Learning to See, Learning to Draw

1. Introduction: When we look at the drawing, many of us ask ourselves, how can this artists draw like this? I don't have the patent or I'll never draw it that I know how it is. I've been there myself. So what we're not seeing property is that before reaching this stage of the drawing, the artists went to several phases. For him or her to reach this point. The artists have to say the word around in a different way that it's taught. This course is all about. Hi, my name is Bobby Bravo. I'm an illustrator, artist, and art teacher basic than Brazil. Works prohibition mailing children's literature, advertisement and the curation. Because of my work as a children's book illustrator and also as a mother, I always had a lot of contact with children. And they were always asking me, bye b, bye b. How did you learn to draw? For sure, I had wonderful mentors, taught me everything I know and guided me to where I am now. So to keep this knowledge alive, I began to organize all this learning in my mind. And that is how by putting together and best-known the pieces of what I learned over the years that I created the course that are now present in this class to observational drawing. I will teach you how to see and to draw from the start. Learn to practical exercises to develop the right side of our brain and also to see the world two shapes. Each class will have a practical exercise and at the end we'll put everything together and make a drawing from beginning to end. Since I was a little kid, I always felt more comfortable expressing myself to draw them. And they still feel like they're drawing is just another way for us to communicate ourselves. And you can learn this new language as well. So come with me and led the work begins. 2. Overview: Before we start, let me present you a summary of what are going to learn here. The first thing we need to pay attention to is where internal dialogue, sometimes we can be very hard on ourselves and we ended up being very judgmental. So let's try to decrease the volume of this internal critic, and let's try to tune into another frequency. Let's begin to hear a more compassionate and also more curious voice inside our heads. I know it seems a little commonplace. How can we do this in a practical way? It's very simple. To draw from observation. We tend to spend a lot of time looking at our own drawing. Instead, let's take a closer look at the topic we were drawing. From now on. Let's look at our subject matter as if it were a small child of serving everything without judgment, as if it were seeing this for the first time. When we look at the word around this with curiosity and passion, we get in touch with your inner child, will automatically turn off this internal critic and connect with another type of conscious. So this is my first and most important tip. Focus more on the subject matter then on our drawing. Now, I have an advice. Drawing, despite being a learned about activity can be a little frustrating. It's not every drawing that I do that I like, not at all. And that's okay. But the secret is not to give up. So overcome frustration and compete only with their old self. You can say something like this. I like this problem, but the next one, I'll try to do a little better. That said, let's go to the practice. For our final project. You'll be able to complete a drawing from beginning to end using an image as reference. You will come out of this class equipped with all the tools necessary to do it. But first of all, keep in mind that in order to make a good drawing, we need to think about 1 million things at the same time. It's like learning to ride a bicycle or e.g. learning yoga. You need to pay attention to your briefing, your thoughts, your core, the position of our feet is too much at the same time. So let's go step-by-step slowly. We can look at our final project is a big marathon. And each lesson before we get there, we'll prepare you a little bit to carry it out. Each exercise will focus on one or more fundamentals of drawing forms like and share those deaf and so on. Now, onto the materials. Let me explain a little bit about pencils. That should be HB pencils and the mechanical pencils are harder and indicated for cleaner lines, outlines, technical drawings, and also details. In general, we use the tip of the pencil to draw a line in this way. This six big pencils and also for B5 be the bigger the, the softer. They are indicated for a softer drawing for shading as well. And they use this side of the pains to more than the point, the lines come out darker and also a little bit more healthy. So if you have a very light hand, go with a six. But if our hand has a heavier grip, you can use it to me. If you prefer to learn digitally, that's fine too. You can also use a soft eraser, kneaded eraser, and also ruler to make some frames for our drawing. Now, let's go to our new mantra. Joy is ten per cent prevalent and nine per cent hard work. So let's go practice. 3. Shapes: Before I start, my first advice for you is to begin on drawing as light as possible. Drawing is a transparent technique. We are creating it layer by layer on top of the order. So if you make mistakes, it's much easier to erase it for keeping our lines very light. Sometimes when you're drawing something very complex, we can be overwhelmed by so much information. So where to start? The answer is from the biggest shape you can see simplifying it the most you can. For instance, if you're drawing a village like this one, instead of drawing house by house, you can draw first the basic shape. This group of houses for me, always start from the largest to the smallest shapes. Then later, you can get with confidence into the details. We can begin asking ourselves, what shape am I seeing here? A triangle, several triangles, rectangles, and squares. Remember, it's much easier to draw forms then to draw things. We have two exercises for this class. Our first exercise, Let's draw as many shapes as you can think about. Circles, triangles, or squares, rectangles, et cetera. Then you can pretend they're made by clay. So let's bend in the store them as well. No, let's get a picture of a landscape and translate it into this simple shapes you can see. Let's start with the biggest ones first until we get the smallest ones. Leave it like that. You don't need to add details on this one. Let's focus only on the basic shapes. As soon as you finish your drawing. Join me in the next lesson, we're going to talk about the right side of our brain. 