of myself for a spiral bound because my hand eyes gets on it. But in this case, spiral bond is fine too. Because if you really, truly only want to keep your good pages at the end of class, well, you could just tear out the bad pages and they'd be gone forever. A sketchbook is just a really good idea, is not necessary, but it's a really good idea. And a pencil, and pencils come in all kinds of hardness and softness. The yellow one you use in schools, very soft and very smearing. The only thing wrong with smearing is that it's hard to erase. And we're going to erase all that we want to, we're gonna talk about that in a second. But I generally use a three H pencil or two H pencil. And the H stands for hardness. And the higher the number, the higher the pencil they make. This is not one which is why I'm not demonstrating it. And the reason it's not one is because it's a light line that doesn't show up very well on video. I am going to use a, three b. The b for some reason stands for softness. And so I'm actually using a smear, a pencil. But you don't need to do that. You can find drawing pencils anywhere that are all numbered. And for long-term drawing practice, a three H or to H, or even an HB which is dead center, is a good idea. So this is just a regular pencil. And the third thing, sketchbook pencil, eraser. I call an eraser, best friend, and a permission stick. Permission stick. Why? Because this gives you the permission to make any mark on a page was no fair? It's an undo button. If his son a computer. There are, there's a lot out there these days because people making art seemed to be in a big hurry. And so there's a lot of talk about erasing being a really bad thing and go directly to your ink line and then live with it and all this kind of stuff. That's fine if that's what you want to do, but it's not a race. The pencil erasers situation where you draw something and if you don't feel it's right, you erase it and you draw it again. That's a good thing. That's the creative process when you're making a drawing, you're sketching and you're correcting and you're creating as you go so far from being a waste of time, It's a really good thing to be able to work with a pencil and eraser because there's no fear involved. Can undo any mark that you want. You can correct, you can move things in your composition and that's why you like to have a lighter lead in the pencil so that you don't end up with a really dirty page. You'd like it to erase completely after you put in your good line. Sometimes that's done with ink. A lot of times that's done with ink, but we're not gonna do that in this class because the ink is scary and ink is difficult. Early. We won't get there someday in our little journey. But what I prefer to do with beginners is to make our final line with a black colored pencil, not a watercolor pencil, regular black colored pencil, nice sharp tip on it. We will use this to define our good line. Once we find our good line. That's really all we need for now. A little later, when your drawings are looking really great and you feel like filling in color. You might add any kind of color, colored pencils or markers or whatever to the supply list. But this is all we need to get started. Let's do that. Let's get started. 3. Drawing Straight Lines: Let's start our journey by talking about lines. Line is due most important thing that there is in drawing because with outlines there is no drawing. You could argue, well, a stroke of paint was aligned to just the fat one, colored one. Anyway, lines come in all kinds of shapes and curves, zigzags and so on. When, when someone says they can't draw, they usually say they can't draw a straight line with a mean by that is that they can't just make a perfect line without a ruler just using a pencil. It isn't true in the first place that you can't draw a straight line if you can print your name. Because the alphabet, when we print it, to write our name or anything else we learned in first grade or wherever we learned that those are all straight lines. So of course, you can draw a straight line. But we all know where people are talking about, when they're talking about. I can't even draw a straight line. Now see, erasing is very cool and you're wondering where these are going. I'm in a greenhouse freely. It really doesn't matter. I'm not putting a month my floor. I am not getting a really clean erase line here and it's because I'm using a heavier pencil so that you can see it. Now if you set out to draw a straight line, one easy way to draw a straight line, and nobody said it's against the law ever is to use a ruler. Straight line, perfect line. Now when you try to do a straight perfect line without a ruler, that's a different thing. So you've drawn, I can draw pretty good straight line because I've been drawing them for 50 years, but it isn't always easy. They walk and they do things. People go see, I can't even draw a straight line. There are a couple of clues I'm gonna give you about drawing a straight line. And one of those is related to if you've ever played softball or baseball when you were a little kid, what did they say to you? They said keep your eye on the ball. Don't look at your mid don't look at anything else. Keep your eye on the ball. Why? Because then our hand wants to follow our I. So if I wanted to start here and I wanted to draw a pretty straight line up to here. It'd be a good idea to put a target dot there. Then when I'm drawing my straight line, I'm looking at that dot, not at the line. I'm trying. That's not too bad. You can get there from here. The truth about straight lines is that if they are a part of man-made structures and so on, they need to be true vertical or a true horizontal. And obviously true vertical means standing straight up and down. You're drawing buildings and things. It's fun and sketchy to do wonky buildings. But it doesn't always work because that isn't the way that the structure would actually stand up. So you're sacrificing some reality if you can't manage a straight true vertical. Likewise, a horizontal line should be a true horizon. And if it isn't something in our little gut response thinks that we're gonna fall down. This is why when you go into those imax theaters and you're watching these surround films, they give you re links to hang onto because when we tip our horizon, we tip our equilibrium. Believe it or not, our brain is running all of this and we have to behave according to our brains rules. And so our brains rules say that a building, a telephone pole, whatever, supposed to be a straight-up thing in a horizon is supposed to be a straight across thing and then we feel good, we feel nice and stable here on little planet. Now another tip about drawing straight lines is that for most people, drawing away from their body is a steadier thing. I don't know why. We think we're gonna stab ourselves in the heart with our pencil. And every class that I've ever told that too, I said somebody who's raised their hand, I feel better drawing it toward me. Well, if you do awesome, you pick. But try it and see, try drawing a straight line away from yourself. Try drawing it toward yourself. See which feels better to you whereas your hand more comfortable. Now a third thing. Is that never should you think that a sketchbook or a piece of paper as glue down to the tabletop. It isn't, it moves and it moves easily and it's worth moving rather than getting your hand uncomfortable. This will come in really important when we do circles in the next lesson. But, um, anytime that you're drawing anything, turning this so that you are always making your line. The comfort zone of your hand and yourself is a great idea. Just turn it in, turn, turn it works. The next thing is that when you began to draw straight lines, it's a really good thing to draw them in his sketchy fashion rather than a swoop like that. When you draw a line and a sketchy way, instead of a swoopy way, you are correcting as you go along your brain in hand, just do this. No, you're not to think. But if you do these short strokes, you get a really nice line. Little bit fuzzy, but I would just clean it off, right? Nudes cleaning up. You see inside of you guide. I'm gonna call it a guide, not a critic, a guide who's really your brain actually, but who knows where things are supposed to look like? Think about this for a minute. Everybody talks about the inner critic. But if you didn't know what something is supposed to look like, how would you know that it's wrong? It's a good thing that you allow your inner guide to correct your line as you go along and drying is perfect setup. It's not like, oh, I'm never gonna be able to draw because that line looks like it's not right. That makes absolutely no sense. If you're telling yourself the lines not right, then you know that where the line should be. If it is gonna be right, you just hunt for it. And that's what I call that a hunting for the line when we're drawing. It's a really good thought. It's a really empowering thought. Now, most man-made start and women made structures in our world are made up of parallel lines. Most of nature's made up of curves, but buildings and houses and sidewalks and streets. Telephone poles, It's all parallel lines, boxes. What's the parallel set of parallel lines? It means that there are two lines. That's a really crappy line. They are the same distance from each other all the way along their length. Obviously, that's not a really easy thing to just do. There is a good plan and it's related to the keep your eye on the ball for making parallel lines. But if you're going to create a drawing and things are all going to work out, okay? You got to make sure that you start with a line that's a true vertical or a true horizontal or true slant wherever it is you're trying to draw. Your first line is going to be the really important one. I have a little vacuum for these and I don't want to make all that noise on the video. However it is, you have to establish that first really good line. If you have to use a ruler, greed, do that. I'm going to do that using the edge of my page as a guide. And you can use that edge or this edge depending on if you're going vertical or horizontal. But what I do is I measure two spots, ruler straight against the chair. I'm going to just put my first line at one inch. You can use anything to do this just so that they're the same distance. Now, I have two dots on my page, right here and right here. They both Denmark and one inch from the edge. And so then I do use a ruler very often for guidelines. Because who's watching and who cares? Idea is to get it right in the end. When you draw your line through those two dots, if you end up with a pretty darn good starting line. Now we have a pretty darn good starting line. We're going to draw a line that's parallel to it. If you want to beef it up so you can see it a little better. That's cool too. You see what I did here? I picked up my three h, which is why you can't see it very well. But I like it better because it'll erase any way while drawing online parallel to