4. Face / Vase: The second place I'm going to talk a little bit about the right hemisphere of our brain. There are a lot of studies on how we can develop our drawing by using the right five of our brain. The brain is divided between two parts, left and right. The right side controls the left side of our body and vice versa. But this can be reversed if you're left-handed. The left side is responsible for our logical reasoning, our speech or language, or logical thinking. The right side is the sensitive side of our brain, and it is responsible for our feelings, emotion, creativity, imagination, and intuition. It's artistic and poetic side. Unfortunately, on a day-by-day of modern life, use much more the left side than the right side of our brain. Join is an activity that encourages to use the right side. The next exercises were developed by an art teacher name is Betty Edwards. I will leave her books as referenced for you. Look at this picture. What do you see? Two faces or a vase? I think it's both. Now, let's make our own face vase drawing. Let's start on the left side of the paper. Attention, if you're a left-handed, start on the right side. First, a person's profile. It doesn't have to be perfect. It may be something like that. The important thing is that we're able to identify a forehead, and nose, and mouth, and the chin. As soon as I finished drawing it, Let's do tracing on top again, very slowly. But this time speaking to yourself, everything you'll drill like this. Forehead, nose, mouth, chin, and neck. Now let's make an horizontal line at the top and another at the bottom of the figure. Now pay attention on the right side of the figure, you'll start or new profile. But this time you'll be looking at the drunk profile and inverting each line of the drawing. Go very slowly. We are mirroring the profile. If it doesn't work, don't give up. Start again. As you finish it, you can start a new one. This time. Let's try to draw Moses profile and then the end of it. Or nato or face vase as you wish. So which side of the felt more comfortable? Well, in the first profile, you were using our brains left side. But when you're mirror, your profile is switch it to the right one. They do notice the difference. Well, I hope you had some fun, different profiles. Next lesson, we'll have even more fun as we'll try to draw without looking at the paper. 5. Blind Drawing: This is another exercise from the right hemisphere series. You'll make a drawing this time without looking at the paper as looking only at what is in front of you. Want to draw without looking at the paper, we put aside all of our memories and focus only on what we're seeing. So we increase our perception. This way, we can draw exactly what we see and not what we were seeing. So let's go to the assignment. First. You need to hold your paper or you can put it under the table or turn your head to another direction, That's up to you. Then let's mark a fixed point in your object and we're going to begin to draw from there. Let's go very slowly and carefully here. Our hands always follow our eyes. If you need to go from one side of the drawing to the other, keep her pains to against the papers so we don't lose the reference. This lines will be part of the drawing as well. Don't worry if your drawing will look like I abstract. The idea here is to stop worrying about the result and just focus on analyzing the object. You can take any object to have at-home birth. I will leave some references for you. In the second exercise will make another blind drawing, this time of her own hand coming towards you so that you can barely recognize it as a hand. This time, I'm going to make it easy. And let's look at our hand for a maximum of five times. Make as many details as you can see. Remember, this is a very powerful exercise to increase our perception. Whenever you're drawing from observation, remember to draw without looking at the paper for infinite few seconds, your drawing will come out more naturally and organic. It was a little bit hard, right? But don't give up. Next lesson, we'll talk about negatives. 6. Negative Space: Joy, what is around the main subject is almost as important as its subject itself. This is another powerful exercise to improve our perception. And this is also another exercise for a right hemisphere brain. You are going to use a lot this technique. This time we'll look only at what is around the subject. What shapes does the empty spaces form? The figure will come out the same, but you only draw what is in the background in blue. First, I'll make a frame in the same proportion as the frame of the image. That's important. You can use a ruler for this if you'd like. Now, I'm going to focus on this first form. What am I paying attention to while I'm drawing? Let's begin with this point where the shape begins. Where is it located? How far is it from the edge of the frame? Which shape is this? What's the inclination? Well, I think it's something like this. Now let's go to the next shape and ask similar questions until complete the whole drawing. You can always use this technique when you're drawing from observation. It helps a lot. Next lesson, we are going to learn about 3D shapes. 