another line. The thing to do is to watch the line that you're following. And so it's like keep your eye on the ball and it's Don't watch your pencil point doing this because then you can watch it and it will go all over the place and do whatever once. Watch this line and watch the distance between this line and your pencil point, and draw a sketchy so you can correct. But draw along. Watching this right here, this space. Sometimes our brains are a lot happier looking at the negative space than the positive mark that we're making. I don't know why that is either were just weird. This is pretty fuzzy with this soft lead pencil, but we're getting the job done here. That's not terrible. And I want you to try it and I bet you that yours isn't terrible either. You can always check if you have this ruler around, you can always check how far apart are they hear? Far apart are they here? If that's vastly different? You keep drawing parallel lines, which is usually what you're doing when you're drawing a house or a wall or fence or whatever, you're putting several of them, a door or a gate, putting several of them Based on each other. And so it's like if you've ever done any kind of needlework like knitting or crocheting or someone who's be a tiny little mistake. But because it keeps being built on, it gets worse and worse and worse. If you skipped a little stitch, then it's going to, your piece in the end is going to be coming way in well with a parallel line. If this one isn't really parallel to this and you're a 3.5th one is to be parallel to your second one. You're in trouble because you've got a slant going on that you're going to accentuate, going all the way. So it's just a thought, just a thought. And I will share with you one of my favorite things, which I got for, I don't know, $2 on Amazon. You can get a little pack of them. Westcott ruler and it's, it's done with squares. And it is awesome because this is kind of hard sometimes you know how many eighths is add to 816, 32nd. Little difficult for the artistic brain anyway. This is easy. I just take a main line there and count the squares. 1234, how far they are apart here. Let us go down and see how close I was down here. 1234. It's a little high on the four. I'm not going to say I'm not perfect, I'm not, nothing is, but I always try anyway. So four here, four here. I know I have parallel line to this. Right now is an exercise that's just important to do and that's all there is to it. And if you skip it, then you're not going to have comfort moving forward and it's gonna take you about five minutes. I want you to take your page in your sketchbook. I want you to do what I just did. Get yourself a good true line to start from. And then I want you to draw, got your way and drawn away from yourself and turn in the book whatever it takes for comfort. And try to make these spaces the same. And see how you do. You know, it's not going to be great as first-time you're doing some. So it's not gonna be great, but I bet you, it's not gonna be terrible either. I want you to go all the way down the page. When you have finished doing that, we're going to turn our page and we're gonna make a really cool drawing with what you already know how to do. You'll like it and it'll be fun. I'll see you in a minute. 4. Create a Cool Bookshelf: I am a firm believer in the fact that you learn better when you have any fun. And so you did, hopefully you did your page of parallel lines and that's a practice. And it wasn't that fun. Probably it might've been challenging at first to see if you could do it and then you got boring and then you are going on. So I think that we learn better when we take what we're learning and we apply it to something. And so we're going to do a drawing and it's going to be fun. And you're going to succeed at it. And it's going to have a real creative element till we're going to make a bookshelf and we're going to fill it with books and wanted to do it high enough on the page so that if you have so much fun, you can put another shelf below it and do the same thing. And it's all going to be nothing more than what we already just learned. I'm going to locate my bookshelf about maybe a third of the way down the page. So I have room on the top to put books of any height. My line that is going to be my true line for paralleling is going to be right about here. Right about here, is about three inches. I think. I'm gonna go with three and a quarter inches. Then I'm going to move over here. Three and a quarter inches. I am going to put my ruler and get your eyes, get your sketch book pages lined up. Because when you're looking at the edge of a page as a guide to something. Good if it's Kirkwood to start with. And so I'm just going to put a light line across there. And that is the top of my bookshelf. The bookshelf has to have some strength in order to hold any books on top of it. And so I'm going to draw a parallel line, do it in a sketchy way. And I noticed that a slanted my board to make it easy on myself. Just a lot more fun when it's easy. There is a bookshelf already, just one. But some people have these new node. They're hooked on their wall and they're just a single shelf. So we're gonna start there because we can always add no, no point over amping in the beginning. And if you look, I am not parallel, they're, my inner guide is telling me that isn't even good. I'm gonna get rid of that good old eraser. And I'm gonna get my little red ruler and I'm going to check it. What I have here is I have to these little squares down here, look how bad that is. I'm halfway through another squared by the time we got down here. But by shocking, I know that I'm going to line my line down here with that little dot I just made. My line should look a little better and I'm gonna use the ruler to make sure the lines are still fuzzy and we're going to fix it in a little bit. How to draw a book, just like this, only shorter. So your books are gonna stand on the shelf or they're not. And later on you can add a what do you call that, those things on bushels of old books up. Okay, I'm lost. I can't even think of it, but you can add one. And so your height and thickness of your books is going to be wherever you want it to be. You can take a look at your own bookshelf if you want to. But try to make a true vertical book is standing up on a tent. Then make a sketchy line right next to it. This would be a straight line to, but you can curve it a little bit if it's just, we're looking up a little bit at the bookshelf. Next book is going to be shorter and fatter. Like this. Just a tiniest curve on your straight line at the top of that. Then I'm going to make the one next to that are about that tall, about that thick. I'm drawing my parallel line. Cool. Now right next to that, I'm going to have some works that are lying down. And now I'm watching this, I'm referencing this horizontal line to make a parallel line to it to get a book just laying down. There's one line down on top of it too. But it's a smaller book. So now we're seeing the spine as it were laid down on the bookshelf. I'm just getting rid of some extra fuzzies here so that my eyes can reference the real lines. Then I'm going to put another couple of here bookends that's called takes a long time to dredge up from the bottom of the sea of my brain. But there it is. I think I'll make the next one little taller. And then I'm going to make one slant because we just don't want it to be boring. So in that case, I'm gonna make a book that is leaning against that book. Your reference line now is not a true horizontal or a true vertical. It is now slanted, but you are still going to make your parallel line parallel to it. Now it's sitting on its corner because that's what they do if they lean. I'm going to put even another book Leaning. You're getting the picture here. I think. Of course your choices are just absolutely arbitrary. You can look at your own bookshelf and go from there. Because of fun part is going to be when you finish this, you're going to go back and get titles from your favorite books and write those titles on the spine. And then you can get colors out. And that's the creative part. We can go back here to little shorter, fatter guy. And so on. When you fill this shelf, you have a lot of choices here and they all have the same skillset. You can put a bookend here, which is something like this, and then it usually has a stand or it could be more fancy than that. Would hold those books there. You can make uprights at the end of your bookshelf. You could do it over here. You could have a whole the whole page be a bookshelf with two shelves. You don't have to finish this in one setting. In fact, my finished sample that I'll show you, I don't know if it'll ever be finished because I'm still adding titles as they come to me as I think of favorite books that I wanted to be represented in it. But for this, you just keep going as long as you want to keep going. And if you want to do a second shelf, just space it just like you would at home in your bookshelf with enough room for toddler books and smaller books. Kick your farm and go take a picture of a section of your bookshelf so that you have colors and titles you can work from. But anyway, what's going on here? What's going on is you're making a drawing already and you only know one lesson worth of stuff. A lot of you I know I know her getting basics and you're already draw a lot of things. But if you never have tried it before, you're already creating a drawing that's gonna be creative and colorful and fun. And it's gonna be a real keeper. This is all sketchy line and I want to take a second here to show you what I mean about putting in your proper line that you found. Because in all these sketching, Let's say on these two books, I found that I have the straight line is right there. The straight line is right here. Instead of taking an ink pen to do this, because it can be messy and scary. I am doing this with a black colored pencil because colored pencil does not erase. Yet. It goes on with a softness. That's like a real pencil and not scary like ink and it won't blob again. You can always move to ink later. But for now this is how we can clean up our work. So when I take an eraser back here, even my smear a pencil, I'm getting rid of all my sketchy lines. Yes, there's a black pencil line. Get lighter. It does, but it doesn't erase. Therefore, you can come back and you can strengthen it before you do color or lettering, or this would be good for doing the lettering too. After you put your color on or before you put your collar on because you'll be able to see it through your color. That's it. So this part of your project is to do as little or as much of a bookshelf as you feel like. And take it as far as you feel like put in some titles and colors and it can turn out to be really cool thing. A keeper already. Here you are. You just started. I wanted to show you what I would call it a finish of a bookshop drawing that I did. I'll show you the difference in using an ink lines thinner. But otherwise she was just going to have the same kind of look. By all means if you know how to use a fine liner and ink pen and you have no problem with it and do it, you know, But those who are a little afraid of it, you can do the pencil instead. So this is the same way that you started out. I have blocked this because it's a different page on a different subject and I don't want to confuse the issue. I got carried away with mine. I got carried away in a different way. I didn't do it by having more shells or, or bookends, but I did add some dust bunnies because here in Santa Fe this is always, especially out in the country. Always true in your bookshelves that everything is always dusty. I own a duster down here. These are some of those giant books that don't fit in a bookshelf and never were never know where to put them. So I just like let them lean on the wall here, stacked some more books on a shelf. And you can do that too. In your laying down books. You can have them for the spine shows and you'll put the title or you can have one end or the other, or the back or the side of it. And all you have to do is put a couple of kind of wiggly straight lines into represented. Those are pages. Here's a bookmark. It's also two parallel lines and I just put a kind of a JTAG you on their same toolset table. Two parallel lines. The cat, forget it, that's curved lines. This table leg also two parallel lines. This is more of a circular thing, but it doesn't have to be. It could just as well be same shape as a book. And it was still looked like a table and it was still a great by the time you finish this, even the drawing of it, you're gonna be really proud of yourself and you're going to be pretty darn good at making lines parallel. And that is the first huge basic of knowing how to draw if you can do that. And a couple of things we're going to learn. You have a world opening up in front of you if things you can draw. The third step in that is going to be able to see what shape things are made of and then apply these skills. But so far we see that books are made of parallel lines. There are rectangles, rectangles, and squares are two sets of parallel lines. And most man-made things are either rectangles or squares. So you're in business. 5. Circles Go Round and Round: As we all know from the title of this class, it is about basics of drawing. Basics started the real beginning. And basically it means 2D or flatly drawing. So what is that? That means that we are looking straight on at something when you see a flat lay photograph or whatever, something is usually laid out so that you're looking straight on at it. Now. Granted, straight on is not the way that we usually see anything. I mean, we almost have to make an effort in order to do that. And otherwise we have a point of view that's not straight on and that changes the basic shapes. However, if we don't understand the basic shapes that something is made out of, we are not going to understand how that shape will change in perspective. So without that being more complicated than it needs to be, I'm just letting you know that 2D drawing is the best place to start because it is the way to understand what things are truly made of. We're gonna talk about in this lesson about circles. And we will in just a minute, but I have a can of cat food here. I'm going to use as an example of what I was just talking about. This can of cat food is made of flat. In order to know what it is made of basic shapes wise, we have to look directly down on it, directly at it, from the side, directly up at it. See what the shapes really are. So right now we're looking directly down at this Can, the camera is as much as I can make that happen right now. We see that the top of a can is a circle. Plug a perfect circle. Let's turn the kn over and we see that the bottom of the can is a perfect circle. Now this just seems like obvious kindergarten nonsense, but it truly isn't because if you get this into your brain about what a thing is actually made of, you will know how to treat it when you get a little more advanced in your drawing it from a different angle. From this side. What is this round can with the circle at the top of the circle at the bottom. It's rectangle. That here's the two parallel lines. Here's the two parallel lines. Knowing this is going to keep you from mistakes like when you're looking at a can, at an angle, not understanding that this line has to be the same curve as this line because they're parallel to each other. Because, why? Because they're a rectangle. In this class, we are going to go after understanding those basic shapes that make things up and making it part of our DNA almost. So that when we are looking at something in perspective, we know what it really is. I'm going to grab something else here as an example and it's gonna be a little more unusual. But if you look down, I'm trying to move this so it's street now as it can be. You look down at this spray bottle. It has a circle here. It has a circle here. It has a circle here. From the side. It's a rectangle. The bottom is a circle. If you look at it straight from the side here, you have rectangle, rectangle, rectangle, rectangle. What this really is is a series of these big and small sitting on top of each other. So with that in mind, we're going to spend some very simplistic time drawing and for recognizing perfect circles. They're all over the place. We just don't ever look at them from that angle. Usually. We want it to be able to draw a perfect circle that is not easy out of the box. But our inner guide knows what it perfect circle looks like. If you reach out with a pencil in your draws circle, more than likely, you're not going to have a perfect circle. Because we just, we know what a perfect circle is, but our hand doesn't know exactly where to go, especially in one movement. To make a perfect circle. Circles are imperfect in just a couple of ways. Here is a tool that is just invaluable in any size and they're not expensive and you can pick them up almost anywhere. But it's a circle template. Why they're so useful is they can tell us right away where the problem is with a circle. This one is kind of the size of this right here. Maybe this one. What do we see? We see that we were doing pretty well. We came around here but didn't really lost it. So circles can be wrong in two ways. It can be too flat or they can be too fat. This one is too flat. It's got this flat side gonad. And so we wanted, and we need to do is come out like that. If you draw a circle and it's walked out and a different direction, what is this one? This one isn't too flat anywhere, but it is too fat in two places. And take this down to what size it ought to BC this right here. That's all just too fat. Down here is too fat. I'm going to just trace this to show you the difference. You're not always going to be running around with a circle template, but if you had one around while you're learning to perfect your circles, It's a great tool because you can do what I just did. Your best approach to drawing a really good circle is the sketchy line, again, because you can correct as you go. And the idea of turning the book very important. And so I'm going to show you how that goes right now. I'm going to draw a circle right here, but I'm not going just with one line. I'm gonna draw my circle with the same kind of little sketchy lines that I drew. My straight lines with an, I am going to turn my book so that my hand is always comfortable as it's making these halfway around. Now. I keep going. I'm feeling it out. I'm feeling that curve that I'm making, making sure it's nice and round. And we're gonna come back this way now that I can see that and never going to keep that up, I'm going to get all over here. Now, it doesn't look too bad. However, my inner guide is telling me, I think I have a flat side right here. I don't think I have any fat sides, but I think I have a flat side. I'm going to test that and find out if it's true. That's almost a match here for this size of circle. And it's not very flat. But it's a little. If I do this, am I getting any you want this one? It's a little bit off round on this side. Just need to add little more round to decide. And they've got nearly a perfect circle. And it's all the hunting of the line, the turning of the book so that the hand is always comfortable drawing that hunting line. Correcting for too flat, too fat. I want you to do another boring exercise. And then we'll draw some exciting things that are just made of circles. Once you can draw a good circle and parallel lines, you have the tools to draw most of the stuff in the world. Because most things are made of boxes and circles in some kind of a combination very similar to what we were talking about here. Circles, boxes, depending if you're looking at the side where you're looking at the top or the bottom. The first part of your assignment, if you will, for this lesson, is to fill a page with circles. Whether you have a circle template or not. You can do, go by the feeling of your inner guide telling you that's a bad circle. Okay, Then listen, why is it a bad circle? What's wrong with it? And look at it and you're going to see like it's really flat there are, oh, it's really fat there. I'm going to bring it back into balance in what makes sense. This is the boring part, but this is the learning brain hand, muscle memory part, if you will, about a good way to draw a circle. Sometimes you have to do them by hand because you can't be carrying a template around all the time. Now the second part of your assignment for this lesson is to take your phone and go around your house and look for perfect circles. Now that is not going to pop up obviously all the time. You're going to take the head to take something. I think there's a circle on that. Take some things and look at it from different angles and see if indeed it is the circle that you're looking for. And take pictures and take them as straight on as you can of these circular things in your life. Then we're going to meet back here and we're gonna look at them and think about drawing things. 