7. Forms: In lesson one, we learned that we can translate everything into basic shapes. In this lesson, we're going to learn the difference between shapes and forms. Forms or shapes in three-dimensions. In other words, shapes with volume. But how to represent a 3D shape in a piece of paper? The answer is two, lights, shadows, and perspective. Let's draw some basic shapes now. A circle, a square, a triangle, and a rectangle. Notice that they all look flat on the paper. Now let's draw some forums. I'll begin of the sphere. This is still a circle, but this time I'll add some volume to shading. It will look like completely off. If I made my shading straight like this. For the height lights, we can always leave the white of the paper. I'm shading with the side of my pencil, strokes coming and going. If you want a darker tone, increase the pressure of the pencil. If you can shave like that, that's okay. You can use a small marks like this. Why do you need more darkness? Just add more marks and increase the pressure. Notice that the light is coming from the top to the right. The right side of the sphere is very clear. The left side is not receiving much light, so it's darker and also where we are going to place the drop shadow. Now, let's transform this square into a cube by rotating it into space. It will look like this. The basic principle of perspective is everything that moves away from us gets smaller. When we see a cube from the front, it simply looks like a square. But notice what happens when we turn it into space. The edge that is closest to us now looks bigger than the others that are far away. Now let's rotate this cube in this direction so we can see the top of the cube as well. Now, let's apply some shading. The light is coming from above, right? So the top of the cube will be very clear and the right side will be in the middle tone. The left side will be in shadow. And that will place my drop shadow here as well. Let's go to the triangle now and transform it into a pyramid. This side of the pyramid is facing the light. The other side is in the dark. Let's put some drop shadow here. Sometimes when I'm shading, I cross the census of my strokes. It helps to cover all the small holes of the paper texture. But be careful not to leave the outline. Always start lighter and gradually get darker. Wow, that was many information, right? But don't worry, just keep drawing so you can get familiarized with all these new concepts. 8. Measurement and Guidelines: Measurement and guidelines are important tricks to keep our drawing as accurate as possible. Now, I'm going to give us some tips to make our life easier while abroad from starvation. You'll be able to use these tips whenever you're drawing. Let's take this image as reference. Whenever I'm drawing from observation and always comparing one shape with the author, e.g. the upper tip of this cone is almost in the same level of the bottom of this field. And if I trace an imaginary vertical line here, I can see that this is almost a line, but not totally with the right side of the cube. I'm always making this mental comparison. The mind doesn't stop when the drum. I'm always looking for references and landmarks between one object to the other. Have you ever seen an artist drawing with one eye close it and the handle stretch at holding a pencil. So the artist is using the paint so to do some measurements on the drawing, how does it work? Let's say I want to compare the height and the width of this bottom. I'm going to close one eye and hold out my hand holding the pencil. I'll place the tip of the pencil, align it with the bottom of the bottle. Then I'm going to put my thumb, align it with the top of the bottle. I'll do the same with the width of the bottle. I can see now that the height of this bottle is almost treat times its width. Which will also pay attention to the inclination and angles of the lines. They can also use our fans so to do it right. For this next assignment, you will make a line drawing of this basic 3D shapes. Remember to use your imaginary guidelines and to compare the size of the shapes. This time, you won't apply any shadows. In the next lesson, we're going to use destroying to shade it more accurately. So let's go to the next class. 9. Greyscale: Now we are going to produce some shadings with foreign pain. So to make a gray scale, I recommend the six B pencil to do this exercise. Before starting our grayscale, lets practice some gradients. You can hold your pencil in the bottom like this. Or we start to combine index finger like this. Let's start with a very light zone and gradually getting darker. Notice that I'm using the side of my pencil. Now let's do the opposite. Start with a darker tone and gradually lighten. Now, let's do our gray scale. You're going to need a ruler. Let's make a rectangle and divide it into seven equal squares. We're going to number it 1-7. The first square will be the white of the paper, so leave it blank. And the last one will be the darkest you can do with your pencil. Be careful not to tear the paper. Now let's go to the middle square. Here. We are going to make a medium gray, halfway between black and white. Let's start with a light board and then increase the pressure. Be careful not to get too dark. Now let's go to square five. It has to be darker than the four, but much lighter than the seven. Now let's go to square seats, which is right in the middle of the line 5-7. And now let's go to three, which is closer to the four. And finally, number two is the lightest gray hair we can reproduce if our pencil. The secret here is to hold the pencil as a first stroke in our paper with a feather. Look how many shades were able to produce with one single pencil. We have one more assignment. Look at the figure below with our grayscale in hand. Let's take a mental note of the tones. We can see 1-7. Square number one will be the lightest tone we can see in this picture, n square number seven will be the darkest. I can see a gray number seven in the backroom and also a growing number one at the top of almost every form. Now let's begin to shader drawing. To better see the lights and shadows, we can use this following trick. Let's look at the picture and squeeze her