6. Drawing Circle Based Things: We are back from our circle haunt and I have no idea what you've found. And so I'm going to go through what I found in order to point things out. As I went into the house for my circle hunt, I ran right into a tomato. Tomato is looked at straight on. Actually, a tomato is a ball. No matter where you look at it from a stool, looks like a perfect circle, so it's a good place to start. I'm using Procreate here to show you my photos because I've been able to draw, help you to see the circles in some less obvious cases than this. This is pretty obvious. It had snowed here and I went outside and I have a stand outside the greenhouse and the top of the stand as a circle. So when the snow piled up, it piled up in a really nice snow circle. Again, just like the tomato, but not something that was always there in this case, this was a magic phoned circle. This is just a little Japanese ceramic real shallow bowl that I happen to like very much. It obviously is a circle when you look straight at it like this. The other thing that's incorporated here were you to want to sketch this bowl. The other element of it is really your parallel lines. Parallel lines. I don't have to be like machine-like about it. These are the idea of parallel lines which help you to draw this, but you wouldn't want to draw real straight perfect lines did respond to get the idea. This was done with a brush because it's thick, thin, thick thin. But when you notice that, you know, how about how you could put the decor on this this bowl if you were doing a drawing of it. Never take a picture of a roll of tape that you're going to look closely at because the adhesive nature of tape picks up stuff, we'll pet hairs and pieces of dust. This is not true to the flat lay. Today are today the flat lay 2D effect that we're working with because of the thickness of the rule of tape, we're seeing down the side inside here, which is what this orange thing is. For the moment, we're going to ignore that because it isn't helping anything. But what we have here is more than one circle. To work this out. We have the one around the outside of the tape. Then we have the one that's the the edge of the core, cardboard core that the tape is Wanda. And then we're gonna have the other side of that as well. We really have three circles in here. In this particular picture. I want you to observe that all of the circles have the same center. The lines of the circles are parallel to each other all the way around. If I take the tape out of there totally, we can see that we have those three circles, two smaller ones within a larger one. Parallel circles because they're not offset in any kind of way. My drawing probably is a little bit, but this is parallel to this. This is parallel to that drives me nuts when I hit that. Another name for this as concentric circles. To draw a concentric circle or parallel circle, you do exactly the same thing that you did when you drew parallel lines. So you get the first circle, whether you start with the smallest and go out where you start with the largest and go in drawing. It is the same thing. You keep your eye on the one you're trying to follow on the space between that and the one that you're drawing. It's really important when doing this with circles that you turn the book. I just turned the whole thing here. I didn't I but anyway, you turn and turn and turn as you're drawing a parallel circle. I want you to stop right now and stop the video for just a minute. If you're working along, if you're watching through and then you're going to work along well, keep watching through, but it would be really good right now if you stopped and you try to draw a few concentric circles and see how well you do. The first ones are not gonna be very good. They won't be really parallel and you've got to make sure they're round circles to says they're a big job. But in practice is what makes perfect in this. But the success, like I said, comes from turning and turning and turning the book as you do sketchy lines and you go along watching that other circle. First, you've got to draw the good circle you're following, right? So, but practice does make perfect the skills of this are really simplistic. It's the doing it over and getting used to it that makes you improve. Watch this line as you draw this line. This is my coffee mug, little errant line of Kremer in it. I don't know how that happened. Anyway. Again, we have a circle out here. Circle at the inside of the room. When we look straight down on a coffee mug, that one, that one. Now, in this case, if we were drawing this, we have something attached to the item as well. It's the handle. When drawing things that are circular, always draw the circle first. Whatever it's going to be attached to, it is going to be a lot easier to draw, attached to it. Much easier than drawing this handle. And I'm thinking you're going to get this circle. All perfect. Draw the circles. And then you'll know exactly where to put this point and this point of the handle to join them about two o'clock and four o'clock. Because you can always use a clock for a reference. And then you just have to make your little lines and that, and you'd have the handle. There it is. This is actually one end of a flashlight. Again, we have a circle. Another circle, another circle. We have. This is actually a strap hanging off of this here. I don't know if I would ever even put that in the picture. But one more thing I wanted to point out, if you were drawing the end of this flashlight, is that the pattern on the center circle is made up of what? It's made up of parallel lines. There's a method to this madness, even though it seems so simple and it seems like why would you ever want to draw the end of a flashlight simply for the power of observation. When you look at something and you're able to see that it's made up of three circles and a bunch of parallel lines. You understand that thing now, you know how to go about drawing it. Like in this case, the outer circle first. This is what I would do. Then a parallel circle inside of that one, and then a smaller parallel circle that I'd be watching this distance and keeping it at the right distance from there. And then a bunch of parallel lines in one direction, parallel lines and another direction. And you would have a perfect drawing of the end of this flashlight, then you can figure it out what one does with a perfect drawing of the end of a flashlight, but that's just a different issue. Here is a watering can in front of a very dirty window, I think greenhouse part of it isn't dirty, part of it is a screen. But I got to get outside at the end of winter and do these windows. Let's look at this for a minute. Now we're in that mode where we are looking at a thing and trying to figure out its structure. What we have here, although it's not perfect, is a circle. Again. That's where you would start the drawing because you know that for sure. Here's the circle. And then I corrected where I needed to. This particular circle had to be flattened a little bit because otherwise it would never sit up, right? So I just made a new line there and I already erase that one. But I started by drawing a circle. If you look at the handle of this watering can, you will see that there you have another circle when you're first beginning to draw. And to notice these things, make your complete shape come back and erase the parts that you don't need. There's a very good reason for that because it makes you understand that you have those shapes there. If you were to start over others as a hand on it, you start drawn it, see if you can get it right. That could be hard. This is not heard. Oh, that's a circle. Let me draw that whole circle. Then I'll see what I can get rid of. An inside of that circle is another one. Now, we've actually drawn the body of the watering can and the handle. And all we have to do is get rid of those lines that we would not see because they're not, they're really hidden by anything, they're just not there. But I added a spout first because this is a circle I knew right where to join that almost nine o'clock and almost eight o'clock. And then I could make my lines out for the spout. Then I erase what I didn't need and look at that. I have a drawing of a watering can sort it looks like one. You can always put details in later. But when you see this basic structure of a thing and you draw the basic structure and then get into see how the parts relate, then you get rid of what you don't need. This is the way that we start to observe our world differently and to be able to draw things because we're able to understand what they're made of. Here we have pencil sharpener. Again. This part is a circle. If I were going to draw this, I would start by drawing that circle. But then what's interesting here is that how would I go about drawing these circles and little triangle shape that are all different sizes and everything, I could make a real mess here if I just arbitrarily started drawn different kinds of circles. But really these circles are placed it concentric circle. If you were to draw the concentric circle in there, you then have a reference for all these little guys, how big this should be and where they should be. Then of course, you'd be erasing where that circle went through things. But that would be your total guide for being able to construct this. This is a simple version of that. Here's a complicated version of that. I'll know that this is how many, how many circles do you see? Think about that for a second. There are two for the outer rim. But looking at all these other ones are three more here. Two of them are establishing where other little circles go. You would draw. Start with your outside, you draw the inner rim of that, then you draw the inner realm of the of the I don't know what to call it, the descent, where it goes down. Then there are holes in, in order to draw in space those holes you would put in a guide circle, which is another concentric circle. Finally, this little handle here. But this would allow you to place all of these guys were they go there are all the circles that are actually concentric circles in that drain thing, drain plug, stopper, bringing a drink stopper. I don't know what these things are called. I don't pay attention. This is actually a lotion dispenser and it's on a handle. This is the handle right here. And this is in here because again, there are circles within the circle, but they're not really there. They're just guides. The only one that's really there is a center one. The rest are guides to tell you exactly where to place. The other circles that you would be drawing if you were drawing. It's always good again to use the clock idea. And you would have when at 12 o'clock and when it's six o'clock. You'd start like that. I want it 31 at nine. Then it becomes easy for your brain to know that it's about one o'clock. Some courts don't even have all the numbers in place because we're so smart that we can just surmise what time it is by the position of the hands. And so you could easily think that that one goes at 1245 and you'd have your placement for all your circles that you would be drawing in there. Your assignment for this lesson is to go to your own photos of the circular things that you've found and choose a couple of them to draw. Start by whatever the most obvious circle is in the drawing and go from there the way that we did here. Now another great tip for learning to draw is to choose the things you think you can draw. As we sit right now, you know how to draw a circle and you know how to draw parallel lines and you know how to draw concentric circles. As you look at your photographs of the things you found in your house that are circular. Look at them and say, Can I draw all the parts of that? If you can then go for it. Now if you look at it and you go way too hard, I don't understand that little design on that bowl. Blah, blah. Don't choose that one. Your progress in becoming a person who draws Raul is so, so dependent on your feeling of accomplishment when you draw something well, really dependent. And so therefore, don't choose to draw things that you can't drive. If your drawing is as simple as that tomato, then do that. You've color it red with some markers and you've made a tomato if that Japanese dish type of item is something you think, I could do that because I can draw a circle and I can draw some pretty rough parallel lines. If you want to draw the end of that flashlight that like I had, if you have a flashlight, but choose something that is going to bring you success, it's really important in the second one you choose to draw might be a little harder, but again, choose something you think you can do and then do it. There'll be happy. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Drawing Triangles: Well, we've come to the part of our class, right? Introduce you to the gift that I gave you, which is the creative drawing playbook, and it is a PDF. You can open it and any app just about your devices. And you can open it on your computer and you can print you all know, PDF, sorry, you can print out all of it or pages of it as you need them. So it's pretty convenient. I wrote this book a long time ago, and it has taught a lot of people to draw all by itself without me even being there. Because it takes the same kind of simple approach that we're taking in this class. It also is going to backup everything that you've learned in the class. You don't need to take notes. It's a perfect companion to the class. So anyway, the welcome, this supplies, this page here can be printed on a transparency if you have the capability of doing that. And then that becomes just like that circle template that we used to check for, for flat and fat on our circles because you'd be able to see through it. That's why that is in here. We talked about the pencil and eraser and how special they are. All about circles as we've gone over, but sketchy circles about concentric circles about parallel lines and parallel circles. We got this far in the book is, you can try practicing your concentric circles on a, a target. For whatever your goal is in the middle of the target. This one says I can draw and was shot in here already at that. Here's a little turn of the thought process on circle drawing. What we did so far, we went around and we looked for objects in which we could see a circle and work from there. These exercises turn that around a little bit and ask your brain to think of things that are made of circles out of your imagination. Then start with a circle and draw like what can it be? String of beads is obvious or balls of any kind or circles. The decorations on these are all straight lines. There's no concentric circles here except for that guiding when there that would show where those whole show up or not holes, they're not holds this time they're polka dots. O'clock is a couple of concentric circles and you can make the outside as fancy as you want. And then it's just hash marks that 12639 and then the marks between easy to figure out, you can put numbers were not. But those are some things to draw. Circles and lollipops or circles as well. Plain ones like this. Or you can do the ones that are whole spiral inside the circle. We talked about the parallel lines, adding that to our arsenal of tools and about squares and rectangles being just made of pairs of parallel lines. That brings us to the next shape that we're going to take a look at. And that is the triangle. Triangles show up much less often then circles and squares and rectangles. There are mostly part of man-made things. Mostly show up as the roof on a house, as a steeple, church, spire, things that happen don't see him a lot. Sometimes they're in nature, but they're in the shape of a leaf, but it's much more of a rounded out adjusted triangle. We don't see them very often, and sometimes we can be funky with them. But when we need to draw a triangle that has even sides, I don't mean an equilateral triangle where all the sides are the same length, but I just mean a triangle that's not wonky. If you're going to put a roof on a house or a steep on a church to be walking unless the whole building is wonky. And that's a style thing. But how do we get a triangle even if we want it that way? Well, we start with the baseline of our triangle and however long we want that to be. And that's an arbitrary decision of course, because it depends on what drawing you're making. But hopefully a true vertical Baseline. And then you decide how high do I want my triangle to be? And you measure the baseline to find the center. And I did that by I and I have no idea if that's the center now, but we're going to find out because that is a two-inch line. Well, I was pretty close. We've divided our baseline in half and then I, I'm going to shoot a point up from there, the height that I choose for my triangle. So if there's only this much room for the steeple, then we'll make a dot at the height. And we will try to make that dot directly above the one on the BSW. You can measure that if you want to or you can eyeball it if you want to. And I can tell them a little left of center there. Once you have that dot, then you can just shoot for it from each corner with a straight line. So keep your eye on the dot like we talked about. Then just bring your, your straight line up to the dot and you'll have a pretty solid triangle. Triangles are supposed to be solid because they have this base and skinnier top. They're considered a real, a solid shape. And visually looking at them in drawings and paintings, there's a feeling of solid, steady base that is not going to fall down. Less of course is sitting in a log or something anyway. So we're gonna go back to our playbook to take a look at what we might draw. I'm starting with triangles. And just to get some practice, here, we have the review of what we just did and we drew our perfect triangle. And then there's a section here, I'm going to skip for a minute, two sections. We're going to go here. We're going to walk through doing a drawing made of triangles, made of nothing but triangles. And it is a drawing of a man-made dwelling, but it's not a house or church. And you can recognize right away what it is as soon as we draw our triangle and allow our lines to go past the dot and cross up here. And then I just put another little one in the middle. We have a shape that looks a lot like a teepee. And so we're going to continue and draw a little village. Tepees were really great dwellings because they would, they would collapse. But these sticks right here, and they would be a true voice. I think that's how you say that. Maybe not. But anyway, you'd put all of your goods on it, you drag it behind the horse, and you move to your new home. These were used on the planes by Native Americans. And so it was a very clever, amazing design. But anyway, we're going to just learn a couple of simple things here by drawing our TPS. One of those is that even when you are doing flat lay 2D drawing, there is a way to show some perspective to introduce a little bit of 3D without getting your drawing off challenged. And there are two very simple rules to this. One is that if something is further away from you, it is smaller than the thing that's closer to you. And the other thing is, it is higher on the page. We're going to draw three triangles and make one a little smaller than the first and the third, smaller than the second one. And go ahead and overlap them. Because we always draw our whole shapes if we can, so we know what we're doing and we come back and erase what we don't need. Then cake another set of triangles and put a doorway into each of the dwellings. Flat. Smaller triangle. Now this one, this doesn't look like it would cover that doorway and it shouldn't because if it did, it would be sticking out. And it's not It's got a little curve to it. But if it were folded over, it would fit the doorway. Then we can add more triangles as decor. Because we know how to draw some parallel lines on there. We know how to draw parallel lines here we know how to put triangles on the parallel lines. This lightning bolt is also parallel lines. They're oddly shaped in a little different to make parallel, but we have to come back and erase the corner of HTTP that I'm just noticing, I hadn't done that yet. And so our village is getting done. We want to put some ground, they aren't floating in the air. Then some colors. So if you have some watercolor or colored pencils or something, you can make this very pretty thing. And I did throw a circle in there for a sun because the sun was a big deal. The planes while still is, I put another little son, I put another lightning bolt. Whatever you would like to do is fun. You can hang some feathers from up here. Feather. You're going to learn to draw an arc in a minute. In a feather is just like two arcs and a line down the middle. So you're gonna be able to come back if you like, and add that kind of decoration. We're going to leave our triangles for just a bit. I'm going to backup to give you another exercise in drawing what you know already. And then we're going to move on to the, to an arc and see what magic there is there. But anyway, I'm going to backup to where we were up here. There's a project practice drawing project here, drawing group of gifts. And I know that's pretty simplistic and useful mostly on birthday cards and at Christmas. But what it does here, and you'll see through these steps, it has your drawing, the rectangles you know how to draw. It has your drawing parallel lines which will make the ribbons on these boxes it looked like this. Now, to draw a bow, we draw a little circle on the top and then triangles. And you don't have to leave these as triangles. You can round them off and make them more fun. But the basic shape, those parts of a bow, our triangles. This project is to do a shelf. We already did a bookshelf with our rectangles. This shelf is for a ball collection. It can be any kind of balls, but they're round ones. I made the whole shelf this time, put a bunch of balls of different sizes, hung some from here. These balls, of course, family walks through the room and wiggles anything, they all fall off. But that's kind of the dynamic fun of a silly little drawing like that. That's two more practice drawings that you can go and do in-between video lessons and just get real accomplished all of this. Now we are going to move on to the arc. 8. Drawing with Arcs: What is an arc? An arc is a part of a circle. We have our circle that we draw this nice and round. If we cut off a piece of it. It looks like this. The curve of an arc is going to totally depend on the curve of the circle it came from. So in other words, with an infinite number of circles, there are an infinite number of looks, amounts of curve for arcs. They can be very, very curved like so. Or they can be very, very not curved like so. If you think about parentheses that we use every day in, well, maybe not every day, but often in our writing and printing and communication in