eyes. Let's look at the big trend. Squint our eyes as if we're looking at the sun. When we do this with the lights and shadows, they become more obvious. So better see the lights and shadows. We can use this following trick. Let's look at the picture and squint our eyes as if you are looking at the sun. When we do this, the lights and shadows become more obvious. I'm glad you're still here. Don't give up. Next lesson. Turned upside down. 10. Upside Down Drawing: This is the last vector size of the right side Brain Series. In this lesson, we'll turn the reference picture upside down as well as our paper. The act of turning things upside down helps us see things in a different way. In another perspective by Tony are drawing upside down. We can see advances and the tails that we couldn't see before. It's like we're telling our brain, this isn't a face in the morning, this is something new. Let's find out what it is. So I look at all this new information and simply draw them. Even the shadows and textures can be approached this shapes. I will leave many pictures as reference for this assignment. And you can do how many wants. Remember, during our drawing, upside-down should always be part of our routine even when we're not drawing from observation. 11. Surprise Puzzle: This lesson is just a summary of our previous one, is just a preparation for our grand finale. We're going to jump into the assignment and make a surprise puzzle drawing. Remember the negative space lesson, it's very similar, but we don't know what is inside the main piece. Will only draw what's around it. And then when I finish, I'll show what's the main subject in. Let's begin drawing a frame as similar as possible with the frame of the puzzle. That's okay to use a ruler number of the pieces, but you don't need to follow an order. Remember to make those mental comparisons and also some imaginary guidelines will draw. Let's begin drawing piece-by-piece. Now that I've finished, I'll show you our surprise so you can complete the drawing with some shading and details as well. I already, well, it's a cow. Let's approach the shading and textures and shapes as well. I love this exercise and I hope you love it too. Next lesson, we'll learn how to apply them in our drawings. 12. Depth: In this lesson, I want to do suggest a little bit about death and error perspective. When we look at the landscape, we can notice some things. Number one, everything that is closest to us seem bigger. Number to everything that is closest to us seems to have more contrast between tones. Number three, everything that is closest to us seems to have more details. On the opposite. Everything that is further away from us seem smaller, have less contrast between tones. And now swore a little bit blurry. We can apply this concept in objects and humans figures as well. Look at this garlic, for instance. Although this scene doesn't have so much depth as the landscape, the main garlic have more sharpness and contrast then the rest of the picture. We don't need to render everything in the same level of sharpness and detail. We can, and we should choose a focal point in our drawing. Now to the assignment. Draw a very simple landscape of principles learned in this class. Everything close to us, we look bigger and with more contrast and the tails, everything that is far away will be smaller and a little bit blurry. Well done, we're almost there. I'm so glad you didn't give up joining me for our final lesson so we can make a beautiful toy. 13. Final Project: Welcome back. This is our final lesson. We'll put together everything we learned and apply it into a complete drawing. I will use a picture as reference for this project, but I will leave other pictures as reference if you'd like. Before we begin, let's recap everything you learned in this course. We learned that when we begin a drawing, we should translate it into basic shapes, beginning with the largest ones. We learned about the both side of our brains some second place. And how the mind can be a little tricky on us interfering in our perception. On third class, we learned that we should look more at our reference and do some blind drawings during our practice. On fourth lesson, we learned the importance of the shapes. The negative space produces. The fifth and seventh places or all about shaving and geometrical shapes. Lesson number six was about the imaginary guidelines we use to compare or subjects in this scene. In number eight lesson, we learned to turn our drawing upside down and also a reference in order to look at things in a different perspective. We made a surprise puzzle in lesson nine and learned a little bit about where our perspective in lesson time. That's so much we need to make a drawing, but by taking baby steps and a big breath, it's easier to put everything together. So let's begin. First of all, we'll look at this picture and it will begin to notice the basic shapes. I'll take a few minutes to look at the whole scene and observe very accurately what's going on here. I'll notice the sizes and distance between shapes and also the distance between shapes and the frame of the paper. One of the biggest mistakes, and I'm saying this for myself as well, is to jump into the details very quickly. I'm a detail over, but we really need to pay attention to the whole picture before adding any details. I'll be gone now to apply basic shading is starting very light. While it begins to develop more of my drawing, it will get darker m, I will add more details. And I will also remember to choose a focus point. So the most important area of my drawing. Now, I'll turn my joy and my reference upside down, look for things that I can improve. So I think that's it. Congratulations. I know it wasn't easy, but remember our mantra, joy is 10% talent and nine per cent hard work. So go practice, keep drawing and drawing. And don't forget to post your final assignment. I can't wait to see it. I hope you felt in love with this new language of the best.