general. Thought containers. There are also arcs and there are pretty good average amount of curve that we can use for drawing a lot of things. So I want you to stop the video if you weren't in for a moment. Draw a lot of arcs. Your page in both directions. Little fig. Real curvy, almost like a half circle, almost straight. Get your hand used to drawing sketchy. Once you can do that, you can just draw amazing things in nature, in botanicals and all kinds of fun stuff that can be done. Now that we have a little practice in drawing are so we're going to create ourselves a little, a little flower patch, a wildflower patch. And it's just gonna be so quick and so easy that you're not gonna believe it. It's also backed up in your playbook. So work along with me and don't worry about taking notes about anything else. The first thing I'm gonna do is cross this page with arcs of different heights sizes, not a million, but quite a few. And then I am going to turn around and do the same thing any other direction. They can crossover. And these are gonna be basically leaves of grass. When we go back and finish this off, we're going to do not a parallel line, but we are going to start a little wider and go in until we meet the tip of our first arc with another arc, just like I just did here. There's the first one, and here's this one. Okay. You can also start from the tip and get wider as you come down whatever is comfortable drawing for you. But we're going to make each of these arcs into a tall blade of grass. Part of our beginning of our little wildflower patch. This can be sketchy because you've strengthened with your colored pencil later, I'll get rid of all the scratchy from the bottom and meet the point down from the permanent and get wider as you go. I'm going to stare on these. This is a little more even than I would normally. I'd be more random. Normally. They can be everywhere and they can be every height and every direction. I'm gonna leave it like this for right now though, because it's just fine the way it is. Now out of this, I'm gonna bring a couple of stems going in both directions. And that's just a big arc. I'll bring one here shortly. I want out of here. At the end of these I'm going to I'm not going to have that one. You've got three. Put a circle, small circle. So it's really easy to draw. The top of each circle. I'm going to make a flower petal. And I'm going to do it with two arcs. Think about parentheses that you closed up. I'm gonna put one opposite that. Going to put one over here, one opposite to that. Again, I'm using my clock face reference. I'm doing it so that I know that I'm going to get an even number of petals. In this case. If you just start with one petal and start going sideways, you'll get to the other end and you won't have room for your pedal to be shaped exactly like you want it to be. I'm gonna do that on every flower. They don't have to be perfect in their placement because flowers never are. And if they are, the breathes makes it that they don't aren't quite there anyways. Finally, all of this is arcs. Everything in this drawing is made from RPS, pairs of arcs. We have flowers, hours needed, a little bit of leaf, I think. What do we make the leaf side of arcs? If you want to, you can put a line down the middle of the leaf to make it more interesting. When you add color to this, it's gonna be just a pretty little patch of wild flowers. You would go back then to finish this off and you would strengthen your line and you would decide which piece of grass is in front of the other. And you would erase any line that passes through that would not be seen. Sometimes your end comes together strongly enough that it just blocks that anyway. That wouldn't be seen from behind because this is in front of it. This totally needs cleaning up. When you get all your lines strengthened, get out whatever color thing you have. Painter, pencils or crayons or whatever is beautiful bike adding the color to it. And as your flower patch, now sticking into botanicals, you'll often see a branch motif. There are really useful for every time you draw a vase, you can bring branches out of it. They're useful as a border and we'll just gonna look at it for just a little minute here. Branch, a leaf branch is going to start with a long arc. That's going to be the stem. I usually have either one or two leaves at the very end of the stem. Then you have two choices. Leaves either grow across from each other. At each juncture. That's a pretty look. All arcs. Or they alternate. In that case, you'd go down one side first, put your leaves. Then there'd be a leaf in between, on the other side, between every two leaves over here. These are wonderful to use and look how fast and how easy. And again, everything here is an arc. 9. Using Compound Shapes: We have done so far is we have learned about the simple, basic shapes that make up everything truthfully. But they don't always do it alone. So like whereas a circle can make up a tomato all by itself. You probably noticed when you went around on your circle, a hunch in your house that they were not usually alone. Circles were not alone in defining things for the most part, unless there were a bunch of circles. But they might have been a circle that was connected to a rectangle or something like that. That is a composite shape. And what it means is that a couple of the basic shapes get together to make a new shape. That is what I would call a secondary basic shape, but something that we know how to draw so we can use it to draw a lot of things. The first one that we're going to look at, composite shape is the teardrop because it is just ubiquitous, it's everywhere and we can use it for everything. Sort of like the arc. Teardrop is easy if you start with a circle. So we're going to get ourselves a nice circle. Be sketchy so it's not too flat and it's not too fat. Now you know how to do this because you've done it a few times. On the circle, we're going to set a triangle. So our baseline, and we're just going to overlap it, or baseline on our triangle is gonna be about a third of the way downers circle. Our height is going to be about the same as the diameter of the circle. This is just an honest have to be this way. But we're doing it for, for learning purposes here. Then we're going to connect, make our triangle. So now we have our basic shape triangle sitting over our basic shapes circle. When we get rid of those interior lines, we have the basis for a teardrop. It is a teardrop, but it's a perfect teardrop and you could do a lot of variety on it. For example, you can turn the sides of the triangle more into arc. So let's look at what that might look like. Now that starts to look more like a drop of water, doesn't it? It also looks like a flower petal. Else has looked like it could be a purse if we put that line back in there. But anyway, you can make the lines inward like that and have that kind of a drop. You can also have them give them a slight outward bend. It's just going to make a fat water drop more like a drop of paint might be because it's thick. And so it ends up being a fat or drop. Finally, you can walk this. How do you do that? Well, start with your circle, your triangle base. But don't put your doctor, you're trying to go right in the center a little off. Then join these lines. But this time you probably really are going to want to play with the curve of those lines because it doesn't look right this way. But if you, Let's say you turn that line inward, this line outward a little bit, then you don't have such a water drop anymore because it's not symmetrical. But you do have a shape that you can turn into. Other things like flower petals and the leaves. You see what a great leaf shape, that is. We love our leaf shape. That's just ergs. But when you do technical drawings, you just don't want all the leaves is same. This gives you another leaf entirely. And if you make Come in here and you pick that up a little bit. Now you have a heart shaped leaf. Obviously can be much fatter and be like the leaves on a morning glory, maybe much more heart-shaped. The composite shape made of a circle and a triangle can take you all kinds of directions. It giving you teardrop leaf shapes that you can use then to make other things. So it's like using a circle to make a clock. Only the basic shape you've got is already a composite shape of two things, the triangle and the circle. I'm going to turn the page here and we're going to do kind of an amazing thing using just that principle. Well, those parallel lines, we're going to draw something that's just perfect for spring when this class is being made and that is a tulip. I am not going to go through all of this shaping that we just went through on the other page because I know that you can do it if you want to, but you might not need to. Here we have fat teardrop. That sort of comes to a point, but I'm not gonna let it, I'm gonna make it retain a round thing there. But here, still, our basic shape. Is there a composite of circle and the rectangle triangle? Just so that we keep our eye on that fact. To draw another one of these right here. I'm overlapping. It can because I can correct for that. Drawing sketchy. Then I get rid of what I don't need here. Then I'm going to put a couple of arcs up here and bring one of them down so it closes. So what we are looking at here, make them a little more pointy. Those inner petals that haven't opened yet on this beautiful tulip that we just drove away, didn't even break a sweat, did we? Little fat there? You haven't correcting a fat place on my circle. There. I usually put a little arc at the bottom of a tulip. Just to make it, it looked like the little cup that holds the petals. Two of stem is a very straight line, which is nice. I mean, it's parallel lines. You don't have to go straight up and down like I am right now. You can curve it. But the stem of a tulip is very straightforward. It doesn't have anything sticking out of it. Now, the leaves of a tulip are pretty dramatic. And so I'm going to make those out of that same shape, but I'm going to really stretch it out. Maybe we'll just put a line there to show that the individual is turning a little bit. Now here we have the same shape still the steam composite shape. We have. We started with a circle and then there was a major triangle on that. And then we did a lot of line bending to make it work. This tulip is in your playbook as well. These leaves come out from either side, but what does overlap the other? We're going to do this same shape once again. This time I'm gonna say that there's little cup filming. That one. It's a little different from the one on the right. You don't want real symmetry. Just want interesting stuff. The two leaves are paired down here, the blossoms coming out of the middle. And all of that is made from our composite teardrop shape. 10. The S Curve and the Arch: Just in time we got our tool done. It's raining. We need the rain here and I can never say, oh boo, it's raining. But the roof of the greenhouse is metal. So you may or may not hear rain in the background. And if you do just know that it's the first day of spring right now, that every living thing out there is so happy to be having this gentle shower. Anyway, we finished drawing our tulip. We have just a couple more compound shapes to talk about. One of them is the S-curve. The S-curve is just compounded of several arcs going in different directions. And it's used a lot. It's, it's used for roads and rivers and just for a lot of things, making designs on things. And so it's good to know about it isn't anything special to draw because basically it's called an S curve because it's made of S's. Yeah. So you just start making an *** but you keep going for as long as the distances that you want your S-Curve to stretch over. And they can be more Humvee or they can be more shallow. Like a string. You can pull it out and make it straighter. Or you can let it bunch up and make it rounder. Where can we use s-curves? Well, ice cream dish is really a Dairy Queen kind of thing is a really good use of these S-curves. All you do is you pile them up and get a little bigger and a little bigger and a little bigger and put a cup underneath it. And there you have your ice cream treat. On. Speaking of ice cream treats, if we hearken back to our teardrop, but we turned it upside down, we can make more ice cream treats using that and using some circles and using an S-curve. And I'll show you that answer straight lines. That is just a combination of an upside down teardrop, a circle, and a triangle. You get rid of the parts that you don't want to see. And then if it's a waffle cone, which this is, you put an S-curve in there. And S-curves don't always have to be even either, like on a waffle cone. It wouldn't be it'd be maybe smaller and bigger, whatever. Then we can fill in with straight lines to give ourselves the waffle cone effect. Then we can add some color and some actual drips in the right direction. To finish our ice cream cones. The S-curve is useful. And it'll be useful in a number of things. There's just so much practice in this book. After we, after we did our first flower patch. Here's a whole lesson on a still-life that you can make if you just know how to use parenthesis or to draw parentheses, because that's all. This is a couple of straight lines and parentheses. Then water is just a series of arcs. And so there's a whole exercise here to draw kind of a funny underwater scene in the fish are made of arcs. More that you do these drawings, you'll have fun doing them, but also it's going to bring home the fact that all things you see are made up of these shapes. There's our finished Finish Sketch and here you storm clouds are made up of arcs that you just overlap on each other. This one gets to be a storm and have lightning. Then we did our tier drafts and we can make rainstorm out of the lightning storm. And here we're back to our tulip. Our ice cream. And an umbrella is made of arcs, little rectangle there. And you put clouds on the umbrella, more arcs, raindrops, parallel lines here. Balloons. Balloons are made out of a version of the teardrop turned upside down and you've got a circle and then you go to kind of short fat triangle and then you turn around, you got another triangle and you just customize it a little bit and you have balloons. And then with an S-curve and balloons floating and it's string is hanging down underneath it. So here's a little tip in your book about how even on a flat lay drawing a two-dimensional one, you can give a bit of form to it by adding a little highlight of white. And you would usually be at about ten o'clock on a round object. That's easy to see here. But remember when you're here in this drop on this balloon that you actually are doing the circle. So it's going in the same place. Is just a circle is part of something else. Just a little side tip to make things look a little more exciting. Here are some blooms and a Cloud. Here's a circle with some straight lines. It becomes a glass dish with candle in it. Here's a sketch I did a long time ago and I use the same shape for balloons and cactus pads and they really don't make good bedfellows, but if you think positive balloons will be okay. Okay, So what this boils down to is that we have a lexicon or a little alphabet of shapes. And if we can draw these shapes, then we can draw basically anything little more complicated or not. We have our parallel lines or circle, square, or rectangle, or a triangle, the arc, the curve, and the teardrop shape. We're going to add one more thing, not it's a compound shape. We're not gonna get too carried away with it. But drawing an arch is a really good thing to be able to do because you'll see it makes up lots of things and it's going to make up the door that is the center of our graduation drawing. So drawing an arch is basically combining circle, a straight line and making, adding three more lines that are parallel. And making a shape that looks like, that looks like a circle and a square joined together. Then if you just erase what's in here that looks like a like a handbag already. So if any ladies wanted to draw a handbag, you can erase these and you'll get an arch. And these can be doors, they can be Windows, they can be other things. In your playbook. We have a little exercise in that where we made three of them. We made them a little bit different. Then what we did was we turn them into a mailbox and some catalog envelopes that we're going to the mailbox just with a few changes. Here's some S-curves parallel line inside the arch. We stuck some of our flowers in our branches in there and you have a cute illustration, again, made of everything. You know how to draw. It is time for our graduation drawing, which is this one. And we're going to do it step-by-step. And it is backed up in your playbook. But I am going to move to my sketch book and we're going to go through this together with pencil and paper. 11. Graduationj Drawing Start: I have my eraser and my three HB pencil and my sketchbook. And we're going to work through this drawing now if you would like to look at the drawing at the same time we do this. Just open your playbook, your PDF, and do a screenshot of it. And you can be looking at it on your iPad while you're drawing or your computer while you're drawing it. And you can look back and forth for reference. It looks more complicated than it is for sure. The first thing you do when you're going to draw anything on a page, you have to establish where it's going to be on the page. And I just do this with just a scribbly outline to tell me I can't really go any higher than that. Any lower than that kind of fit in here. And this does not have to be perfect or parallel at all. It's just a reference for the size that things should be. And I know that I have the door, I have a big sunflower going up besides the door. The door can't be all the way up here. So I'm gonna start by drawing a circle. Just a rough, sketchy circle. Right about there. I'm going to cross that with a line through the middle. Then I'm going to use that line as the top of a rectangle. And the rectangle is going to be about this distance is going to be about the same as this distance. It's kind of a nice tall arch. And a tall arch makes for a good little door. This looks like a big mess right now, and that's okay. No problem with that. Because this is our rough sketch. This is gonna be the shape of our door. Because I need to reference this door and add a lot of things to it. I am going to strengthen my good line and clean up my ones that aren't so great. To take a lot of this fuzz out of here so that I can see the sides of the story a little better. And you'll see why. Minutes. The why is because I need to put an insert in the door that will be made of. I'm going to just show you in case you don't have a picture in front of you. Drawing is here. Let's take a nice look at it. What we're working on now, we needed to put a square in here. The lines have to be parallel to the sides of the door. And that's the reason that I need to be able to be more sure of where the sides of the door are. Then when it's real scribbly, this is just going to be a square. And so I'm going to start. You can turn your book with the bottom, the square. Get everything are all nice, squared up. And then the top of the square root sides of the square have to be equal. Remember, in a judgment call, because I'm eyeballing it, but you can measure it. I figured I would put the top of it right about there. I have that reference point. Then the top of the door is going to be like a semicircle. I'll show you again. So this is our stained glass window in our door here. This piece of wood between the section of boards here has to be just as thick as the piece at the bottom. Because really this is a framework if you could see all the joins and everything. This is done in a very specific way. If we follow it, we will have a door that can work. The next thing I'm gonna do is define this space so that I am then able to finish off the rest with a circle. That will parallel the edge of the door like long here. And this will be the same thickness all the way because of it being made out of the same size would let's see how that goes. I'm going to establish this guy. This space right here, make it like this space right here. Once I do that, and I know that this has to be the same thickness going up. It's easy for me to watch this space as I draw in this line and make it parallel to this outside of the door. Because that's got to stay the same width. Now you can really hear the rain. It's really soothing when you think about it. Nature gave him giving a drink. All of us in the long run. There is a basic architecture of my door. And at this point so that I can tell what I'm doing, I'm going to clean up a little bit, get the marks out of the middle, get this line out of here that we don't need anymore, and just straighten things out. This is really the way I work through a composition when I'm drawing, I slob it in there, if you will, in the best way that I can. Then I erase and I strengthen that all these pencil lines will be gone over with your black colored pencil or with ink. But in order to keep drawing in pencil, I need to know where things are. And so for that reason, I am cleaning up. In our bottom section here we have planks and let's find planks of wood. Let's find the center. The center there. Then let's put a line on either side of it that we have board in the center. Make these two lines the equal, equal distance from the center mark that you had so that you know that that board is centered. Then all we have to do is add a parallel line over here to divide that space in half, and add one over here to divide that space in half. So good-looking door so far, isn't it? I know yours looks just as good because you're standing up your vertical lines here and you're making your horizontal lines nice and horizontal. All going to turn out great that way. Now, in our stained-glass window, we're going to start by putting a circle, the center of it, center of the sunflower. And it should be the center of this smaller arch that we drew right here. Then it's about S curves. We take them from her and they do not have to be perfect. We take them from our center and take them out to the edge. We're not really doing placement here. And so you may I may have to adjust some of them if we turn out that we can't get it looking kind of even symmetrical. But you never know. Sometimes it just works. I'm going to throw another corner one, they're pretty good. Now you might, some of yours are too fat and some are too skinny. You might want to go back and adjust those, but I think overall looks pretty good. What else goes in the doors? So we have our slats. Get rid of our center mark here. We're going to put a triangle right here. That's gonna be our fancy door knob, door handle. I guess you'd call that, that's not enough. Now, we're going to porch at the bottom. If we were speaking realistically, this would be a triangle coming from here. That is a good way to establish what these two angles should be is to know that, know that the base you make your portrait boat is why did you want it your step here and know the base. You also know the center. If you go from the base to the center and make a triangle you've established with the lines of that porch are going to be. We won't see this triangle. We won't see these little lines in the corner. But we will see a couple of parallel lines that are going to define that step for us. Remember, all of the steps are in your playbook, so no panicking. You can also make these videos go back 15 seconds if there's something that you missed that you didn't want to miss, going to establish some grass on both sides and you know how we do that. Usually in a little scene, I let them get smaller as they go away from the center of interest. These again are joining each other. At one end. Not at the other. Little low there. The door, the porch of the grass. So far so good. 12. Graduation Drawing Finish: I'm going to bring very bendy arc. Then I'm gonna make another one parallel to it. This is the stem of my sunflower. I start with the stem because it's gonna tell you what you're doing. There is our stem. If we look for a reference here, the stem, reality is going to go to the center of a song flower, this circle right here. So this actually goes behind these petals. And it goes to that circle. How high is that circle? That circle is just a little higher than the circle in our door. And it's moved out far enough so you can get nuts with your with your paddles on your sunflower if you want to. But right now we're trying to establish location. The circle that is this sunflower. I'm a little high there. I think. It's just a little bit higher than this one. So there is the center. This part of the stems not going to show. But I'm going to do exactly what we did in our simplistic drawings. And I'm going to use that center as a clock to get my first layer of petals going. And the pedals are of course, just like they should be more round, circular. I'm putting my noon and my six and my three and my nine to start the orientation of petals. Now we're adding in the middle of those groups. This time we're getting a lot more fancy and we're gonna put in-between petals in-between these two. You're still drawing. So if your pedal goes with pasture door a little bit, that's okay. Then you come back and you put petals between your petals. And this is completely up to you. How many? How nuts, so you want to get with your sunflower petals. Should be a little bit bigger. Sky would stick up there. You're not seeing that these whole petals because they are partially behind the ones in front. So really you're just drawing the ends of them. We have to have a leaf. Let's establish our first leaf with an arc that we draw like that. Then this is a teardrop upside down. Remember we said we could, we could make heart-shaped leaves. Well, sunflowers have heart-shaped leaves. That's why we're doing it. Then. Not from the same place, but from a little lower. We're going to make one, it's going to come right over the door because that just makes an interesting drawing. Then that side of the heart. This side. Then thicken that stem just a little bit. There we go. Now this slats of the door right there, not this one. That one. They do not show because the leaf is coming into overlap. Right here does not show. And right here it says not show because the sunflower petals are in front of the door. This side. We did it a little bit differently. Little further out from the from the door. We're going to bring one of these. We just going to have a just a bud on it and a leaf on it. So we're going to do that. It looks like a little shepherd's crook, but they're just arcs. Going to make it thick like a stem. This time, whereas the circle location with that and this flower is sticking out the side of this stems, so it's right in our face and it's blocking the black and this stem. But the circle relationship is kind of cool because it's even with the door knob. We know right where to put the center of that sunflower, even with the door knob. So right about here is gonna be the center of our sunflower. Again. I'm tipping the clock. I'm not always going to start with the petal right at the top, but I'm going to start with that relationship between 612, so that I can pedal on all four sides. Add the middles. This is different. Again. Honor, original. Sunflower does not overlap the door on this one. It does. Just because I feel like it. That's called artistic license. You get to change whatever you want. Probably don't want to run this into the window since the colors there are gonna be very similar and you wouldn't see one for the other. We put our trainers in there, almost getting done and it's looking just like the, the original for the changes we made of course, but the original sunflowers overproduced a little bit in mind. I'd cut back here in the interest of time and clarity. Here. Sunflower number two. You're going to have a lot of fun coloring this. Now up here we said this is just a new leaf, so it's a smaller leaf than the others. Coming out of the stem. Then I don't want this bud to overlap the door. So I'm going to I've got the height here, it's okay. I'm gonna go a little bit higher with that stem. Then I have a half circle on arc that is a pretty round one. And then three arcs coming across there. I'm going to make them join up to the stem. And that's a little cap that holds the petals that will open up and be one of these glorious guys. You can put as many petals in here as you like. This is not opened up yet. They don't know how they're going to arrange themselves. Well, they do their inner being, but we don't know. And there we have our finished graduation drawing. What has to happen now is that we'll take our black colored pencil and we will clean up the lines and erase the fuzzy lines as we go. As you go and do that. I want you to feel very proud of having done this drawing. The other thing is adjust whatever feels like you want to adjust it. Think with every line that you make. Think about the shape that you're drawing and how all of this got created because you knew how to draw the shapes in that lexicon of drawing shapes. 13. Where to Go from Here: If you are a person who has worked through this with us and actually put pencil to paper. You are now a person who can draw. You can go around saying that I can draw. You may not be able to draw every single complicated version of anything in the world, but you can draw a lot that looks like what it's supposed to be. Better than that. You can understand why you can draw it. So unlike a lot of classes out on YouTube in everywhere that our new, let's draw a tulip, okay, and that's great. And you do it and you draw that tulip. And then now you know how many tulips are you going to draw and you go over to something else in your yard and you go. That doesn't look like a tulip. And so I can't draw that. What's happened in this class is different because what you have learned in this class is to understand the puzzle pieces that make things up. And so in essence, you can draw anything. Now, not the most complicated version of it because we haven't talked about shading and perspective and proportion and all of that kind of stuff. But we don't need to because in 2D flat lay drawing, you are just drawing the shapes that make up an item. And now you know those shapes. And I want you to practice this, but you're going to walk around and know that you see the world differently. Now, when you see something you'll be going, there's a circle in that and there is a rectangle, there's a square. I don't see all of it, but part of it's there. This will be a new way of thinking when you look at things. And that thinking is what allows you to see the shapes. And then you know how to draw the shapes. It's just like get some kind of logic about which one to put where. And you're in business. Now if you're someone who watched through the class and has not yet picked up a pencil. I hope that you have gotten the confidence to know that if you pick that pencil up and you go back and you go over the lessons again and this time, stop the video or go back 15 minutes or 15 minutes. There's Dean seconds with that little button they give you and work through with us. Get out your playbook. All of this is in the playbook. Do it so that U2 can get to this place where you are looking at something very cool and complicated that you drew. And know that you can go out and look at other things and you can draw them too, because a lot of doors are going to look just like this, but they're going to have a square top or they're gonna have a line down the middle so that we would open like this. And there are variety out there, but the basics are the same. This is how a drawing looks when it's cleaned up in the lines. The good lines are done with colored pencil, not watercolor pencil. You're free now to two color just like you would color in a coloring book. Watercolor or markers will not smearing or black colored pencil. So you're just as good as if you had ink here. You can do it your color version. And it can look just like the cover of your playbook. This is the end of our first rung of our ladder to success in drawing. Subsequent classes will go wrong too in rung three, so that we can learn what happens when you tip the thing you're looking at. And then how do you have to adjust the relationship of the shapes that you see? But it'll be a piece of cake after you've gotten this far. Enjoy doing this, enjoy coloring this, enjoy playing with the other practice drawings in your playbook, and enjoy going out into your life. You don't even have to go out, just look around your desk or your kitchen or anything else. Pick up things and see if you can see what they're made of enough to draw a straight on drawing of them. And the more you do that, the more you'll be able to see, the more you'll be able to draw. And it becomes one of those joyous practices that you're so happy that you know how to do. Have fun.